Employee development is encouraging employees to acquire new or related skills, knowledge, and viewpoints, by providing learning and training facilities, and avenues where such new ideas can be applied (businessdirectory.com).

Employers must allocate sufficient resources to employee development or they risk creating the impression that employees are not valuable to them. Development provides another means of achieving engagement of employees and engaged employees gives high level performance on a more consistent basis.

Development planning involves the ongoing collaboration between leaders and their employees. Leaders support the employees in determining their career goals, assessing their strengths and identifying their developmental needs.

Before Drafting Your Plan

Ensure you understand the process. The process involves:

• Identifying your career goals.
• Assess your skills, knowledge and behaviours by identifying your strengths and opportunities.
• Review the competencies required for current and future roles and option available to acquire or improve them.
• Prepare plan, take action and review.

Identifying Goals

Begin by thinking about where you are now, where you want to be and how you’re going to get there.

Work on getting to know your skills, knowledge, behaviours, interests and values as well as your opportunities.

You can ask yourself the following questions:

• Where am I now?
• Where do I want to be?
• What do I want out of my career?
• What do I like to do?
• What are my strengths?
• What are my opportunities?
• What is important to me?

At the end of this step you will have a clearer idea of your work or learning goal and your individual preferences.  Your personal preferences are very useful for helping you choose your best option.

Assessing Your Skills

This step is about exploring the occupations/roles and learning areas that interest you. Once you have some idea of your occupational preferences, research the specific skills, competencies and qualifications required for those occupations/roles.

• List your strengths in your current position.
• List your areas for development in current position.
• What other skills do you need?
• Where are the gaps between the skills required for the new role and the skills you already have?
• What options do you have to gain these skills or qualify for these roles?

At the end of this step you will have a list of preferred occupations/roles and/or learning options. 

Review Competency Required and Available Options

This step involves reviewing competences required and comparing your options, narrowing down your choices and thinking about what suits you best at this point in time. 

• Explore the required competences for roles that interest you and ask yourself how do my skills and interests match up with these roles?
• What are my best work/training options?
• How do they fit with the current labour market?
• How do they fit with my current situation and responsibilities?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of each option?
• What will help and what will hinder me in accessing these options?
• What can I do about it?

At the end of this step you will have narrowed down your options and have more of an idea of what you need to do next to help you achieve your goals.

Prepare Plan, Take Action and Review

Here you plan the steps you need to take to put your plan into action.

Use all you have learnt about your skills, interests and values together with the information you have gathered about your options to create your plan.

• List the actions/steps will help me achieve my training and career goals (e.g.  work shadowing, relief duties, training courses).
• List the resources available (e.g. Internal/external training courses, Location of possible relief opportunities).
• Discuss with your leader in order to arrive at final plan.
• Document your plan with required timeframe for each action.
• Implement your plan.
• Periodically review your progress (e.g. Monthly/quarterly).
• Re-assess/adjust needs and plans as necessary.

Your development is your responsibility. It is primarily owned by the employee and supported by their leader. This means that it’s the employee’s responsibility to ensure that the plan is prepared and implemented according to the above processes. It also requires ongoing coaching and feedback between leader and employee to evaluate the progress.

Take action immediately and watch your performance rise to the next level. For assistance in completeing this process, feel free to contact us immediately: sabgfuturesolutions.com.

Sherraine Gardner, MBA (Management Consultancy) is the owner of SABG Future Solutions.