Career development plans turn talk into reality. They are a comprehensive and essential part of ensuring that ambitious employees are in the right place, on time, and with the right skills, to fill the most important positions in your organization. Done right, a career development plan also allows HR/L&D to prepare development programs to be as successful as possible.
What Is a Career Development Plan?
A career development plan is a tool used to define the exact steps that an employee will take in completing a career ladder.
If the career ladder is the outline of a path for the worker to take on their way to a certain place in the company, then the career development plan is the document showing the steps, timeline, and resources required. It’s basically a list of all the things that need to happen to get an employee from where they are to where they want to go.
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So then, What Is Career Development?
A lot of terms are thrown around when it comes to building a career, so let’s break them down:
- Career management is the entire process that supports an employee’s progress within an organization. We’ve defined it as “all of the activities undertaken by a company to ensure that an employee decides upon, and then follows, their chosen career path”. Behind the scenes of career management are a range of HR activities, such as sourcing fantastic L&D platforms.
- Career development, on the other hand, is what happens from the employee’s point of view to encourage career growth. Nowadays, career development is also known as career pathing. Sitting down with somebody from HR and discussing how you’d like to be a senior manager one day is part of this process.
- When the HR person describes how to get to this point, they set out the steps in a career ladder. This is a generalized roadmap that gives the employee an idea of what they will need to do in order to reach their goal.
- The final process is to build a career development plan. Keep in mind that it’s not so practical to define every step from now until the end goal. For example, a career development plan might show L&D courses that the employee will need, including start and end dates. Usually, it’s not possible to have such information years in advance. Instead, the career development plan typically covers what will happen in the next year or so.
A Note on Professional Development Plans
Another important clarification is the difference between professional and career development.
“Professional development” is an “initiative organized by HR/L&D to improve the professional skills of employees.” Professional skills are those that can be used by someone throughout their career, no matter where they are. For instance, if you are a bookkeeper and learn advanced accounting, that’s a skill to be used in the future, even though you might not use such new skills in your current position.
In contrast, a career development plan helps you to figure out a career path in your current organization. Remember that not every career is about moving up in the company. As described below, some career development opportunities are remedial (helping to improve current skills) or transitory (finding a new role).
From an HR perspective, it’s also true that providing L&D programs for professional hard and soft skills can be seen as a bit of a waste if that employee leaves the company. On the other hand, career development is always focused on the skill gaps that your company has and will fill through career development.
Why Is a Career Development Plan Important?
Creating a career development plan means wins all around. As with any type of employee development plan, career development plans make organizational development easier as the company knows more about what resources will be required, and when. Employees who show aptitude as they follow their career development plan might be good candidates for building leadership skills through L&D. The employee skills and knowledge that workers pick up as they climb the corporate ladder also mean better performance in their current role. Plus, a career development plan shows employees that the organization is investing in their future, a fact that boosts employee retention and attracts qualified people to your job postings. To this end, let’s look at some interesting statistics related to career development:
- Companies that focus on career development see concrete and positive results, and are said to have “mature career development practices” according to LinkedIn; 50% of such organizations provide individual career plans.
- L&D programs are now seen as strategic, and not simply “nice to have”. The development opportunities enabled by programs like career development form the main employee retention strategy for 90% of companies.
- On an organizational level, the L&D programs that support career development are vital for competitiveness. The World Economic Forum states that 41% of employees who complete their training can bridge the skill gaps that otherwise threaten competitiveness.
From the standpoint of the employee, career development plans are also a great move. Just like a company, employees have “resources”. If they are aiming for a certain future, they want to know how much it will cost them in terms of effort, personal life, and stress.
Expectations are very important to job satisfaction. When an employee has a realistic view of how long it will take to reach their career goals, they are less likely to be disappointed than someone who wants it all to happen ASAP.
Finally, a career development plan gives an employee the motivation to work towards a concrete goal and acquire valuable experience along the way. Even if they eventually choose not to take the planned role, they will still have learned a lot and will have increased their value as employees. This is true both for their current place of work and for future endeavors.
How to Create an Effective Career Development Plan
A career development plan is the end product of a lot of work. The organization needs to know what the requirements are for each position, who has the future ability to meet those requirements, and which employees will actually follow through.
Once these steps are followed, it’s time to get typing. The traditional approach to a career development plan is a basic table format that shows, at a minimum:
- The final position for the employee within the organization
- The activities they will undertake to reach that goal
- The reason behind each activity
A large variety of other information can be included if you wish, such as:
- Short- and long-term goals (such as those described in a career ladder)
- Measurement techniques for each goal
- Start and/or end dates
- Resource requirements
- Learning and development programs
- Mentors who will help the employee learn about the role and become acclimatized
- Introductory learning opportunities such as job shadowing, temporary duties, and lateral moves within the company
- A list of managers who need to ensure that the employee’s old position will be covered and that they can move within a certain period of time
For employees and HR professionals who are interested in a more creative approach, there are other formats as well. One of the more popular alternatives is a 2 x 2 matrix, which allows the employee to choose the optimal career path according to what they wish to do, and what is in demand at the moment. The axes are labeled “market value” and “internal value” that show:
- Best choices (upper right quadrant)
- Options to consider (lower right quadrant)
- Potential part-time positions (upper left quadrant)
- Ideas to avoid (lower left quadrant)
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Career Development Plan Examples
The career development plan template is a versatile method for bringing a career management initiative to life. In fact, any major move that an employee wants to take can be converted into something tangible by using this medium. HR people may find themselves applying a career development plan to all kinds of employees, with the goal of helping them identify their best fit within the organization.
