Disha Gupta
How to Create an Employee Development Plan (+Free Template)
- Published:
- Updated: October 3, 2024
For enterprise learning and development teams, creating an effective employee development plan is a strategic imperative. Employee development plans are a blueprint for upskilling your workforce with the competencies they need to excel and drive organizational success.
With the rise of hybrid work, digital transformation, and ever-changing industry regulations, a well-crafted development plan ensures enterprise agility, productivity, and long-term employee engagement.
However, in enterprise settings, you are planning for more than just a handful of employees; you’re potentially impacting thousands of team members, spread across geographies and functions.
This amplifies the complexity of your L&D strategy, but also increases the potential ROI of effective employee development.
In this guide, we will take you through the step-by-step procedure of creating an effective employee development plan for your organization that will provide real value for your employees’ growth.
What Is an Employee Development Plan?
An employee development plan is a structured approach designed to enhance an employee’s skills, knowledge, and competencies in alignment with individual career goals and organizational objectives. It outlines specific development goals, the activities and resources needed to achieve them, and a timeline for completion.
The ultimate aim of an employee development plan is to grow employees into future leaders, closing skill gaps, prepare employees for future challenges, improve their job performance, and contribute to the organization’s overall success.
Benefits of Building an Employee Development Plan
Here are a few benefits that come as a result of investing in continuous L&D for your employees.
1. Discover new talents and upskill opportunities
Creating an employee development plan helps organizations identify hidden talents and potential within their workforce. Through regular assessments and feedback, employers can discover employees who desire more than their current responsibilities.
This enables targeted upskilling opportunities, allowing employees to acquire new skills and take on more challenging and rewarding tasks by targeting specific employee development areas.
2. Improves skills and competencies
Employee development plans are tailored to enhance specific skills and competencies required for both current roles and future opportunities. By focusing on targeted training and development activities, these plans ensure that employees continuously improve their technical and soft skills, making them more effective and efficient in their jobs.
3. Increase productivity and satisfaction
Well-structured development plans boost employee productivity by equipping them with the necessary tools and knowledge to perform their tasks more effectively as employees develop their skills and see tangible career progress, their job satisfaction and morale increase. This heightened sense of accomplishment and motivation leads to better performance and a more engaged workforce.
4. Attract and retain talent
Offering robust development opportunities makes an organization more attractive to prospective employees looking for growth and career advancement. Additionally, existing employees are likelier to stay with a company that invests in their professional development. This focus on employee growth helps in employee retention, reducing turnover rates, and building a loyal and committed workforce.
5. Succession planning
Employee development plans play a crucial role in succession planning by preparing employees for future leadership roles and key positions within the organization. By systematically developing the skills and competencies required for higher-level roles, organizations ensure they have a ready pool of qualified candidates to step into critical positions when needed.
6. Organizational agility
Organizations prioritizing employee development are more agile and better equipped to respond to changing market conditions and business demands. By continuously developing the skills and competencies of their workforce, these organizations can quickly adapt to new challenges and opportunities. This agility allows them to stay competitive in the dynamic business environment.
7. Better adaptability to change
An effective employee development plan fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement, making employees more adaptable to change. As employees become accustomed to regularly updating their skills and learning new things, they are better prepared to handle technological, process, and industry trends shifts.
Types of Employee Development Plans
Here are different types of employee development plans.
1. Performance-based plans
Performance-based plans focus on improving specific aspects of employees’ job performance. These plans address the strengths and weaknesses identified during performance reviews.
The goal is to enhance job performance by setting clear, measurable objectives and providing targeted training, resources, and support. Activities include coaching, mentoring, on-the-job training, and performance improvement programs. These plans ensure that employees meet or exceed their job expectations and contribute effectively to organizational goals.
2. Succession plans
Succession plans enable organizations to plan for key employees leaving the company by identifying and preparing high-potential employees to fill critical organizational roles as they become vacant. This proactive approach involves identifying high-potential employees and providing them with the necessary development opportunities to assume leadership or critical positions.
Succession plans typically include leadership training, cross-functional projects, job rotations, and mentoring by senior leaders. The aim is to create a pipeline of qualified candidates ready to step into important roles, reducing the risks associated with sudden departures or retirements.
3. Career development plans
Career development plans focus on helping employees achieve their long-term career goals. They outline a clear path for career progression and detail the skills, experiences, and milestones required for advancement.
These plans involve formal education, skill development, job shadowing, and stretch assignments. By aligning individual aspirations with organizational needs, career development plans foster employee engagement and retention.
4. Continuing education plans
Continuing education plans support employees in pursuing further education and professional development to stay current with industry trends and advancements. These plans may include funding for college courses, professional certifications, seminars, workshops, and conferences.
