Employee development plans are essential to building a strong team. Working on the individuals within your workforce is key to increasing productivity and getting results. Providing professional development opportunities will:
- Attract the best new talent when hiring
- Increase employee engagement
- Reduce turnover rates
- Boost productivity and profits
While it’s easy to get lost in top-level corporate goals, it’s important to remember that each employee contributes to those objectives. Ignoring the needs of the individual will make it harder to achieve the bigger goals.
That’s where employee development plans come in. An employee development plan is a roadmap for career building. It outlines what an employee has to do to reach their personal goals and advance their career within the business.
Each employee and their manager should be involved in the process. This helps create a balanced, realistic plan with the best chances of success.
An employee development plan should include long and short-term goals. It should also drill down into the smaller steps needed to obtain both. They can include things like participation in mentorship programs, additional training, and other resources that support the employee’s efforts.
Your learning management system can help. The right platform will facilitate career development through access to courses, progress tracking, and assessments. Consider these 7 important training questions that your LMS can answer to get started.
What Should an Employee Development Plan Look Like?
A good employee development plan should include several parts. It serves as a recipe for career growth, so it should be concise and detailed. Employees should be able to read the plan and understand what they have to do to progress through it.
Your employee development plans should include the following:
- Self-Assessment and Employee Input
The first step in an employee development plan should establish two things. It should show the employee where they stand now, and it should address their desires for the future.
Each employee can assess their strengths, weaknesses, and skill set. They can also highlight any areas that they would like to grow into or improve. This combined with performance data from your LMS will help managers identify skill gaps.
Having a conversation can help kick off this process. The employee and manager can discuss goals, skill gaps, and expectations to keep everyone on the same page. This information will also show how the individual’s goals fit into larger business objectives.
- Clearly Defined Career Goals
Using the information gathered, it’s time to set goals. The employee development plan should include long and short-term objectives. The short-term objectives can serve as milestones for bigger successes.
Goals should be measurable, relevant to the job role, and realistic. It can be exciting to set lofty goals, but doing so could lead to demotivation if they aren’t obtainable. Some common goals include completing a training program, earning a promotion, or increasing productivity numbers to a pre-determined threshold.
Keep goals focused on career development objectives. More can be added later if needed or if the focus shifts to a different role or purpose.
- Actionable Steps for Each Goal
Now you have the goals listed, but you still need to explain how to achieve them. Each should be included with actionable steps. The steps should be clearly listed and can include any related activity. Some common actionable steps could be shadowing another employee, completing online courses, adopting new technology, or working through coaching.
Make sure the employee understands each action. They should know who to go to if they have questions or if anything isn’t clear.
- List of Resources and How to Use Them
The employee development plan should also list available resources and how they can be used. Resources are anything needed to take each actionable step.
Include relevant direction as available. For example, a link to a knowledgebase or online training could be added next to the related resource. A name, phone number, or email address can be provided when someone may need to be reached for mentoring, shadowing, or coaching purposes.
- Goal Timeline with Scheduled Check-Ins
Having a goal timeline will help keep the employee on task. Choose realistic timeframes that work for each goal. It is best to allow a little extra time in case of setbacks.
Whether it’s days, weeks, or months, having a timeline will help the employee gauge their progress and performance. If they miss a deadline, then it may mean something needs to be adjusted in the plan or in their approach to complete it.
Also include scheduled check-ins. These should be brief meetings that give the employee a chance to share their progress and ask questions.
- Plans for Review and Adjustment as Needed
Career development should be an ongoing process. That means there should be plans for review so that adjustments can be made as needed. Business goals may shift, or an employee may decide to focus on a different job role or objective. When this happens, their plan goals and steps may need to be updated.
How Can My LMS Help with Employee Development Plans?
Are you tracking the right employee training data? Are your training and career development resources easy to find? Your LMS can help answer all the important questions related to employee development.
What can your LMS do to make employee development plans more effective?
- Centralize All Resources and Training for the Company
Long ago, all documentation had to be kept as hard copies. It’s easy to see how this can be difficult to manage. Computers came along and digitized everything so it’s easier to search and store. Today’s LMS platforms capitalize on that technology by creating a central repository for everything your team needs.
Content can be delivered in multiple formats. Provide text documents along with audio tracks and videos to supplement information and address all learning styles.
Updating the repository is easy by changing out files or editing documents. The new versions are instantly available to your team and can be effortlessly distributed if needed.
You can check out online LMS reviews to see which platforms have the repository features you need.
- Build Personalized Learning Paths for Job Roles and Career Goals
An LMS doesn’t just store courses for you. It can also organize them into learning paths. These can be tailored to any objective. Create a path that prepares learners for a specific job role or career goal. They can also be created to strengthen knowledge of a certain topic or task.
Most LMS platforms include learning paths. Some are self-paced so that learners can work through them on their own. Others may include trainer-guided courses that require scheduling.
It’s easy to build new learning paths with an LMS, which is ideal when keeping up with industry changes and trends.
- Continuously Track Progress Across the Organization
One of the biggest benefits of using an LMS is the analytics. A centralized system can continuously record data for you. This can include company-wide and individual data. See how your team is doing with career development overall then drill down to see which employees are thriving and which may need support.
You can see trends in performance reviews, self-assessments, and course completions. Automated reporting makes it easy to separate the relevant information to make quicker informed decisions when building employee development plans.
- Encourage Increased Engagement at All Stages of Career Development
An LMS can encourage increased engagement on an ongoing basis. This can be done in several ways. Gamification makes training more fun and interesting. It helps employees see their progress through scores, leaderboards, and badges. It also increases motivation to earn rewards through the successful completion of goals.
Interactive content can be used to keep employees engaged. This can include interactive videos and activities. For example, many LMSs support roleplaying activities that put the learner in a scenario that requires active participation. Instead of reading text or watching a video, they can interact with the content.
There are many ways that a good learning management system can streamline your employee development plans. Get started now and begin building an expert team that will guide your organization to a profitable future.
