What Should Your Employee’s Development Plan Contain? (P.1)

Finding talent is a difficult task, but retaining talent is even harder. If you do not continuously pay attention to developing your employees with an effective training process to help them reach their full potential, they will leave and you will have to start over.

Therefore, an organisation should have a suitable plan to focus on employee development. This process fulfils two goals: keeping the employees and ensuring that the organisation has a new generation of managers ready to take over.

Read more: [Infographic] Distinguishing Between High Potential and High Performing Employees

Aspects to be considered in your employee’s development plan

In order to maximise the effectiveness of the employee’s development plan, here is a 10 aspects that leaders need to pay close attention to.

1. Think of the business objectives

Before deciding the objectives for your employees, you should try to align their self-development needs with the general and specific needs of your organisation. Once you have considered both short and long-term goals, you can identify the skills, knowledge, and human resources that support those goals.

This can save you time and money when recruiting, integrating and training, and erases the gap between the current skill sets and the future ones, which will be invaluable to the company. In addition, it also helps to create a clear career path and opportunities for advancement through development, which is a great effort to retain top talents.

Read more: 7 types of difficult employees

2. Talk to your employees and create a personal development plan

If you want to develop an employee, you need to create a development plan. This plan should provide an orientation for employees that includes measurable goals and time frames to achieve each goal. However, do not jump to conclusion that you know the level of skills and career aspirations of each employee.

Not everyone is willing to share their needs or has any clue about what they want to achieve in their career, while others may be unsure of what they want to do. Some of your employees may already plan for development but do not know how to start, or whether the leader will support those plans or not. Other may not realise the potential you see in them or need a little push to reach the next step.

Read more: Duplicating your top employees

Talk to your staff about their personal interests and career goals. This will help identify the development activities that individuals need to perform. You should also ask your employees to evaluate their work and talk about any challenges they are having in their current position.

By talking to the employees, you can find out your business role in their plans as well as the opportunities you can provide them. A carefully built employee’s development plan will increase the return on investment for all stakeholders.

3. Join a network of professionals

Apart from the support of the organisation, you should establish a policy to provide employees with the access to resources that can help them grow. Specifically, introduce them to other professionals who can act as mentors or instructors, or send them to training courses and networking events, register them for professional industry associations. Moreover, the employees can be offered other ways to get help, tips and additional information on how to grow professionally and personally.

With this policy, your employees will feel very honoured and understand that the organisation cares for them so that the cohesion between them and the company will increase.

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