Everything You Need to Know About Employee Development Planning

In this article, we will explore everything you need to know about employee development. From its meaning, all the way to creating an effective development plan, we’ll examine all the facets of employee development. We will also go into detail on the role of the HR department in creating a comprehensive, pragmatic employee development plan for their organizations.

What is Employee Development?

Employee development is universally defined as a strategic tool for organizations that want to improve their growth, productivity, and employee retention. At a high-level, it can be defined as a process of improving, enhancing, refining, and honing existing skills of employees, as well as developing newer ones, to remain true to their organization’s mission and goals.

Along with those definitions are some finer points of interest:

Employee development planning is more than just implementing mandatory employee training.
It goes a long way beyond developing L&D strategies.
It’s also not enough to have annual meetings with employees to discuss their limitations and highlighting improvement needs.

When you execute employee development successfully, even though it requires a lot of investment from the company, it will pay off more over the long-term.

Here’s an example: both letting go of an employee with limited skills and improving those skills to the organization’s standards will cost you money. But, employee development efforts will benefit the company better when you implement a carefully planned professional development plan.

Using the same example, choosing to develop employees will result in a positive aftermath for the whole organization. For one, it will help them avoid the costly process of replacing the employee. It will also profit from the “sunk capital” that they invested in that employee. And lastly, it will allow HR professionals to maintain the organizational culture instilled in that employee instead of building from scratch.

The Benefits of Employee Development

As we mentioned a while ago, a carefully planned development strategy can help your organization on multiple levels. And if you were able to execute it well, it can gather up multiple benefits to all parties concerned, from the employees to the broader organization.

The benefits of a development plan for employees, as well as the whole organization, include:

1. Performance enhancement

For companies to stay competitive, they need to outstrip their competition. Luckily, employee development can let you do just that by helping the organization meet– and possibly surpass — performance projection.

According to a 2017 report by CSO Insights, they found that sales manager development can heavily improve performance metrics (quota attainment, win rates, and revenue rates). For some, investing as little as $500 in employee development rendered $5,000 investment produced, 51.4 % more wins, and 46.1% win rate improvement.

Read: Get to know the top 7 benefits of workplace diversity.

2. Professional development planning can help attract new employees.

Ask any HR professionals and they will tell you that it’s not enough to only advertise job vacancies. The reason is because candidates will always look for a company that offers good compensation and benefits, a healthy and positive workplace, good organizational culture, and even a company that promises career development plans. So in conclusion, a company won’t be able to attract the best candidates to help them remain competitive without an employee development plan.

In a Whitepaper produced by ATD Research titled Building a Culture of Learning, The Foundation of a Successful Organization, they stated that companies are more agile, competitive, and engaged when an organization implements a learning and knowledge-sharing culture within the workforce.

3. Helps save money through employee retention

To keep the ship afloat, it’s essential to invest in in-house employee development programs. Doing this can help ensure that employees stay in the know and remain competitive. Also, employee development planning can also help the organization save money in the long run.

AT&T found that only 50% of its 250,000-strong workforce had the right skills to support their company through a cutthroat competition. As a result, they decided to invest in a $1-billion retaining program. This employee development plan helped them save a lot of money. The reason is that replacing them also increases as employee base pay increases.

Read: The Complete and Epic Guide to Successful Employee Management in 2020

4. Through an employee development plan, companies can handle unexpected situations better.

The nature of today’s business environment brings about constant changes. And those constant changes can bring challenges for the workforce. But if handled properly, these challenges can open unexpected opportunities which are vital in handling ever-growing situations efficiently.

With the right development plan for employees, you can train the employees to be adaptable. As a result, they can greatly improvise solutions, unlike with less-developed employees who would simply accept the status quo.

5. Grants the company the flexibility to innovate, expand, and compete vigorously.

Such employee development programs not only develop existing skills, but they also let you deliver competitiveness in the long run by inculcating new skills that will surely be helpful in the future. These newly-learned skills grant the company the power to be flexible, nimble, and accommodative to the needs of the external forces of the company. Additionally, they can help you innovate and compete for various business opportunities, which is crucial for a true market leader.

6. Employee development planning helps improve employee engagement.

By implementing good training, it’s easy to drive employee engagement so that they can remain motivated to the company’s goals and mission. According to the Dale Carnegie Institute, a highly-engaged workplace can lead to a 202% improvement in productivity. Moreover, even 85% of leaders believe that employee engagement is a high-priority strategy for success.

