JLL has confirmed that a facility management (FM) upskilling program it offered to hundreds of its employees has led to a measurable improvement in retention and promotion rates across the organisation.
The training initiative is offered in partnership with the International Facility Management Association (IFMA).
It resulted in 1700 JLL employees globally completing IFMA’s Facility Management Professional (FMP) program, with additional participants completing Sustainability Facility Professional (SFP) and Essentials of FM programs.
Since it began in 2023, the two-year FMP program has reportedly delivered both a two percent increase in promotion rates and a nearly 14 percent improvement in retention rates for FMP-certified employees.
The collaboration between JLL and IFMA began in June 2020 when JLL expressed interest in enhancing its facility management training through credentialing.
IFMA and JLL launched their first pilot in March 2021. The pilot tested logistics and systems and gathered feedback from participants through a jointly developed survey. Additional pilots followed between November 2021 and February 2022, each incorporating lessons from the previous cohort.
At the conclusion of the pilot phase, the program transitioned to business-as-usual (BAU), a standardised model that retained flexibility for regional adaptation, enabling regular enrollments.
The need to upskill its employees comes at a time when JLL’s Global State of Facilities Management 2025 report revealed that half of the respondents cited the scarcity of candidates with the required skills as a key challenge in sourcing talent.
With facility management roles requiring increasingly specialised expertise, retaining top talent has become imperative.
“Today’s facility managers are strategic partners who are critical in shaping the employee experience and workplace culture,” JLL Americas CEO, Work Dynamics, Sanjay Rishi says. “The FMP designation identifies professionals who combine cutting-edge facility management expertise with the leadership skills needed to drive real organisational impact.”
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