A professional development plan: what is it?
A career development plan is a business resource with a dual purpose:
- To contribute to the evolution of the employee's career. That is to say, to understand their preferences and professional aspirations and to help them achieve them within our company.
- To assess the employee's training, experience, knowledge, and skills in order to ascertain the extent to which the aforementioned objective can be met and what they can genuinely contribute to the company.
In other words, the professional development plan aims to help the employee achieve their career goals, but without forgetting to generate benefits for the company. This generation of benefits is directly linked to what the employee aspires to and their chances of achieving it.
Some tips for a career development plan that retains talent
Now that we know what a professional development plan is, let's look at some key aspects that will allow us to create or consolidate our own with the aim of retaining talent in the company:
- The professional development plan can be put into writing in a document. Doing so provides two main benefits. Firstly, we will be able to refer to it whenever we need to, thus avoiding forgetting key aspects of it. Secondly, if we share this document with all the employees of the company, they will know that we care about their professional development and will know exactly how we do it. This will contribute to Motivation and talent retention.
- We can also opt for written records of each worker's particular situation in a separate document that accompanies the generic professional development plan. In this case, it is important to take care of data protection and privacy. Therefore, we will never share these types of individual documents with other colleagues, but only with the employee to whom they refer and with the people responsible for their professional development.
- The objectives of each worker in their independent document can be set out in SMART format, so that there is no room for error between what we record and what the worker aspires to. The more clearly defined they are, the more information they will provide.
- Within the professional development plan, it is advisable to include meetings with each employee to determine their level of satisfaction with the company and their current job, as well as the alignment between their role and their professional goals. We can hold these types of meetings periodically or call them when we detect that an employee feels demotivated, something that should be detected by HR department.
- Every professional development plan, as a motivating element that it is, can be complemented by other solutions that contribute to employees seeing that the company cares about them. This way, we will manage to retain talent. One example of this can be found in the Flexible remuneration.
In summary: a professional development plan is an alternative that any company that cares about its employees should implement. Its main benefits are motivating employees and retaining their talent.
