Employee Development Plan: What it is and how it is created?

The most important asset for companies today is human capital. Several surveys show that developing your employees is the best way to increase the value of the company. Therefore, there are several human resources to decrease employee turnover and develop them within the organization.

What is an employee development plan?

It is the set of actions taken by the human resources department that the company during the year to develop the skills, knowledge, and abilities of its employees. The development plan describes all initiatives: Training, periodicity of evaluations, and budget for each of these phases.

There is no time frame for future planning. Maybe it is only for this year, and for the next 3 years, the most important thing is to plan and schedule everything, including financial allocations. A suggestion from us is to do this planning at the beginning of the year.

What are the key steps for an employee development plan?

We can create an employee development plan in two simple steps.

1. Pre-planning

Before any type of planning, it is important to have the right inputs to analyze and make decisions based on data, not whims. To understand what is developing in your organization, you need to take a step back and see what in fact needs to be developed.

There are some HR tools that can help in this step Performance assessment through competencies.

Training Planning
After you have done the performance assessment of your employees and find out what needs to be potentialized and developed, it is time to plan the training. When thinking about training, it’s important to have two things in mind:

Financial Planning
The first is your financial budget. There are two ways you can actually reach the final amount.

In some way, you will structure the whole plan of necessary training, the budget price for all, and provide in the budget of the company.

The second option is to already provide a budget and consider the training plan from the company budget.

Although the first mode is ideal, I know that this is not the reality of many companies. Therefore, it is important to clarify that there is no right or wrong way. The important thing is to provide training value for your employees.

Training time
A lot of training will occur during the workday and this can end up as a whole lowering the productivity of the company. Therefore, it is important to always understand what times of the scheduled period the training will occur.

Some companies choose to have their employees take courses online instead of face to face to achieve this exact time. For example, he or she may take the course at home or at an idle time.

2. Performance evaluation schedule

After all, steps have been taken to train employees, it is important to conduct performance evaluations to see if team performance has improved.

Ideally, you should conduct at least two performance appraisals during the year. If you have already identified the improvement points in the pre-planning, conduct one after the training, more towards the end of the period and with most of the training done, to check if there was indeed an improvement in the indicators.

Finally: as with any planning, the development plan must have a follow-up to verify that the execution is carried out. After all, it is worth nothing to plan but not file the paper.

You can begin to track your development plan with the Performance Evaluation Form and Training Tracking Worksheets. You can these forms from HeyForm: A simple drag and drop online form builder.