How Does Adobe Train Its Workforce: A Blueprint to Replicate Adobe's Top Programs

Renowned for its innovative software and creative solutions, Adobe stands out for its approach to employee training and development.

The company is dedicated to fostering a culture of continuous learning and development, empowering employees to excel in their careers. By investing in continuous learning and creating a culture of real-time feedback, Adobe not only enhances individual performance but also drives overall organizational success.

How does Adobe build this learning culture? What training programs do they drive? Why do they work so well? This case study provides a deep dive into Adobe’s training strategies, offering a blueprint your organization can adapt and replicate to enhance your learning and development strategy.

How Adobe’s company values reflect the company’s learning philosophy

Adobe values form the base of their learning philosophy. Each value reflects how they run their training programs and people development initiatives.

Their four values are:

1. Create the future: Adobe supports creativity and innovation by motivating employees to try new things. They have programs to encourage employees to explore their passions.
2. Own the outcome: Adobe employees own their learning journey. They can say where they see themselves down the line and choose training that helps them meet their goals.
3. Raise the bar: Adobe looks for employees hungry to learn. Employees get timely feedback as check-in from their managers. Accordingly, they can constantly elevate their learning journey.
4. Be genuine: At Adobe, employees are encouraged to interact with others and learn from each other. Not every learning happens on the monitor. There are initiatives like Employee networks to promote social learning.

How does Adobe enable training and development? Top learning initiatives

From recruitment, Adobe looks for people with a drive to learn. In an interview, Donna Morris, former Chief Human Resources Officer, Adobe, said that learning agility is one of the essential qualities they look for in new hires.

Employees also vouch for Adobe’s strong learning culture. Scott Gruer, Senior Solutions Consultant, says:

Through initiatives like the Adobe Leader Experience, a quarterly program designed to enhance managerial skills, and the global Career Fest, offering workshops and networking opportunities, Adobe provides diverse avenues for professional growth.

Learning funds

Adobe offers employees two types of learning funds.

Learning Fund for Professional Development

Employees can take any short-term learning programs (such as conferences, workshops, webinars, online learning, business-related books, language courses, certification fees, or professional memberships), and Adobe reimburses it with an upper limit of $1,000 per year. The only prior requirement is that employees must discuss the programs with their manager before enrolling. It ensures the particular program aligns with their career goals and the company’s objective.

Learning Fund for Education Reimbursement

This learning fund covers degree programs and select certifications. Employees can get tuition, course, or certification fees reimbursed up to $10,000 yearly. There is also a counseling service called College Coach to ensure employees have a smooth admission process. They can get free advice on the college application process and strategies for student loan repayment.

Mentorship programs

Adobe also has a mentoring program that pairs employees with experienced mentors who can provide guidance, support, and advice on career development.

How does Adobe run its mentorship programs?

1. Employees fill out an intake form stating their expectations from the mentor and why they want to participate in the program.
2. Based on their responses, the learning and development (L&D) team sends a list of possible mentors, and they can choose one.
3. After getting the mentee’s thumbs up, L&D asks the mentor for approval.
4. Post-approval, Adobe also provides templates to mentors and mentees on how to drive development conversations.

Types of mentorship at Adobe | Source: Adobe Design Blog

The Adobe Leader Experience (ALE)

The Adobe Leader Experience is a quarterly “learn it when you need it” sequenced training that helps Adobe managers improve their people management skills.

This cornerstone program provides leaders with:

• Coaching
• Access to on-demand sessions
• A curated hub of people manager resources
• Peer networking activations (like breakout rooms for two-way conversation and feedback)

The sessions highlight leadership qualities identified by Adobe founders Charles Geschke and John Warnock as crucial for driving significant business impact and scaling effectively.

So, these resources have one clear goal: to empower participants to become the best people leader possible.

Each quarter of ALE is tied to a specific theme:

• Q1 - Goals That Raise the Bar: Managers learn how to help their teams create clear, stretchy, outcome-focused goals. Plus, they learn to deal with tough questions like: What do you do in a year if a goal does not make sense anymore? Do you stick with it? Is it all lost?

• Q2 - Giving Actionable Feedback: Managers acquire the skills to provide genuine feedback, offer actionable guidance, and manage all levels of employee performance. The goal is to ensure that feedback is impactful, specific, and respectful to align with Adobe’s culture. They also receive training on receiving feedback.

• Q3 - Creating Conditions for Success: Managers get practical guidance to understand the feedback collected with Adobe’s Employee Engagement Survey and how to define focus areas for improving engagement.

