Leila Gisela Ghalia Doûmi

Strategic human capital research distinguishes value creation from value capture, emphasizing mobility, bargaining, and labor-market conditions as barriers to firms capturing returns. This paper identifies an earlier, internal challenge: a firm may develop and retain externally verified skills yet fail to allocate them to the work where they create value. I study a German car manufacturer that, facing electrification and automation, reskilled production workers as certified electricians across six plants. Combining administrative training and personnel records of all production-related employees, program documents, contractual agreements, and nearly 100 interviews, I trace workers from training through deployment. Although participants outperform the national certification benchmark, more than one-third of graduates remain outside the electrician roles for which they were trained. Attrition, certified skill, and bargaining do not readily explain the gap. Formal rules are more complete for training than for deployment, yet firmer rules are not associated with closer adherence to the strategic mandate, and implementation varies substantially across managers. The findings point to internal allocation as an additional organizational challenge to value capture: firms may create human capital successfully yet lack the organizational capacity to move it into productive use.

Employer-provided training is central to firms’ responses to technological change, but little is known about how firms design and organize training programs. We provide new survey evidence from the Employer Reskilling and Upskilling Survey (ERUS), which measures program design, skill needs, and supporting HR infrastructure in a large sample of medium and large U.S. firms. For each firm’s most important upskilling or reskilling program, the survey records detailed features of delivery, selection, funding, incentives, assessment, placement, and skill-management systems. Skill gaps and firm-sponsored training are widespread. We document three stylized facts. First, training investments sort into two coherent organizational typologies: a leaner, standalone configuration and a more formalized, system-integrated architecture (multi-location delivery, on-the-job learning, external design, mandatory participation, formal assessment, targeting managerial roles). Second, these configurations differ in structure, not intensity: training hours, duration, cost, and targeted skills are similar across types. Third, the more articulated configuration co-occurs with specific firm characteristics (MNE status, firm size) and the presence of structured HR policies. These findings provide the first large-scale evidence on the organization of firm-sponsored training, shifting attention from whether firms train to how firms structure training investments.

Organizations increasingly provide digital learning platforms, but access alone may not generate learning. Linking weekly LinkedIn Learning records to monthly HR data for more than 129,000 employees across 32 countries at a global automotive manufacturer, I document a substantial engagement gap. Nearly all invited employees activate their licenses, yet the median activated employee completes no courses, and country-level activation ranges from below 5 percent to above 50 percent. After accounting for employee characteristics and organizational context, employees whose direct supervisors activate are five percentage points more likely to activate, while senior-manager activity shows no comparable association. The findings shift attention from whether firms provide training to how organizations generate employee participation once access is available.