What do Heineken, Microsoft, and Amazon all have in common? Strategically implemented employee development plans!
87% of managers say their current workforce is already underskilled for their positions, or will be within the next three years. You may be inclined to chalk it up to bosses never being satisfied; but research shows that one in three employees actually agree, which means that employees are also concerned about lagging behind. To be fair to everyone, a noticeable skills deficit is somewhat expected in a world where our tech gets exponentially smarter every day and working styles are constantly changing, often drastically. So how on earth do we keep up? With the help of an employee development plan!
What is an employee development plan?
As the name suggests, this is how employers create learning and development opportunities for their employees. Designed to not just meet the short-term requirement of the job, these plans also keep pace with what the future of the organization/position demands.
There is simply no way to avoid skills and upskilling; we live in a skills economy during a global skills-based revolution. Plus, it’s no coincidence that some of the world’s most-sought after employers also have great examples of notable employee development programs.
Fact: A great employer recognizes the value in their employees.
Let’s take a look at Amazon, who invests heavily in enabling their non-tech employees to pick up tech-based hard skills through their own homebound Amazon Technical Academy. Another good example is Microsoft, whose LEAP program (Leading, Empowering, and Accelerating Potential) is all about diversity and growth. With a more classroom-based learning model, Microsoft provides its employees with the opportunity to work on all things from soft skills to tech skills in order to promote inter-departmental functioning and internal career pathing.
So, with such big businesses investing in employee development, you may naturally ask…
Do you need an employee development plan? If so, why?
Where there’s an employee, there’s a use case for an employee development plan! If nothing else but the simple reason that businesses can no longer afford to stagnate or risk becoming irrelevant and losing market share to newer, more developed organizations. And an organization is only as developed as its people.
This is one of the primary reasons why you need an employee development plan. The more developed your team is, the higher the level of productivity you can expect. Enhanced productivity brings less waste of time and assets and subsequently, more profitability!
Secondly but just as importantly, from an employee’s standpoint, a business that invests in its people is associated with a better work culture. Two out of three employees quit their jobs because their existing employers do not have sufficient opportunities for growth.
When you invest in the right employee development program, you are enabling your people to progress within the organization. Better career pathing leads to lower attrition and higher employee satisfaction!
Read this next: Unlocking potential: The role of career advancement & growth in employee retention
How to create an employee development plan
1. Recognize any existing development challenges
First things first! To improve on something, we must first understand where improvement is needed. To accomplish that, the first step towards mapping out the right employee development training involves a collaboration between HR and the direct in-line team lead. These two departments have to both understand the needs of the business in order to find alignment for team members and training initiatives.
This includes (but isn’t limited to) gathering an overview of each team, their current performance, where they might be lacking, feedback on existing tools and tech being used, and channeling a good deal of inter-departmental communication as well.
2. Skills audit
Once we understand the team and the goals of the business, let’s zoom in to each individual. This is the part of the plan where we look at each employee to understand three primary things: strengths, improvement areas, and skills they need to learn. These skills should be the ones that will help them in the three to five year period to further the organization as well as their own growth.
How do you find those skills? As per usual, we’ve got you covered and our team has developed a quick and intuitive skills audit tool, SkillMeter, that will give you the answers in a personalized report.
3. Align the employer's and the employee’s vision
Once you've identified what the job requires and what the business wants, you’re halfway there! The next step: aligning with what the business requires. This in itself can be a long list: short-term goals, long-term goals, how does the job contribute to the organization, how does the employee contribute, are they a good culture fit, and does the employee resonate with the company's vision and values?
But there's another side to this story…the employee’s side! How can the organization best nurture and foster the employee's growth? Before you set goals for your employee development plan, you have to consider the employee's own personal interests, goals, and grievances.
When you’re able to marry the employer's with the employee's needs, we can solidify a development plan that works.
4. Allocate a learning and development budget
There's no one size fits all here, to each their own. What matters, though, is that we set a dedicated budget for this exercise. A proper budget helps us run training sustainably while also not minimizing the need or expenditure.
5. Provide the right resources
This is where beggars can be choosers! Thanks to e-learning, you have no lack of options for training. Virtual webinars, online courses, networking events, and remote mentorship—there's a platform for everything. And if it works well for you and your employee needs, there are all-in-one platforms too!
However, while devising an employee development program, one should also include some degree of ‘onsite’ (remote and hybrid employees are included here too!) learning and training. To ensure your employees are a good fit for your organization, it’s a good idea to provide them mentors within the organization.
6. Set goals and timelines
The purpose of an employee development program is to…*check’s list*...yup, develop an employee’s potentials and skills! So how do we know the plan is actually working? You’ll decide on the metrics to measure its efficacy and time the measuring correctly. For instance, if you’re setting plans to help your copywriter also become a social media genius, a good metric is to periodically assess their social media campaigns and the growth in traffic/sales they have brought.
Keep in mind this requires milestones that are spaced out evenly and some amount of constant monitoring (not micro-managing!) as well so you can fine-tune and course-correct as-needed.
Employee development plan examples
Let's look at some examples of what an employee development training looks like in action.
Marketing coordinator to a digital marketing manager
- Advanced course on SEO, social media management, performance marketing, etc.
- 1:1 mentorship with the head of marketing
- Start them out with small paid advertising campaigns.
- Pace it out to bigger and more high-stakes projects.
Software developer to senior software developer
- Advanced technical courses in programming languages, machine learning, or cloud computing.
- Code review exercises to develop leadership skills
- Mentorship with a senior engineer or tech lead.
- Cross-functional exposure and collaborations with product managers and UX/UI designers because their job requires an understanding of the final output.
Product manager to data analytics team
- To make the shift, they would need training in data analytics, so start with basic tools such as Excel and SQL and graduate to more advanced tools.
- The various aspects of data handling, from data collection to filtering to interpretation, provide opportunities to practice and do it all under the guidance of a data analyst.
- Cross-departmental collaboration so that the budding data analyst gets insights on the product and consumer from the marketing, sales, and product teams.
Need an extra hand? PowerUp offers comprehensive employee development training on critical workforce skills! Explore the catalogue today and start upskilling your workforce for tomorrow.
