How to build a professional development plan: Examples and instructions

A professional development plan outlines the meaningful steps employees take to reach their career goals through education, experience and skill-building. These plans support both company goals and personal ambitions. 

A timeline usually includes some combination of the following:

• Education or training

• Work experience

• Promotions

• Relationship building

Development may also overlap with company’s performance management cycle, with plans often shaped by an employee's future aspirations.

Personal development plans vary by organisation and should be customised to each employee's role.

• Career goals: This section highlights employee’s career goals and what they hope to achieve while working with their company.

• Key strengths: This section outlines the employees’ current strengths and knowledge and identifies additional learning needs.

• Development opportunities: The manager or HR representative lists development opportunities, including learning paths, mentorship, or support through HR software tools.

• Action plans: Provide clear, achievable, and tailored steps to advance the employee’s career while improving team collaboration.

Many employees struggle to create a professional development plan and define goals without first identifying their strengths and interests. 

Employee development plans identify strengths and skill gaps so employees can take steps to improve themselves through training. 

By building new skills and feeling supported, employees become more effective and engaged in their roles. An in-depth plan helps employees become more efficient at managing and tracking time, and accomplish more.

Supporting an employee’s professional growth helps to boost satisfaction, improve retention, and preserve institutional knowledge while reducing the burden on recruitment efforts. 

Employees tend to give back the attitude they receive. Leadership support can foster a culture of inclusion and collaboration. 

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You need to start by understanding where your employees are at the current point in their careers.

Here are several ways to help you learn about your team: 

Self-assessment tests are useful for employees evaluating or reconsidering their career path.

There are plenty of online assessment tools that measure interests, skills and ideal working styles and environments for employees. These include:

• The Big Five

• CliftonStrengths 34

• Myers–Briggs Type Indicator

Ask employees to complete one or two tests to see what insights you can gain.

Review employee performance to uncover strengths and overlooked interests. This can take place with the help of performance management software.

A performance review is best conducted by an employee scheduling a meeting with their manager to see how they are progressing in the role. Ideally, these meetings should occur regularly. 

Together, they should look at the metrics used to evaluate success in their job and see where they stand. It’s useful here to cover questions such as:

• How have they met or exceeded expectations?

• How much value did they bring to the organisation during this period?

You can quickly see where an employee is pulling ahead and where they might need to focus more on trying to improve. It can also lead to a discussion on what they need to achieve to get to the next level.

While reviewing their performance level, use this opportunity to identify which tasks the employee enjoys most. Ask them to assess their job description and list all recent projects – big and small – along with success metrics.

Have them mark the tasks they enjoyed versus those they didn’t enjoy. This helps to shed light on where their goals should be moving. Patterns will likely emerge, revealing areas that spark motivation. 

For instance, if they enjoyed analytical reporting but disliked organising meetings, one goal in their professional development plan could involve taking on more reporting responsibilities.

Identify the skills used in the tasks where the employee rated highly. This will help identify future projects where an employee can put those skills to use. It can even find areas for training to take those skills to the next level.

Now that you know more about what your employee is good at and what they would like to pursue professionally, it’s time to formulate their goals. Focus on two goal types:

• Long-term goals. These are objectives your employee would like to achieve over the next several years.

• Short-term goals. These are smaller goals that work as stepping stones for achieving larger ones.

Looking further out, let’s say five to ten years, think about what an employee would like to achieve in the company or beyond it.

This long-term view should take into consideration the following items:

• The position they would like to reach (through lateral moves or promotions)

• Expertise that they need to have attained by that point

• Other important milestones (for example, reaching a certain income level or being able to mentor high potentials)

Long-term goals require systematic work over time to reach them. Those actions become short-term goals. In other words, they are things that contribute to achieving the long-range goal, such as:

• Acquiring skills or education

• Building work experience to reach the next level

• Working with and learning from certain leaders

For example, if an employee is an HR project manager now and their goal is to be an HR team lead within five years, a short-term goal may be to work toward a senior HR project manager position.