Promotion
The “classic” reason for building a career development plan is to move up the hierarchy. The level of detail put into the career development plan will change according to how high a person wants to go. For example, long-term career development goals require extensive experience in certain areas. Somebody aiming to become a chief marketing officer will need to work in a lot of related departments that could include advertising, promotions, corporate communications, and product development. The career development plan should define what interim positions are preferred and for how long the employee must remain in each.
In contrast, somebody who wants to move from being a line employee to a management position could accomplish that in a few years, and so their career development plan would be shorter. In both cases, working with the L&D department is important so that the employee can take the proper courses in the most convenient way.
Transition
It’s not always necessary to encourage employee growth through an immediate vertical move. Over time, some employees become interested in a new role within the organization. This could happen as the result of a talent development strategy, or because some L&D course has stimulated a person’s interest or in the case of the organization moving in a different direction.
Remediation
Not every employee copes well with their job, including when they advance to higher positions. Poor performance reviews, personal confusion, and organizational disruption can put a serious dent in an employee’s output. In a next-to-worst-case scenario, the worker goes into survival mode.
An individual who feels that they have been underperforming, or who was told the same through feedback, may create a plan specifically to improve. This signifies that the employee is not really interested in extensive advancement. Instead, they want to focus on their present job and make sure they can remain in the organization. Using career development planning in this way is a great method for understanding the training, coaching, learning, and assignments needed.
Career Development Plan Best Practices
Building a career development plan isn’t a theoretical activity. A company that is serious about employee development will devote resources to it. So step one is making sure that upper management is prepared to support these efforts. In addition, the employee’s direct managers should understand that the worker might need to take some time off for L&D programs. And, if the career development plan is successful, they will eventually need to be replaced.
Of course, it’s up to the employee to do the work. Yes, it’s important for HR to follow up occasionally, such as during performance reviews. But it is not the responsibility of HR to cheerlead an employee’s career path in case they start missing milestones. If talent development programs are running, then there should be a few choices for succession planning.
Similarly, there’s no need to fill projected vacancies by “selling” a certain position or journey to the employee. If the worker is happy with the path they have chosen, it’s not wise to influence them towards taking a more difficult course.
Finally, as with many future-focused projects, don’t make promises. The company might change strategic direction, eliminate certain positions, or make hiring decisions that interfere with the plan. Instead, start your career development discussions with an explanation of what is beyond the control of the people directly involved.
Implementing Career Development Plans
A career development plan is just a start. Once created, it’s time to put it in motion. HR/L&D teams have many options for building the skills and experience that allow employees to fulfill their career goals, such as:
Internal Learning and Development Programs
Coursework, coaches, and mentors are a few of the options that companies use for upskilling employees. It is often through traditional learning that workers acquire basic skills, while advanced soft skills might come through close personal instruction from coaches and mentors. In any case, it is critical to personalize L&D to focus on specific skill gaps.
“Hands-On” Training
Once an employee learns about a skill, they need to apply it. Job shadowing, cross-training, job rotation, role-playing, temporary assignments, and temporary leadership positions are all ways of gaining practical experience before officially taking a new role.
External Learning
Particularly for academic types of instruction, employees might attend an in-person university or college course, learn online, or attend seminars and workshops delivered by third parties.
Current Career Planning Trends: Skills
Many HR teams keep a constant eye on what skills are becoming more important in the workplace. It is one thing to perform a skills gap analysis that is greatly influenced by what executives and managers see as the most essential abilities for an organization in the years to come. But it’s HR’s job to also track the bigger picture of shifts in global workplace skill trends.
According to the World Economic Forum, the critical abilities (“core skills”) for companies to develop right now are:
- Analytical thinking
- Creative thinking
- Resilience, flexibility, and agility
One of the main reasons for soft skills claiming the top spots is the advance of artificial intelligence. AI will be a major advantage for companies and employees who can understand and use its complicated functions.
However, according to Forbes, AI is also a threat in that it, in a way, does our thinking for us. In fact, Forbes says that the top three career skills that people need today are critical thinking, critical listening, and critical reading. An important issue with AI is that it cannot determine the level of quality or truth of its output. Companies need to develop employees with the ability to stay aware of AI issues and know how to correct them.
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Perfect Your Career Development Planning with Growthspace
The one thing missing from many career development plans is the how of L&D programs. The usual approach is to work with the same L&D provider, who delivers “one size fits all” training. But when you’re dealing with multiple employees, each with their own unique career path and career development plan, the pre-packaged approach just won’t work.
For this, and many other reasons, leading corporations are turning to Growthspace. With a scalable skill development platform dedicated to matching employees with the right experts in every subject, Growthspace is the technology you need to turn your best development plans into reality.
