3 Requirements of an Employee Development Plan

Putting employee development as a priority is crucial to every organization’s success. A non-rofit organization is not going to win someone over with a big fat raise because it doesn’t have the money. Instead, companies have to support their people, motivate their people, empower their people with training and development. Here are three things you should consider in your employee development plan. 1. Skill set – Are there skills employees need for their job that they do not have? Perhaps they need to understand Excel better or maybe they need to have a better handle on data analysis or a better handle on a certain software program or system. Whatever that is for the employee, it’s good to go ahead and develop the skills. 2. Future abilities – If you want to be able to promote employees or utilize them in a different capacity – maybe as a team lead or a supervisor – determine what skills they are going to need at that point. Maybe it’s not skills that they need in their current roles, but skills you want them to have before they reach that next level. Those are skills you can make part of a development plan. Perhaps it’s leadership or setting boundaries or how to handle conflict resolution? When they become a supervisor or you promote them to team lead, you’re going to want them to have those skill sets. 3. Personal goal - This is the part of an employee development plan most organizations overlook. Allow employees to choose a skill or a goal they wish to obtain. Maybe there’s someone who’d really like to be a better parent or maybe they dream of a future in graphic design. Maybe there’s a computer program that they don’t really need to do for their current job, but they’ve always wanted to learn how. Access to this development motivates and empowers people. As leaders, one of the things we have to think about to keep people at the organization is that they have to keep growing personally, especially if we can’t help them grow in their job responsibility. For example, if you know you can’t promote them, but you know that they’re a superstar employee, one of the things you can do is give them the skills they are looking for. You can turn to them and ask, “What have you always wanted to learn? What have you always wanted to try? Let’s build that into your development plan so that we can support you in that journey even if it’s not specially job related.” If they feel inspired and motivated by a company that invests in them, they are more likely to stay and they’re more likely to be engaged in their work. If you find that you have employees who are disengaged, not feeling tied to their work or feeling they have no room for growth, you can focus on a development plan that looks at all three of these steps. Decide how you can best support employees in their own growth. The payoff is an organization with better engaged and motivated employees.