• Q4 - Rewarding & Recognizing Performance: Managers learn how to reward employees based on their contributions and give actionable feedback for improvement.

These themes are tightly integrated with Adobe’s Check-in timeline (their modern performance management system), ensuring that managers can immediately practice all the learnings. This approach bridges the “Knowing-Doing" gap between training and real-life application, improving knowledge retention and training effectiveness.

Development programs to diversify leadership

Adobe has also taken initiatives to diversify leadership through its Women’s Executive Shadow Program and The Leadership Circles Program.

The Women’s Executive Shadow Program allows female employees to connect with senior executives and shadow them at work. In the Leadership Circles Program, chosen high-potential women leaders get access to 1:1 coaching to refine their leadership styles.

The initial sessions help women leaders find their strengths. After that, the group is divided into small cohorts where peers help each other. Each participant also gets an executive coach who helps them one-on-one.

Adobe employee sharing their experience on the Leadership Circles program | Source: LinkedIn

Employee networks

Adobe also supports social learning by building communities of like-minded people as employee networks. It has communities for women, Asians, Hispanics, people of color, differently-abled, veterans, and more. Community members meet online or offline, where they come together to discuss issues and professional development opportunities.

For instance, the Adobe Women Employee Network hosted chats where senior leaders shared their personal journeys, discussed the spectrum of leadership styles, and shared advice about developing leadership skills.

Content recommendations

Besides courses sponsored by professional funds, Adobe also makes third-party courses from top platforms like LinkedIn Learning, GetAbstract, Coursera, Harvard ManageMentor, and more available for employees.

Global “Career Fest”

Launched in June 2023, the Global Career Fest is the newest Adobe flagship development initiative.

With this innovative employee development program, Adobe aims to empower its workforce with new skills, connections, and ideas.

The event takes place over two days when employees can engage in a variety of growth-focused activities:

1. Inspiring speakers: The fest features a lineup of inspiring speakers, offering fresh perspectives and insights into various professional areas
2. Hands-on workshops: The workshops are tailored based on employee feedback, which is vital to ensuring relevance and effectiveness. Areas covered include communication, resilience, and professional skill development
3. Networking events: Career Fest includes engaging in-person networking events, fostering stronger connections across different business sectors, and enhancing internal collaboration
4. Diverse learning topics: The sessions cover various subjects, from practical professional skills to personal development, catering to a broad spectrum of employee interests and needs
5. Community building: Career Fest aims to reinforce community bonds within Adobe, encouraging employees to take a break from routine tasks and invest in their career growth in a collaborative environment

Reasons behind Adobe’s current L&D strategy

1. People-first approach

Adobe has always kept employees the core focus of its policies and programs. It is reflected in their L&D initiatives. Employees get ample learning opportunities, reimbursement perks, transparent career paths, and options to switch roles.

2. Growth mindset as a core for staying competitive

Two of Adobe’s core values are to ‘Raise the bar’ and ‘Own the outcome.’ Adobe continually looks for employees with a learning agility or a growth mindset.

Instead of enforcing training, Adobe wants employees to take the lead, decide what’s right for them, and own their learning journey.

3. ‘Adobe For All’ vision

Adobe’s vision for diversity and inclusion, called “Adobe For All,” advocates for equal treatment irrespective of personal background, gender, ethnicity, etc.

For instance, Adobe has created mentorship programs to support women. They also built employee networks for different groups so that underrepresented groups could collaborate, learn, and feel heard.

4. Investing in people leaders as force multipliers

A study by The Workforce Institute at UKG reveals just how important managers are for their reports:

• For 69% of people, their managers had the greatest impact on their mental health
• This is on par with the impact of their partner
• This is more than the impact of their doctor (51%) or therapist (41%)

This group can have so much power over employee and business results, yet data shows they struggle. Half of global workers struggle with burnout. So, the ALD was built based on this knowledge, seeking to empower leaders to empower their people and move the needle on the most important elements that managers spend their time on, such as goal setting and giving and receiving feedback.

In his conversation with The Talent Development Think Tank podcast, Brandon Clark revealed that after just one quarter of ALE, Adobe’s internal research concluded that feedback quality has tripled.

5. Growth as a critical pillar of Adobe’s performance management system

Adobe’s performance management system, Check-in, has three core pillars](https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/aboutadobe/pdfs/adobe-check-in-toolkit.pdf):

1. Expectations: Managers and employees discuss and agree on what is expected of employees for the year in terms of deliverables, behavior, and contributions.
2. Feedback: Managers share feedback to ensure employees progress against expectations. Employees share feedback to let managers know if they could do something differently to support their progress.
3. Development: When employees know how they are performing, they can plan actionable goals, focusing on learning, career, and experience.

