Employee development plans: everything you need to know

Most HR professionals appreciate that employee development plans should be a vital component of companies’ strategic thinking when it comes to nurturing talent and supporting attraction and retention. They know too that the best training and development plans strike a strong balance between meeting the ever-growing skills requirements of organisations and supporting individuals to develop themselves both personally and professionally.

Most of us understand that these two things are inextricably linked, with employees that are provided with opportunities to develop their career feeling more valued by their organisation and committed to shared goals. For example, a LinkedIn report found that 94% of employees are more likely to stay at a company longer if it invests in their career development.

In this way, the benefits of employee training and development programmes can be felt by businesses and employees alike.

What is an employee development plan?

An employee development plan is an operational action plan to support and measure the progression of an individual and is managed by both an employee and their line manager. An effective training and development plan for employees will set out the pathway for the individual to achieve their personal and professional goals, in-line with their KPIs and the goals of their organisation. A plan will usually set out learning aims and objectives to support the individual to develop their skillset in the flow of work.

Why do you need an employee development plan?

There are many benefits to investing time and resource into implementing more strategic employee development plans.

Our 10 advantages of employee training and development plans are:

• Greater workforce productivity and effectiveness
• Increased efficiency and revenues
• Improved internal talent mobility
• Reduced costs in recruiting, onboarding and training external candidates
• Improved talent attraction and retention rates
• Reduced employee churn
• Higher staff satisfaction, fulfilment, purpose and engagement
• An enhanced company culture
• Greater visibility of succession planning
• Improved compliance re regulatory requirements

A strategic approach to talent, learning and skills development is a proven way to get the most from your employees, both in levels of engagement and results. The overall advantage is the emphasis on the employee as an individual, with their own career goals and personal development aims. When this is aligned to organisational needs, it helps improve the employee experience as a whole and contributes towards a culture where employees feel valued and with clarity and purpose on the direction their organisation is heading, and the part they have to play in this journey.

Investment in employee development helps achieve greater levels of productivity and efficiency for the organisation, the increased likelihood of achieving business goals and reducing the chances that talented employees leave, for the opportunity to develop themselves elsewhere.

How to develop a training and development plan for employees

 So, what’s the best route to setting up an effective training and development plan for employees? Here are a few pointers for you to follow, which you can adapt and add to for your organisation’s particular circumstances.

Step 1: Understand your existing competencies and seek out future skills gaps

This will ensure that managers themselves understand the nature of the roles in their teams, and how they contribute to the wider goals of the organisation, as well as the skills that will be required of their teams in the short, medium and long term and what succession planning could look like.

This should ideally tie into a wider organisational view of skills mapping and competencies to identify gaps, and also areas of strength in the business to better understand what skills or competencies exist in high performing teams to make them so successful. In our recent webinar Preparing for the unknown jobs and skills of the future Learning Analyst Laura Overton told us that detailed competency mapping was no longer necessary. She mentioned that Cisco had shifted to a simpler skills-centred strategy to better support career mobility, and enable them to more easily map job titles to roles. “This simplification then enabled employees to see what they needed to do to get to their next role.”

Step 2: Discuss the career development goals of the employee

The individual should take majority ownership of this part of their employee development plan, thinking about the areas they would like to develop more personally to support their longer-term career goals, whether that’s developing soft skills like problem-solving and critical thinking, or hard skills like formal training in a new programming language or a marketing qualification. A ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ approach to development is likely to see employees engage more with their development plan.

We know that soft skills are increasingly regarded as essential skills for new and existing employees, but these skills are still not being trained in line with their increase in demand. Well-rounded employee development plans should really be focussing on these soft skills, like negotiation, creativity and communication. These things can feel like harder objectives to action and measure, but thought should be given to how to achieve this. Softer skills are likely to make employees more resilient as an organisation grows and their roles adapt, and fostering transferable skills helps support succession planning.

Step 3: Align employee development goals with organisational needs

A good employee development plan will align the personal career development goals of the employee with organisational objectives. However, enabling employees to develop other skills outside their immediate role should be encouraged and considered in terms of the future skills that may be required of their role, but also in the organisation as a whole. In a manager’s view, a wider perspective of internal talent mobility should be considered in this process, and for an employee, having some autonomy over the areas they’d like to develop will go a long way to helping them feel valued and engaged in their role.

Step 4: Set objectives and map out the plan

Setting the development goals should also include a plan to achieve them. There could be many routes to success and are likely to be somewhat dependent on what is currently available to your employees, from software or resources to support career development, talent management and learning.

Whilst the 70/20/10 model (70% of learning is from experience learnt on the job, 20% from others eg coaching and mentoring and 10% training) is still widely used to support employee development, this should only be used as a guide. Some employees may have less opportunity to learn on the job, this can potentially be harder in a remote working environment or at least may take longer. In addition, more and more professionals believe that 10% of formal training is no longer enough for many employees, particularly where new and emerging skills and more technical knowledge is required to support future development.

In short, some objectives may have softer measurements eg approaching an internal mentor to meet with once a week and some may have hard measurements eg complete a specific training module in your learning management system. There may not always be appropriate training or resources available internally, so ensuring that you have budget to support your employee development plans is also important.

Step 5: Adapt, review and update plans

In setting out programmes that will essentially form part of an internal career development plan for employees, it’s important that employees recognise that this will be a process of ongoing improvement and not a quick fix to fulfil a training requirement for example. It also shouldn’t be viewed as something to be ‘fit in’ to their working day, it should inform their development and progression in the flow of work.

It’s down to the individual to own, action and manages their employee development plan, with support from their line manager to ensure they have the time and supporting tools to achieve their actions. Employees themselves may want to make adjustments, potentially reviewing how often they spend with their mentor or taking additional eLearning courses for example, so there should be ways of monitoring engagement and progress built into an employee development plan. Managers and employees should regularly review what’s going well and any changes needed as the individual develops or their role changes and evolves over time. An employee development plan shouldn’t be used by managers as the informal part of an appraisal for example, but viewed as a working document that is consistently referred back to.

Using technology to inform and measure the success of employee development plans

 A timely investment in technology can really bring the benefits of employee training and development programmes to bear. It can also be the difference between just managing operational learning and compliance requirements, and proactively developing talent and skills strategies for the future. Integrated HR solutions can help support talent pathways, employee career development, performance against KPIs and develop the future skills required of your organisation to help move forward with your strategic goals.

Being able to easily access your people’s data across all of these areas allows People managers to better analyse the learning and development needs of the existing workforce and plan for the future more holistically.

An effective employee development plan should be personalised, with the alignment of personal development aims and organisational objectives and monitored and adapted in line with the evolving skills and desires of the individual, the requirements of their role and the organisation’s goals. Success can likely be measured in enhanced employee motivation and engagement, as individuals are likely to feel more loyal and committed to the organisation they work for. As Henry Ford implied, whilst there’s a risk that you may lose the talent you’ve invested into a competitor, the risk of not investing in employee development is likely to cause more significant challenges in achieving organisational aims in the longer term.

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