"Another way to attract and retain employees, and to support internal career advancement, is to engage employees in on-the-job education"
Offer 50k more or a 4-day-week and you won’t have a shortage of anything.
The only thing that is almost universally true about "advancement" is more compensation. So, if someone is complaining about advancement in their exit interview, it's very often code-word for compensation.
Which is sometimes the trigger for leaving: "why did they get the promotion when I have been-here-longer/work-harder/do-better-work?"
- Better working conditions (possibly including more respect and higher social status)
- Different work (sick of development, want to move into management or product or whatever)
- Better prospects for future employment ("when I'm a middling-quality 45 year old developer I might not be able to find a job anymore... as a middling-quality 45-year-old manager, on the other hand, I'll do just fine)
One or (probably) more of those are what people want when they talk about wanting advancement opportunities. The comp is pretty much always going to be one of the things they're focused on, as it's a big part of what distinguishes advancement from changing careers. The better pay and/or status is what makes it advancement.
I'm pretty sure that's code for better compensation and better working conditions.
Software devs already make a lot more than most staff-level jobs. Why will another 50K shake out talent that is not already in the market?
I think the more likely approach is that companies are going to be more open to remote contracting in places like Eastern Europe, South America, India, and Southeast Asia. There are a lot of examples of this not working so well in the past, but there were also a lot of examples of WFH not working so well, until there was no choice and companies figured out how to make it work.
It’s very hard to hire and coordinate good developers abroad. We have some devs in India and Spain, but some directors spent weeks there talking to consultancies and ensuring they were hiring good candidates. They are cheaper local consultancies, but not much cheaper than local individual contractors.
One who plans to hire randos in east Asia and pay them peanuts, should prepare for troubles. Good developers may be a bit cheaper in India than in the UK, but they don’t come for free and they require non-negligible coordination costs.
You still need to hire (or get a vendor that hires) good developers or you'll be screwed though. I was burnt by some bad Indian outsourcing earlier in my career, but since then have worked with excellent firms from India, Ukraine and Columbia. But we paid top of market (for the foreign market) rates for that value.
And the best have a tendency to... end up in your local talent pool soon enough (jumping to companies serious enough to sponsor them).
I have the impression that the article is assuming:
1. The work is already interesting for developers and they are learning and applying what they learn.
2. Developers are paid well.
3. There is a good culture.