Younger generations increasingly look for something beyond salary: professional development. Salary will always be one of the main factors in choosing one job over another, along with other benefits and perks, but the professional development a job offers is just as important — and companies are increasingly promoting it during the hiring process.
The same goes for employees who have been with an organization for several years — they're increasingly likely to consider leaving if another company offers them more opportunities for professional development.
With that in mind, let's talk about one of the best ways to drive employee development: Individual Development Plans.
What Is an Individual Development Plan?
An Individual Development Plan (IDP) is the set of actions an employee carries out to improve their competencies and skills — whether personal, professional, or technical. It's also known as a Development Agenda, or by its abbreviation, IDP.
They are indispensable for an organization's growth.
Optimize Talent Management
Discover how Integratec can help you manage your organization's talent.
What Should Be Clear When Reviewing an Individual Development Plan?
- The employee's current level of development in their competencies.
- The employee's current performance level.
- Which competencies and skills the employee wants to improve.
- What steps or actions will be taken, and by when, to achieve that improvement.
- What resources are needed to achieve it.
- Ongoing progress updates on the plan's completion.
There's nothing stopping you from adding a few extra items. But the more direct and efficient the plan is, the easier it will be to follow up on it, and the less likely the employee is to lose interest or see it as something complicated.
Steps to Create a Good Individual Development Plan
Based on the previous section about what the plan should contain, we can now look at how to actually put it together.
1. Give the employee and their direct manager intuitive access.
Both should have the same visibility into the employee's plan, along with a space to leave comments or suggestions. This helps the manager support the employee in following through on the plan.
2. Give both the manager and the employee information to start from.
Performance evaluation results, feedback from other employees, or any other type of insight will be a big help in starting to define the Individual Development Plan. Often, what we think we should improve on isn't what will actually have the greatest impact on our work. The more information we gather about our development and performance, the better we can direct our efforts.
3. Provide clarity on company, department, and position objectives.
This allows employees to focus on actions that are relevant to both their own professional success and the company's. For example, if we're at an accounting firm and an employee has a major opportunity area in the Creativity competency, focusing their efforts on improving there probably won't have much of an effect on their role or performance. It would be better for them to focus on competencies that are more relevant to their position.
4. Organize activities by competency.
The internal development plan shouldn't be an endless list of actions. Follow-up and correctly defining each action becomes much easier if we organize them by the Competencies or Skills being developed.
5. Each competency to be developed should be broken down into several specific points to work on.
It's a good idea to follow the 70-20-10 model, though any other model can work too. The goal here is to make sure a competency's development doesn't depend on just a single action.
They provide the support and guidance needed to achieve goals and objectives.
How to Follow Up on an Individual Development Plan
The final step in the Individual Development Plan process is proper follow-up, to make sure the effort put into building it actually pays off.
1. Effective communication between employee and manager.
The best way to make sure teams follow up on their development plans frequently and on time is to have good communication between the manager and their team. It's important to keep a written record of actions taken and results achieved, so that over time you can identify which actions have actually been relevant, and which ones have been hard to complete or had little impact.
2. Follow-up frequency.
If good communication already exists, keep it frequent to make sure its benefits stay consistent and its quality keeps improving. For the development plan to be effective, the employee needs to receive continuous feedback.
3. Monitor resource availability.
If employees need certain resources to complete their development plan, it's important to manage what those resources involve in terms of cost and time, and have an availability plan in place for employees.
They should be created by experienced personnel and written so they never limit employees' development or role.
Common Mistakes When Implementing Individual Development Plans
1. Thinking a course catalog is enough.
Buying an online e-learning package and giving employees access to it isn't enough. Employees will have hundreds of courses available, but won't know where to start, and will likely end up learning about topics that aren't very relevant to their role.
2. Not evaluating the employee's competencies and skills.
Following on the last point, before building development plans we need to know which areas employees should be working on. To do this, we need to study and evaluate employees' strengths and opportunity areas.
It's just as important to know which competencies matter for each position, so development plans can be aligned with the competencies that actually matter.