In this step, list the qualifications an employee needs to have to achieve each of their short-term goals. Then, help them determine where they fall short. 

There are two effective ways to identify the gaps in your employee’s skills:

• Reading the description for a position they want

• Performing a gap analysis

You can also support this step with compensation management tools to ensure employees are rewarded fairly as they upskill and advance toward new roles.

Start by looking at the position description for the role that your employee wants to reach. Then compare the requirements of this role with their current one as a method of finding where they need improvement.

Using the example of the senior HR project manager above, you may see that it requires experience in developing top-level strategy and delivering presentations to the business leadership team. This reveals two key areas for skill development.

Doing a gap analysis also serves as a great place to start your focus. Let’s say an employee’s short-term goal is to achieve a certain position within two years, but the qualifications needed are beyond what can be managed in this time frame. 

Alternatively, you may realise that the qualifications don’t fit well with the strengths found in the first step. Both are signs that maybe this goal needs an adjustment.

This is where it all comes together. An employee now knows their interests, goals and what stands between them and these goals. Together, you need to map out the various actions an employee can take to realise each of these goals in the allotted time frame. Possible actions include:

• Adding responsibilities to a current role

• Completing formal education

• Taking training courses inside or outside the organisation

• Doing side projects to build skills

• Developing informal and formal mentoring relationships

• Getting coaching from a co-worker or team leader

• Redesigning a current role to focus more on strengths

Two things matter most: timelines and resources. Attach deadlines to each activity e.g. ‘Complete project management certification by the end of the year’, and plan backwards. The second is nailing down resources. HR should help to shift workloads or provide support so employees can focus on development.

The ability to get support will have an impact on how an employee’s plan develops and whether it is successful, so it is imperative for HR to be involved from the beginning.

As with any plan, you will need to stay on top of it to see it come to fruition. Review plans regularly, especially if you need the support of others. A good idea is to encourage employees to check in with their plans every month. 

Below is a personal professional development plan example to help you develop one for your employees. This template allows each section to be recontextualised for other professions. The example worker used here is a member of the sales team.

• After interviewing the sales professional, you find that this employee is interested in a leadership position within the marketing career path. 

• In a self-assessment, you find that the employee has good communication skills and can work well as a part of a team.

• The employee’s interest stems from previous marketing experience.

• However, the employee’s marketing knowledge is somewhat outdated, and they have trouble thinking outside the box.

• They also have very little experience in a supervisory role. 

• There’s an experienced project lead in the marketing department who’s open to a mentorship role. 

• A third-party organisation is offering on-site creativity workshops for all businesses within the area. 

• Over the next month: Shadow the project lead and ask questions about their role within the company.

• Over the next three months: Attend the creativity workshops offered by the outside organisation.

• Over the next year: Ask for more responsibility to demonstrate capability.

• Within the next three years: Apply for a managerial position within the company’s marketing department.

A professional development plan is a guide to help employees reach their career goals, often made collaboratively with their manager.

Writing a professional development plan tends to boil down to the following steps:

• Learning and understanding an employee’s long-term career goals

• Identifying the strengths that will help them achieve those goals

• Finding opportunities to fill the skill gaps that will keep them from their goal

• Creating a timeline to guide their development

• Goal: Earn a promotion within the marketing department.

• Strengths and Weaknesses: You develop good communication skills but lack familiarity with social media communication. 

• Opportunities: There’s a social media marketing webinar being held for the next two weeks.

• Action Plan: Within the next two weeks, attend a social media marketing webinar to improve your skills with social media channels.

HR may understand the importance of professional development plans for employees to reach their career goals and objectives, but many skip or neglect them.

Planning and crafting professional development plans take time. It’s an exercise in thought and digging deep to discover what you really want. Yet the benefits are substantial – especially when supported by modern HR software that simplifies goal tracking and alignment.

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