According to Gallup data, half of all American employees are open to leaving their organizations, and almost a third of them say accelerated career development is what attracts them to a new role. Employee development isn’t just good for employees, it’s good for business.
Employee development gives employees a path towards growing in their careers, increasing their commitment to their day-to-day work as they see how each project moves them towards their goals.
For employers, employee development increases employee retention, reduces turnover, and improves the employee experience throughout the organization. But more importantly, because it involves creating a development plan for every employee, you have a clear picture of potential skill gaps and a path to filling them.
15Five’s Career Vision tool is a simple, powerful way for manager and their teams to create an employee development plan. And since it’s built into 15Five, it’s part of a broader performance management platform that gives managers and employees alike the tools to move towards that goal.
In this guide, you’ll get a full understanding of employee development and why it’s so crucial.
Key Takeaways:
- Why employee development is essential to workforce productivity and retention
- The components of a successful employee development plan
- How role clarity supports long-term development and employee engagement
- How 15Five’s Career Vision tool facilitates skill-building and career growth
- How to use employee development software to track progress over time
- Practical tips for managers to implement employee training and development plans
Why employee development is a business imperative
Median employee tenure is at its lowest point since 2002, at just 3.9 years, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And with each departing employee potentially costing six to nine months of their salary to replace before accounting for lost productivity and institutional knowledge, keeping top performers around for longer is a priority for leaders across industries.
Your employee retention efforts ensure that your top performers stay your top performers, as well as keeping your workforce as a whole resilient and adaptable—employee development is a key part of this. Employee development involves building out a pre-determined plan for each employee’s growth with your company. When implemented properly, this has a massive impact on their work. 59% of employees believe the right training can directly improve their performance, and the results affect the organization as a whole. Company training programs improve revenue per employee by 218%.
These programs allow organizations to build skills throughout their workforce, plug skill gaps, adapt to evolving market conditions, and retain their top talent. Building these programs can easily be your most effective employee retention effort.
Core elements of a high-impact employee development plan
An employee development plan compiles the skills and traits employees need to develop to reach certain goals according to specific milestones. A development plan for a software developer, for example, might mention programming languages that the developer needs to learn, aspects of their work style that need improvement, and dates by which these elements will be evaluated for a potential promotion.
The term “employee development plan” is often used interchangeably with career development plan or employee growth plan, but there are some important differences between these variations:
- Employee development plan: This type of plan focuses on developing specific skills and traits for current roles or promotions in the near future. They may address performance gaps, prepare someone for additional responsibility, or help them master new processes. Typically, an employee development plan has a timeline of six to 12 months.
- Career development plan: This plan has a longer timeline for an employee’s growth, typically two years or more. It focuses on career progression and advancement opportunities, rather than the specifics of certain skills. Those skills will still be mentioned, but their development isn’t the focus of this plan.
- Employee growth plan: This kind of plan takes a more holistic approach, combining an employee’s professional development and personal growth in a single plan. While it will include aspects of skill development and career planning, it also addresses work-life balance, personal values, and overall fulfillment.
Employee development plans are built systematically, then adapted for the different realities of individual employees. This means they generally follow a predetermined list of essential elements. Here are some of the core elements of every employee development plan:
- Career goals and aspirations: Co-developed by the employee in question, their direct manager, and leadership, these goals should pair an employee’s personal aspirations with the organization’s broader needs.
- Skill gap analysis: This analysis demonstrates the skills your organization needs to develop for its continued growth, showing employees how the skills they’ll build will contribute to their team and department.
- Measurable learning objectives: No matter how the actual learning involved in employee development takes place, you need clear, measurable goals to track progress. Using a methodology like SMART goals allows you to do this consistently.
- Actionable training and development activities: Do you expect employees to follow an internal training program you’ve developed? Or will you guide them in pursuing educational opportunities? Clearly list the activities involved in building up necessary skills.
- Timeline and progress tracking: Regular check-ins and feedback are crucial to ensuring employees achieve the goals you’ve set for them. Outline the frequency of these check-ins and the expected timeline for reaching these goals.
The importance of role clarity in employee development
With role clarity, employees know exactly what’s expected of them in their day-to-day work. It also aligns managers, collaborators, and leadership on the responsibilities, skills, and requirements of a particular role. This makes role clarity foundational in employee development plans.
Think of it this way. Would you rather build a house on a slab of concrete or a pool of shifting mud?
Role clarity creates rock-solid alignment from which a proper plan can be built. Misunderstandings around what a role should be responsible for create warped ideas of the skills needed for that role, the progress an employee needs to make to improve their performance, and even which roles they can eventually be promoted to.
