share on
The belief that "career development must be treated as foundational corporate infrastructure" was what reshaped Titansoft's employee experience strategy during a period of rapid growth, Chen Chao, Division Director, Organisational Development Division, Titansoft tells us.
Rapid growth often brings new opportunities, but it can also expose cracks in an organisation's people strategy. As Titansoft expanded to address business needs, its informal approach to learning and development struggled to keep pace. Rising voluntary attrition and a lack of leadership successors highlighted the need for a more structured approach to career growth.
The experience reshaped the company's thinking around employee experience. Rather than viewing career development as another HR initiative, Titansoft positioned it as essential organisational infrastructure. The company invested in transparent career pathways, employee-led self-promotion, and continuous learning, giving employees greater ownership of their careers while strengthening leadership capability and reducing attrition.
Fresh off the Employee Experience Awards 2026, Singapore, Chen Chao, Division Director, Organisational Development Division, Titansoft, shares with HRO how the organisation built a scalable career development ecosystem that earned it a silver win for 'Best Career Development Programme'.
Read the full interview below.
Q Tell us about the biggest insight or lesson that influenced your EX approach this past year.
As Titansoft scaled rapidly to support 5mn active users across more than 100 live products, our 163% organisational expansion broke our informal learning model. This friction triggered a severe 26% voluntary attrition rate and left 57% of critical leadership roles without successors.
This critical talent retention and leadership risk taught us our biggest lesson: career development must be treated as foundational corporate infrastructure, requiring absolute structural clarity to maintain organisational capability during rapid growth.
In response, we engineered a highly structured, scalable career development ecosystem. We allocated 5% of annual manpower expenses to learning, introduced transparent career pathways, and implemented objective, employee-initiated self-promotion mechanisms. This structural shift successfully transferred growth accountability to employees and stabilised voluntary attrition down to 10%.
Q How did you bring leaders, managers, and employees together to support the execution and success of the initiative?
We achieved alignment by breaking down corporate silos and building transparency, mobility, and structure into a unified career framework. We successfully brought teams together through our high-touch integration strategy:
We shifted managers from traditional gatekeepers into active coaches evaluating team readiness. This is supported by our internal ecosystem: which includes successor coaching, executive flash-mentorship, and the manager’s competency framework.
Our buddy system pairs new hires with a technical team buddy for workflow integration and an HR Buddy for cultural assimilation.
Our Dual Track Career Pathing separates Expert and Management paths, ensuring flexible advancement. Because Job Grade Guidelines and Skills & Knowledge Criteria are completely public, employees confidently initiate their own growth through structured self-promotion processes.
Q What challenge behind the scenes tested your team the most, and what did it teach you about building stronger employee experience programmes?
The ultimate test for our team was navigating a severe talent risk mid-flight: a rapid 163% scale increase triggered a high attrition rate that threatened our institutional knowledge, while over half of critical roles lacked successors. Our challenge was transitioning into a structured "Learning Organisation" and deploying a scalable career ecosystem without disrupting product delivery.
This transformation taught us three enduring lessons:
- Clarity over scale: Transparent career pathways, self-promotion mechanisms, and clear role expectations eliminate uncertainty and foster employee ownership far better.
- Targeted impact: Initiatives deliver the highest ROI when targeted where the business impact is greatest, such as programs for manager successors and experiential growth.
- Managers as coaches: Shifting managers from "gatekeepers" to active readiness coaches unlocks consistent, equitable advancement.
“Equipping leaders early strengthens performance continuity, reduces risk, and builds a scalable, human EX.”
Q As you reflect on the journey, what does this recognition at the Employee Experience Awards 2026 mean to you and your team?
Winning the silver award for 'Best Career Development Programme' at the Employee Experience Awards 2026 is a profound validation of Titansoft’s human-centered, future-ready philosophy. It serves as powerful proof that embedding deep empathy and "heart" into a data-backed, highly structured business framework yields elite organizational outcomes.
This recognition celebrates the real, tangible growth of our people. It reflects the 25% of Expert Track employees successfully promoted in our latest cycle, and the high internal fill rate for managerial roles over the past years.
More than metrics, it honors the inspiring career journeys brought to life by Team Titansoft: the ones who undertook a cross-border stretch assignment in, whose development was accelerated into an Assistant Manager role within four months via our Internal Talent Marketplace, and more.
Q Finally, as employee expectations continue to evolve, what is one area of EX you believe HR teams will need to rethink in the year ahead?
HR teams must urgently replace static career paths with adaptive, non-linear growth driven by future-critical capabilities like AI fluency and experiential mobility. In a volatile tech landscape, top talent will no longer wait for linear promotions to feel successful at work.
At Titansoft, we are already leading this shift through our Internal Talent Marketplace, which allows internal talent swaps and lateral experimentation backed by a "Right to Return Guarantee" to eliminate the fear of instability.
Furthermore, we have embedded AI future-skills directly into our daily workflows, achieving 100% AI adoption within our development teams in the first year through peer-led knowledge exchanges. One success is a custom AI tool automating 60% of routine tasks, allowing the team to expand into high-value analytical work. The future of EX belongs to organizations embedding continuous learning, internal mobility, and tech evolution into the daily flow of work—ensuring we Never Stop Improving.
Read more interviews on why organisations have won trophies for their HR practices - head over to our Winning Secrets section!
Image / Provided
share on