By having a well-defined employee engagement program, you can balance all the employee engagement factors, from skills development to training. Doing this can also result in delivering the benefits of a fully-motivated workplace within — and outside — the organization.

Read: 10 Change Management Strategies That Will Make Your Initiative Successful

What is the Role of the HR Department in Employee Development?

While HR encourages the employees to control their own career development, they also never stop in providing ways for employees to be effective in their current roles and skillset level. It is HR’s responsibility to convince both managers and employees that development can bring many benefits to the company. If they fail to do this, it can result in managers balking at training cost and at lost productivity time. Moreover, employees will never see the gains of development programs, which can lead to them feeling unenthusiastic about it.

Knowing these rules can be helpful for HR professionals to align employee development with the company’s employee management strategy:

Get to know the organization well. Study every bit and detail of the organization. This knowledge can greatly help you with employee management planning and employment development.
Get to know the industry by developing an approach to all training programs.
Find out the needs of employees. What are the employee’s training needs and backgrounds? Make sure to find those out before developing any training program.
Know how to measure outcomes. The more HR can measure training outcomes, the more effective the employee development process can be.

Keep in mind that HR professionals should also focus on their own professional development, even though they are usually the ones assigned to organize development plans.

Read: The Complete Guide to Building a Collaborative Team

The 5-Step Process for Creating an Effective Employee Development Plan

Don’t make the mistake of creating an employee development plan off the cuff. Instead, you can follow this step-by-step process to ensure that your development plans for employees are on point.

1. Plan for your business goals.

What are the business needs and goals? Before you set objectives for your employee development plan, you must know your company’s business needs so that you can align them with the development needs.

When planning for the development, you must plan with long- and short- term business objectives in mind. Does someone in the IT department need to learn to use new software? Do you need one of your full-time employees to move to a managerial role?

Once you’re able to identify all your objectives and goals, you can start identifying the required skills and knowledge that support those goals.

Developing career paths sure is a massive opportunity, but you still need to talk to your team members to ask for their suggestions and feedback. Never assume that you know your employees’ goals and skill level.

Additionally, you must ask them to assess their own work and try to discern the skill gaps that can be solved by professional development plans. Know which areas they struggle with the most and whether they would benefit from the additional training.

Talking to your employees is a good practice considering how most employees have development goals in mind but don’t know where to start. Some employees don’t even realize their potential until they’re encouraged by the management.

Read: 4 Effective Exercises for Active Listening That You Can Play with Your Colleagues

3. Distinguish potential from readiness.

There’s a fine line between potential and readiness. For example, Harry has the potential to become a manager, but he isn’t ready yet to get promoted for that role.

Readiness comes in all sorts of forms, from desires to experience. Harry may seem interested to move to a managerial position, but he might not be ready yet. Perhaps he has other priorities, like caring for his elderly parents or young children or he’s just not ready to travel every week. Or, he may need more progressive and complex assignments to master the skills required for the managerial role.

While most employees, if not all, want to improve in their chosen career, not everyone wants to move to a higher role. This is the part that most leaders tend to overlook, which in return can have devastating repercussions.

4. Figure out the best training and employee development.

You already know your business goals and objectives. You’ve also talked to your employees about professional development. Now, it’s time to figure out the best way your employee will get the new skills.

Bear in mind that developmental programs don’t have to be expensive. Even enrolling in a Coursera course will do.

To cater to the different needs and learning styles of employees, there are various types of development you can do apart from the typical formal classroom training, which includes:

Giving special assignments and challenging assignments
One-on-one mentoring and coaching
Local networking groups
Working with an expert on a subject matter

Training your employee to take pieces of the next job up the ladder is the best way to prepare them for the job. If you want to give chances for your less experienced employees to learn and grow, you can use the ideas above for your development planning.

5. Create a plan for all events.

Make plan for the before, during, and after of the employee development process. Create a plan with specific and timely goals. This will help you measure the employee’s progress compared to having vague objectives with no deadlines.

Then, think about what you need to consider in order to put the development plan into action. Do you need more preparation? Are there any other parties involved? Does the employee need to take a break from work? Lastly, do they need to have someone to cover up for them while they’re on training?

Be sure to let the employee know the reason why they need to learn this new skill, what you expect them to learn, and how it will benefit both the company and themselves.

After the training, help the employee apply what they’ve learned from the process in the workplace.

Remember that you’re spending a considerable amount of money and time to help your employee hone their skills or develop a new one. After all, it is only right that you get your return on investment from your employees who will use those skills to work in your company.