By encouraging lifelong learning, organizations ensure that their workforce remains knowledgeable and skilled, capable of adapting to new technologies and methodologies.
How to Create an Employee Development Plan For Your Organization
Creating an effective employee development plan involves a systematic approach encompassing various stages, from identifying organizational needs to celebrating success.
Whether you are updating your company’s existing professional development plan or building a new one from scratch, you can follow the following best practices and guidelines to create a successful employee development program:
1. Identify organizational needs and goals
Begin by understanding your organization’s overarching goals and objectives. Identify the skills and competencies required to achieve these goals. This could involve discussions with senior management, analyzing market trends, and evaluating the company’s strategic direction.
Next, refer to your organization’s larger objectives to determine which behaviors, skills, and competencies are the most critical for achieving those business goals. By aligning the needs of individual employees and the company itself, L&D teams can design employee development programs that straightforwardly benefit the organization at every level.
2. Assess individual employee needs
High-performing employees drive organizational success, growth, and innovation. The top 5% of high-performing team members drive 26% of all output.
To develop these employees, you must understand the specific development and skill needs of employees. First things first, gather data on current L&D needs from recent assessments and progress reports to identify the specific employee development areas to target with your new and improved L&D programming. This will play a significant role in determining which employee development methods would be most applicable and ensuring that development activities are highly relevant and helpful.
Evaluate the skills and competencies of each employee. Use performance evaluations, self-assessments, and feedback from managers and colleagues to identify areas where development is needed. This step helps to tailor the development plan to individual needs.
3. Set clear and measurable goals
Define each employee’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) development objectives. SMART goals provide clarity and direction, making tracking progress and measuring success easier.
Here are a few examples of SMART goals to provide clear objectives for employee development plans:
Leadership development goal |
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Communication skill improvement |
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Customer service skill goal |
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4. Choose appropriate training delivery methods
Identify the most effective training methods for your employee development plan. Some of the most common methods include:
- Traditional classroom-style training: Face-to-face learning and instructor-led courses ideal for foundational knowledge and complex topics that benefit from direct interaction with an expert.
- Online training: eLearning occurs via web browsers and allows learners to engage with training materials at their own pace via tools like learning management systems (LMS).
- On-the-job training: On-the-job training takes advantage of the 70-20-10 method of learning to provide more contextual employee training. The rule states that 70% of learning comes from real-life experiences and hands-on training, 20% from social interaction and peer-based learning, and 10% from traditional training programs. With on-the-job training programs, employees learn by doing, enabling them to master skills through hands-on practice.
- Mentorship and coaching: The coaching method involves an experienced professional—a supervisor, mentor, or veteran employee—who mentors or coaches an employee on specific job tasks and responsibilities.
- Simulation training: Simulation training lays out different scenarios that allow employees to practice tasks that mimic the actual work of their specific job’s role. This is an ideal training method for employees working in high-risk or high-stakes fields, such as pilots or doctors.
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Enable your employees with in-app guidance, self-help support, process changes alerts, pop-ups for department announcements, and field validations to improve data accuracy.
5. Allocate resources and support
Ensure employees can access the necessary resources and support to achieve their development goals. This might include funding for courses, access to training materials, time off for training, or mentorship from experienced colleagues. Providing adequate resources and support demonstrates the organization’s commitment to employee development and helps remove potential learning barriers.
6. Implement regular check-ins
Schedule regular check-ins between employees and managers to discuss progress toward development goals. These check-ins provide an opportunity to review what has been learned, address any challenges, and adjust the plan as necessary. Regular communication ensures that the development plan remains on track and that any issues are addressed promptly.
7. Monitor and evaluate
After implementing the training programs, monitoring your training’s effectiveness in employee development is crucial. This can be achieved using various assessment tools, such as training assessments, post-training feedback surveys, performance metrics, and observation.
Assess how well they align with the plan, whether they are acquiring the desired skills, and whether there’s any need for modification.
To ensure maximum efficacy, L&D teams can incorporate Whatfix’s in-built analytics that provide usage and engagement-related data for your training content in easy-to-understand visual formats. It helps track training analytics metrics such as completion rate, participation rate, engagement rate, content consumption rate, queries resolved, etc.
Using feedback and performance data to continually refine and improve the program makes it possible to keep employee development aligned with individual and organizational needs as the company and its workforce evolve.
8. Celebrate success
Recognize and celebrate employees’ achievements as they reach their development milestones. Celebrating success boosts morale, reinforces the value of development, and motivates employees to continue their growth journey. Recognition can take the form of public acknowledgment, rewards, promotions, or additional responsibilities.
