Marie Creasey
Digital Customer Experience Manager
Cranfield Online
A good employee development plan helps people grow personally and professionally. By aligning individual and organisational goals around expanding knowledge and networks, and developing skills, it cements a person’s place within their organisation and looks forward to the role they could play in its future success.
This professional validation, together with the importance given to their personal development goals, can increase the loyalty that person feels towards their organisation, as well as their motivation to do a good job.
What is an employee development plan?
An employee development plan is a bespoke list of actions and activities that outlines an individual’s professional growth within an organisation and that someone sets out to achieve to progress their career.
A good employee development plan considers the goals of the business or organisation alongside the personal and professional goals of the individual employee, creating a collaborative, actionable plan.
By acting on the plan, employees are committing to continuous professional development, while employers are showing the value they give to developing their people.
Putting time and money into developing their employees is one of the smartest and most future-focused decisions an organisation can make. It can help to attract new talent into the business, improve retention of existing employees, encourage engagement, and speed progress towards business goals.
Employee development plan best practice: five top tips
A good employee development plan includes:
- A mixture of short and longer-term goals covering skills development within the current role, skills development for progressing to the next level, and/or skills development for switching career pathways.
- A timeline for success in each area, with regular checkpoints along the way to measure progress.
- For each goal, an identified learning pathway or route to success.
- Sources of employer-led support to achieve stated goals, such as financial assistance, mentoring agreements, training plans etc.
- A mixture of SMART targets, deadlines and deliverables to ensure continued progress.
An employee development plan can aim as far into the future as needed; the timeline for success is not as important as ensuring that the plan is acted upon, and its results evaluated to ensure it provides lasting value.
Employee development: The value of bite-sized e-learning
Providing individuals and teams with access to some kind of online knowledge academy where they can choose from different educational content according to their needs is one of the easiest and most convenient ways to enable continued progress towards goals set in an employee development plan.
The growth in popularity of e-learning over the past few years has allowed learning and development providers to produce bite-sized digital content across a wide range of topics and catering for those with varying levels of experience and/or prior knowledge of that subject. A variety of different content types – from instructional videos, to games, quizzes and animations – cater for multiple learning styles rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
The flexibility, accessibility and cost-effectiveness of an online delivery model allows learning and development interventions to be targeted to new audiences, including those unable to attend traditional face-to-face courses. It also enables development to be provided to those in the lower levels of the organisational hierarchy who may otherwise be overlooked in favour of upskilling managers and identified ‘high potential’ employees.
With a knowledge academy, there is no need for organisations to commit to one single option for all employees. Learners may also be able to supplement the courses they are required to complete with additional programmes in subjects that interest them, encouraging a culture of continuous learning and development.
At Cranfield University, we have developed a portfolio of self-paced e-learning courses that may be completed individually or ‘stacked’ together to gain micro-credentials all the way up to a MSc in Business and Management. To find out more about how they could help your organisation develop its employees at all levels, view our course portfolio or speak to the team.