For Adobe, growing careers for all is a core managerial competency:

Why are Adobe employees happy? The key to Adobe’s L&D success

Adobe won eight culture awards in 2024 based on honest feedback from their employees | Source: Comparably

Taking the ‘Less is more’ route

Adobe believes that less is more when it comes to L&D. Mino Thomas, Sr. Director of Talent & Global Head Talent Operations, says:

Adobe doesn’t try to develop all employee development methods. Every program at Adobe is carefully chosen based on how it will impact employee growth, and the company tracks the numbers to see whether it is actually helpful. Being selective and tracking numbers has helped Adobe curate programs with higher engagement.

Providing supporting resources

Adobe’s L&D team doesn’t just launch the program and take a backseat. Instead, they provide the employees with as many supporting resources as possible in the form of templates and supporting documents. This enables employees to make the most of any program.

Training is aligned and connected

When designing their Leader Experience program, Adobe linked it to their Check-in conversations so that people leaders can use the learnings in a real-life context.

So, Adobe managers don’t just learn. They immediately practice what they’ve learned, making the program extremely effective.

Creating connected employee experiences

It is often the case that compensation, training, talent management, DEI hiring, and onboarding are HR functionals that usually act and think in silos. However, the employees need a seamless view of how things work in their company.

Adobe acknowledges that all these functions must work together to create a seamless, connected experience.

There is one culture, one Adobe, so all teams need to be on the same page.

How can you run a development process like Adobe?

Deel Engage lets you run a people development process like Adobe. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown.

Create transparent career paths for all roles

You can define career paths, showing career progression in each department and the skills required for each role. These help employees get role clarity and a concrete list of competencies to develop to advance their careers.

Link competencies to performance evaluations and check-ins to collect data that will help you identify skill gaps. You can then use this information to deliver targeted training on one platform.

Hold recurring growth conversations

You can easily replicate Adobe’s growth conversations with the Deel Engage Slack plug-in for hosting 1:1s. You can adapt elements from the Check-in guide for employees into a template that everyone in your company can use in their development conversations.

The best part about Deel’s 1:1s is that they are fully integrated with the career frameworks, goals, feedback cycles, and growth plans.

Review the initial goals you set at the beginning of the cycle, review the feedback you shared with the employee, and check how they apply that feedback to grow and reach their targets.

Help people define structured development plans

Employees can create a development plan after receiving feedback and having a career conversation with their managers.

Having a plan in place brings structure and helps managers oversee employees’ plans at a glance.

Run learning needs assessment surveys

Adobe customized its Career Fest offering based on employee feedback. Learn what your people are primarily interested in with our surveys module.

Create your questionnaire, set up anonymity settings and your participant group, and you’re good to go.

Develop courses easily with an AI-powered LMS

Adobe offers its employees a wide variety of learning resources, including on-demand sessions and a curated hub of people manager resources.

Use the LMS module to create and assign learning content to support people in achieving their goals—assign single-topic learning courses or more elaborate learning programs.

You can design unique employee journeys using various building blocks such as text content, email messages, surveys, quizzes, tasks, and feedback collection.

And if you have already created learning content in the past, you have not lost your work! Bring all your resources to Deel with SCORM.

Add all your existing training content to a learning library. Then, you can assign learning journeys to employees, allow your people to self-enroll, or do both.

Promote voluntary sign-ups

One core value of Adobe’s learning philosophy is empowering employees to own their learning journey and promoting voluntary participation.

You can enable self-enrollment in training so employees can shop around for courses that match their growth items.

Since employees stay in the loop with what’s required to reach the next step of their careers, they can focus their growth efforts on matching those requirements.

Invest in your leaders’ development

Create custom learning content for leadership development that targets the key managerial competencies identified by Adobe:

• How to set expectations
• How to give effective feedback
• How to assess and reward performance
• How to coach people

You can use a blended learning approach, combining self-paced learning, social learning, and microcourses to enhance knowledge retention and leader engagement.

Track all learning and growth initiatives in one place

Use dashboards to track course progress, survey feedback, quiz performance, and completion rates. Keep track of key training metrics such as pass/fail rates, time to completion, and learner engagement.

Enable high-performance teams with Deel Engage

Deel Engages streamlines the talent development process by combining powerful tools, automation, and AI into one integrated solution.

No other solution will allow you to launch and run impactful people development programs that connect competencies, performance goals, feedback, development, and career progression at this speed.