9. Adjust and refine
Adjust and refine the development plans as needed based on the feedback and evaluation. Employee development is an ongoing process, and plans should be flexible enough to adapt to changing needs and circumstances. Regularly updating the plans ensures they remain relevant and effective in helping employees and the organization achieve their goals.
Employee Development Plan Template
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Most Common Employee Development Challenges
As L&D teams create space and opportunities for employee development, certain challenges commonly arise:
1. Resistance to change
Organizational change is challenging and overwhelming for your workforce. Although the employee development plans are built for your employees’ own benefit, they still might not get on board with it if they’re not confident in their own abilities to adapt to it. When people feel threatened by their own shortcomings (real or imagined), they protect themselves from failure by resisting the change.
To avoid change resistance, you need to show the value of the development plan to your workforce. Educate your employees on how the new changes and developments will make their lives better.
2. Engaging learners
It’s a huge challenge for L&D teams to get learners to attend, actively participate, and follow the employee development plan because some employees lack engagement on the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral levels. The root cause of this problem is that employees might find some programs unnecessary and irrelevant or the training content might not be engaging or interactive enough to hold the learner’s attention.
L&D teams need to find increasingly creative ways to address the paradox of employees who want to learn, but struggle to keep themselves motivated and engaged in the training and development process.
3. Hectic employee schedules
When work, family life, politics, and a slew of other demands are draining employees’ energy, development training sometimes adds too much to their stress, which makes them resist development training. Traditional employee training methods such as instructor-led classroom training demands a lot of time from an employee’s already hectic schedule, which most of them are not willing to invest.
The solution here is to embed the development training within your employees’ daily schedules via self-paced learning. Self-paced learning enables employees to access learning materials and go through training at their convenience and at a speed that works best for them.
Whatfix enables employees to learn in the flow of work with in-app guided experiences and on-demand performance support. Its self-paced and interactive on-the-job training solution augments training by helping employees learn while doing within the business application.
4. Balancing individual and organizational needs
It can be difficult to strike a balance between the needs of employee learners with larger organizational goals. Emphasizing training opportunities related to areas where these aspects overlap and still providing additional ones that contribute to more specific needs can be a good place to start.
By committing to making employee development an ongoing process, L&D teams can use data and feedback related to employee and company-wide performance to adjust this balance as necessary.
5. Ensuring equal access to development opportunities
Part of developing a learning environment that benefits all employees is the expectation that all employees will be able to actively participate. This can be difficult when employees in different roles have different levels of availability or when most of the office works remotely.
Choose employee development methods that provide the flexibility needed by employees across the organization and provide safe opportunities for employees to speak up if they feel they are missing out.
6. Emerging technologies and the need for reskilling and upskilling
When work, family life, politics, and a slew of other demands are draining employees’ energy, development training sometimes adds too much to their stress, which makes them resist development training. Traditional employee training methods such as instructor-led classroom training demands a lot of time from an employee’s already hectic schedule, which most of them are not willing to invest.
The solution here is to embed the development training within your employees’ daily schedule via self-paced learning. Self-paced learning enables employees to access learning materials and go through training at their convenient time and at a speed that works best for them.
Whatfix enables self-paced learning for your employees via interactive walkthroughs and video training. Whatfix’s self-paced and interactive on-the-job training solution augments training by helping employees in learning while doing, within the business application.
CASE STUDY
How REG reduced time-to-proficiency of its CRM and ERP by 50%
REG’s L&D and IT team faced challenges training employees to its highly customized Salesforce CRM and JD Edwards ERP instances. New employees took upwards of six months to become proficient with the system, leading to frequent account errors and incorrect process usage. Existing users were failing to adapt to new processes and adopt new features.
Whatfix enabled REG to standardize its end-user training via contextual in-app guidance in the flow of work. With Whatfix, REG reduced its time-to-proficiency for its CRM and ERP by 50%, equally a 3-month faster onboarding time for new employees. It also reduced daily IT support tickets by 600% by deflecting issues with in-app support.
“Whatfix reimagines our training. It supports in-app guidance across almost any interface and platform. And it’s so easy to update materials, we can at last keep pace with the system changes. Looking back, Whatfix was one of the best decisions we have made.”
Abby Essings
Sr. Operations Managers at REG
Employee Development Plan Examples
1. Leadership development
Employee: John Doe, Senior Software Engineer
Current Skill Assessment: John is technically highly skilled but lacks experience leading and guiding junior team members.
Development Goals:
- Develop Mentorship Skills – Participate in mentoring junior engineers to foster their growth and development.
- Enhance Decision-Making – Attend leadership workshops focused on effective decision-making.