The impact of role clarity on employee development goes beyond just contributing to a more robust development plan. It’s also closely tied to employee engagement, which describes how passionate, motivated, and driven employees are. Murky responsibilities can frustrate employees as they double up on work, lose precious time to projects they’re not supposed to be involved in, and get vague feedback on their performance.
Role clarity is a lighthouse, guiding employees, managers, and leaders as they build growth plans.
Not sure how to achieve role clarity? 15Five’s Role Clarity tool allows managers and employees to collaborate on clearing up roles and centering them within broader performance management processes like feedback cycles and engagement surveys.
How 15Five’s Career Vision tool supports employee development
Building an employee development plan is a crucial process, but often poorly documented. Managers might have their own individual templates for development plans, modified slightly for each member of their team, leading to little consistency across plans and wildly varying results across the organization. Worse, these plans aren’t data-driven, leaving both managers and employees in the dark as they build them or evaluate progress.
That’s where 15Five’s Career Vision tool comes in. This powerful tool allows managers and their teams to co-create a strengths-driven career vision that keeps employees engaged and working towards achievable goals. This tool allows employees to:
- Define their ideal work day, which is the foundation for mapping their growth.
- Explore career paths, and other growth resources within your organization.
- Choose a career path through a better understanding of their strengths and your opportunities.
Because Career Vision is found within 15Five, it pairs naturally with other performance management features, like its regular, automated performance reviews and e-learning resources.
Want to see what 15Five’s Career Vision can do for your employee development plans? Book a demo here.
From planning to action: Making development plans work
Recognizing the importance of employee development plans is just the first step. Properly implementing them, at scale and effectively, requires a careful approach. Here’s how it’s done:
- Build customization into your plans: No two employees are alike, even within the same role. While each development plan should have similar elements, they’ll need to be deeply customized to match an employee’s individual requirements, goals, and needs.
- Start with a skills assessment: A skills assessment allows your organization to evaluate the skills available across different teams, identify skill gaps, and plan out future skill-building priorities. This is an important resource for an employee development plan, since it can help guide employees towards the skills they need to build and help guide you in putting them on the right career path.
- Make regular feedback a priority: Both employees and managers should regularly give feedback on the development plan and the progress made toward its ultimate goal. This helps direct employees as they work on their growth, continuously improving their performance. Likewise, managers, who may be implementing brand new plans, can improve the way they coach their teams.
- Support managers: Managers are the front line in employee development, helping employees through their frustrations if they fail and celebrating their wins. But if they aren’t already experts in performance management, they’ll need their own support. That can mean providing them with e-learning resources to improve their own skills or mentoring them in their own growth.
- Offer psychological safety: For employees to learn the skills they need to reach their goals, they need to know that they are free to try new things and potentially fail. Building psychological safety into your company culture is essential.
- Provide a breadth of training opportunities: Simply building an employee development plan isn’t enough. You need to ensure employees have training opportunities available in their day-to-day work, and you need to offer a variety of these to accommodate different learning styles. This can mean prioritizing mentoring, promoting cross-functional collaboration, or even sending employees to networking events for professionals with the skills they’re trying to develop.
- Adjust workloads to account for training: If your top performers have to take on more and more responsibilities while pursuing the goals in their development plan, they’re unlikely to make much progress.
One of the most important steps to making employee development plans work? Consistent improvement. Much like your employees, your approach to these plans will improve over time, which is why feedback is so important.
Long-term benefits of strategic employee development
Building an employee development process—and the necessary templates for development plans—from scratch is a significant investment. But this process doesn’t just come with serious benefits for employees, nor is the only benefit for organizations a marked reduction in turnover. A robust, battle-tested employee development process has long-term strategic benefits, including:
- Upskilled workforce: Your organization’s growth depends on your workforce’s skills, and employee development keeps these skills increasing steadily. It’s an investment that pays off massively for your growth.
- High-performance culture: When employee development is a priority, you build high performance into your company culture. Employees will continuously look for opportunities to improve, and you’ll stay ahead of the competition.
- Fewer skill shortages: Organizations that don’t proactively review the skills they have at their disposal frequently find themselves with skill gaps they need to rush to fill. Employee development helps prevent this.
- Increased agility: Skills are essential for agility, and employee development builds up your organization’s skill base so it can better respond to market changes.
- Stronger DEI initiatives: Too frequently, DEI initiatives involve outside hiring when they could focus on internal promotions. By developing your existing team, you get the added benefit of diversifying your leadership team and your top performers.
Invite development
Employee development encourages employees to believe in pushing past their limits, leading to stronger engagement and satisfaction. But organizations reap the rewards of this approach as well, with long-term strategic benefits like a more skilled workforce, a culture of top performers, and, in the end, a stronger bottom line.
Tools like 15Five’s Career Vision and Role Clarity give managers and employees everything they need to collaborate on employee development. Want to see what they can do for your teams? Book a demo.
