How to Build an Early Talent Pipeline That Stays

Session Overview

Employers are investing significant time, energy, and resources into attracting early-career talent.

They are building campus relationships, refining employer brands, attending recruitment events, designing internships and co-ops, and competing for the attention of emerging professionals. But for many organizations, the hardest part is no longer getting early talent in the door. It is keeping them long enough to grow, contribute, and become part of the organization’s future.

When early-career employees leave, the instinct is often to revisit recruitment strategy, compensation, onboarding, or manager capability. Each of these matters. But they may not tell the full story.

The deeper issue is often infrastructure.

Many organizations have programs related to workforce planning, learning, career development, performance management, onboarding, upskilling, retention, and succession planning. But these efforts often operate separately. As a result, employees may enter the organization with enthusiasm, only to find unclear pathways, fragmented development opportunities, and limited visibility into how they can build a future there.

For early-career talent, that uncertainty can become a reason to leave. For employers, it creates turnover, weakens workforce planning, increases reliance on external hiring, and reduces the long-term return on early talent investments.

In 2025, Challenge Factory partnered with CACEE, with the support of CERIC, to examine this persistent challenge. The result was the development of the Career Development as Strategy Playbook and the Career Infrastructure Bootcamp, designed to help employers shift from program-based approaches toward building internal career centres that function as part of everyday workforce and business planning.

Together, the Playbook and Bootcamp lay the foundation for organizations to implement a made-for-this-moment Career Infrastructure Operating System™ (CIOS). This proprietary framework reframes career development as an integrated, enterprise-wide system rather than a disconnected set of programs or activities.

Through a CIOS lens, employers can diagnose the structural conditions that determine whether career development can scale and evolve as quickly as today’s changing world of work demands.

In this webinar, participants will:

• Examine why program-based career development efforts consistently fall short
• Learn how the CIOS framework helps diagnose structural barriers to early-career retention and sustainable workforce development
• Explore how the Career Development as Strategy Playbook can support deeper systems-level change inside organizations
• Consider how internal career centres can strengthen talent mobility, retention, and long-term workforce agility

Date, Time, and Logistics

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026
12:00 - 1:00 pm Eastern
via Zoom

Each participant will receive a confirmation e-mail with the link to join the session via Zoom upon registration and again in a reminder e-mail 24 hrs leading up to the event. There is no cost for both members and non-members to participate in this session. Registered participants should also note that there contact information will also be shared with Challenge Factory, with which CACEE is partnering, for this session.

Who Should Attend?

This session is designed for HR, talent acquisition, talent management, and business leaders who want to move beyond attracting early-career talent and build the systems that help people stay, grow, and contribute over time.

For CACEE members, this webinar also offers a timely opportunity to bring a more strategic conversation back to senior leaders: early talent strategy does not end with recruitment. It depends on the career infrastructure that determines whether people can build a future inside the organization.

Questions?

Please do not hesitate to reach out at events@cacee.com with any questions, to speak further about this session, or for additional details about CACEE's partnership with Challenge Factory.