- Project Management Proficiency – Enroll in project management training to gain skills in leading projects.
Development Activities and Timeline:
- Mentor junior engineer for a project (3 months) – Month 1-4
- Attend leadership workshop (2 days) – Month 5
- Enroll in project management training (8 weeks) – Month 6-7
Resources and Support:
- Regular check-ins with a mentor to discuss mentoring experiences
- Budget for leadership workshop and project management training
- Access to online resources and training materials
Evaluation:
- Feedback from mentee on mentorship experience
- Application of decision-making techniques in team discussions
- Successful completion of projects with improved project management skills
2. Technical Skill Development Plan
Employee: Jane Bryant, Data Analyst
Current Skill Assessment: Y is proficient in basic data analysis techniques but lacks expertise in advanced data modeling.
Development Goals:
- Master advanced data modeling – Complete an online course on advanced data modeling techniques.
- Apply learning to real projects – Identify opportunities to apply advanced modeling to current projects.
- Share knowledge – Present a workshop to the team on new data modeling approaches.
Development Activities and Timeline:
- Complete online data modeling course (12 weeks) – Month 1-3
- Apply advanced modeling to a live project (2 months) – Month 4-5
- Present data modeling workshop to team (1 day) – Month 6
Resources and Support:
- Budget for online course enrollment
- Access to relevant datasets for practical application
- Support from a technical mentor for guidance
Evaluation:
- Assessment of the quality and complexity of data models developed
- Feedback from team members on the effectiveness of the workshop
- Successful implementation of advanced modeling techniques in live projects
3. Project management development plan
Employee: Sarah Johnson, Product Manager
Current Skill Assessment: Sarah is excellent at product design and innovation but needs to develop her project management skills to lead cross-functional teams effectively.
Development Goals:
- Improve Time Management Skills – Learn to prioritize tasks and manage time efficiently.
- Gain Project Planning Expertise – Understand project planning methodologies and tools.
- Enhance Leadership Skills – Develop skills to lead cross-functional teams and manage stakeholder expectations.
Development Activities and Timeline:
- Time Management Workshop (2 days) – Month 1
- Project Planning Course (8 weeks) – Month 2-3
- Leadership Development Program (10 weeks) – Month 4-6
Resources and Support:
- Enrollment in a time management workshop
- Access to project planning software and tools
- Budget for leadership development program
- Mentorship from a senior project manager
Evaluation:
- Implementation of time management techniques in daily tasks
- Successful creation of a detailed project plan for an upcoming product launch
- Positive feedback from team members and stakeholders on leadership improvements
4. Customer service skill development plan
Employee: Emily Davis, Customer Service Representative
Current Skill Assessment: Emily is knowledgeable about the company’s products but needs to improve her customer interaction and problem-solving skills.
Development Goals:
- Enhance Customer Communication Skills – Improve clarity and empathy in customer interactions.
- Develop Problem-Solving Skills – Learn techniques to resolve customer issues efficiently.
- Master Conflict Resolution – Gain skills to handle difficult customers and resolve conflicts amicably.
Development Activities and Timeline:
- Customer Communication Training (4 weeks) – Month 1-2
- Problem-Solving Workshop (3 days) – Month 3
- Conflict Resolution Course (6 weeks) – Month 4-5
Resources and Support:
- Access to online customer communication training modules
- Budget for problem-solving workshop
- Enrollment in a conflict resolution course
- Regular feedback sessions with the customer service manager
Evaluation:
- Positive feedback from customers on communication improvements
- Successful resolution of customer issues using new problem-solving techniques
- Demonstrated ability to handle and resolve conflicts in customer service scenarios
Enable employee development in the flow of work with in-app guided training and real-time support with Whatfix
A well-trained, dynamic, and motivated workforce is crucial to any organization. The best way to raise employees to such standards is to invest in their continuous development. This will foster an engaged workforce that is proven to be productive, profitable, and motivated.
Invest in digital adoption platforms like Whatfix to maximize the ROI of your employee development programs. Using DAPs as training software empowers employees to upskill themselves on the latest tools, applications, or processes without disrupting their workflow or productivity.
Whatfix offers step-by-step tutorials, real-time guidance, and personalized assistance to provide your employees with an interactive, user-friendly learning experience. L&D teams can measure training effectiveness using Whatfix Guidance Analytics to understand how employees engage with in-app content and use help resources. Use this data to make informed decisions on improving your “learn by doing” experiences, improve task completion rates, and support team members better.
Enabling your employees to learn in the flow of work creates a culture of continuous improvement and adaptability, setting your organization up for sustained success. To learn more about Whatfix, schedule a free demo with us today.
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