How To Create Effective Development Plans For Employees

Changing technology, shifting roles, and employees increasingly seeking growth opportunities are good reasons for you to be thinking about development plans for employees. 

But the best reason is no surprise; retention. This is where that oft cited statistic from LinkedIn's Workplace Learning Report comes out. A startling 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development.

Employee development plans serve as structured blueprints to guide employees in acquiring new skills, advancing in their roles, and achieving both individual and organizational goals. This guide provides an in-depth look at development plans, their benefits, and actionable steps to create them effectively.

What is a Development Plan for Employees?

An employee development plan is a structured, goal-oriented roadmap that helps employees improve their skills, grow professionally, and achieve their career aspirations. They are often managed through the use of a performance management tool that continuously engages employees about their progress.

These plans also align individual growth with the broader objectives of the organization, creating a win-win situation for both employees and employers.

Benefits of development plans

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1. For Employees

• Clear path for personal and professional growth and development. 
• Plan for skill improvement and career advancement.
• Improved sense of purpose and satisfaction. Example: A customer service representative looking to advance might work on public speaking skills to prepare for a transition into a training role.

2. For Organizations

• Improved productivity
• Better retention rates
• Enhanced employee loyalty. Example: A retail organization may use development plans to train promising employees for store manager roles, ensuring a steady pipeline of qualified leaders.

4 Steps To Create Development Plans For Employees

1. Assess employee strengths and weaknesses

The first step is identifying the employee’s current skills, strengths, and areas for improvement. Use tools like skills gap analyses, self-assessments, and manager feedback to determine where growth is needed.

We’re currently in a time where many people feel as though soft skills are the new hard skills and the younger generation is lacking those soft skills. But this can become, as you might expect, an oversimplification of what’s going on and one that makes it harder to establish short-term pathways to growth. That’s because soft skills take longer and are more challenging to develop. 

“Investing in soft skills is a long-term endeavor and doesn’t always yield results,” Pavel Shynkarenko, Founder and CEO of Mellow, a contractor management software company, said. “Technical skills are easier to develop—they come with clear instructions and algorithms.”

With Shynkarenko’s philosophy in mind, your strength and weakness assessment needs to look carefully at the employee’s entire skill profile and look to develop it in relation to the person’s goals and the organization’s talent ecosystem.

In other words, your development plan for employees isn’t just a list of skills. It’s a map to where their career can go within your organization and identifying strengths and weaknesses is a way to help them understand which developmental levers they need to pull to push themselves down that path. 

2. Setting goals

You need a framework for goals. There are a variety of performance goal examples you can choose a format from, be it SMART goals, OKRs, FAST, or another method of identifying and setting goals.

Without a cohesive framework, it’s difficult to ensure clarity and focus on employee goals.

Author's Tip

A goal without a method to measure progress or clearly defined benchmarks for success is just an idea that’s never going to come to fruition. While a deadline might not be the key determining factor for success in an employee’s development plan, you should include one to give both a sense of urgency and a natural check-in point. It’s easy for people to be distracted by things that might seem more critical on a day-to-day basis, but their growth is a key factor in success over the long term.

3. Identifying development opportunities

Once goals are set, identify opportunities that align with the employee’s development needs. Common options include:

• Training Programs: Workshops, webinars, and certification courses.
• Mentoring: Pairing employees with experienced professionals.
• Cross-Functional Projects: Assigning tasks in new areas to broaden skills.

“I believe companies should focus on helping employees build career paths,” Shynkarenko said. “This isn’t about forcing people to learn but creating opportunities and support systems for development. Mentorship programs, buddy systems, and assistance with certifications are excellent examples. Employees need clarity about their growth potential—what steps they need to take to advance from one role to another.”

The lack of a clear path has a real impact on how people perceive their work. Research shows that about 3 out of 4 workers feel at some point that they lack development opportunities and it prevents them from fulfilling their potential.

According to Heather Doshay, Head of Talent at SignalFire, there are three things you can do to prevent this. 

• Adopt the 70-20-10 model

Seventy percent of learning should be experiential, such as stretch assignments or on-the-job problem-solving that supports business goals. Twenty percent should come from peer-based methods, like mentorship, job shadowing, or 360-degree feedback. 

The final 10% should focus on traditional classroom learning, including internal training and company-sponsored attendance at external conferences and certification programs.

• View career progression as a transparent system that extends beyond promotions

Developing career pathways in organizations with 50 to 100 employees can provide a strategic advantage, helping employees understand available job opportunities and aligning compensation structures accordingly.

• Train managers to engage in meaningful career development conversations

This allows for a broader view of growth beyond promotions. By recognizing employees' individual goals, organizations can create intentional career paths that encourage longer tenure.

4. Tracking and measuring progress

A good employee development plan will have clear milestones and established regular check-ins to review progress. Using KPIs and feedback loops ensures development stays on track.

But you knew that, right? So where does this usually go wrong? 

“Companies over-focus on vanity metrics like completion rates and satisfaction scores because meaningful outcomes like increased skills and employee advancement are lagging indicators and harder to turn into an easy KPI,” Doshay said.  

She believes companies should consider pre and post-self-assessments from learners on their perception of gains, and while lagging, monitor correlation between participation in these programs and outcomes in performance reviews, promotion rates, and retention.

A Template For Employee Development Plans

A well-crafted development plan should include specific performance goals, skill gaps, opportunities for growth, and measurable outcomes. Here’s a sample template:

This template ensures clarity and accountability for employees and managers alike.

A more formal version of this might look like this. 

Tools And Resources For Creating Employee Development Plans

1. 1. Deel — Best for continuous performance feedback via 1:1 meetings
2. 2. Topicflow — Best at simplifying continuous performance reviews
3. 3. Mitratech Trakstar — Best for collecting multi-rater feedback via survey
4. 4. Performance Pro — Best for evaluating individual competencies
5. 5. Workleap — Best for flexible review cycles
6. 6. PerformYard — Best for dedicated customer support to design your ideal performance review cycle
7. 7. Primalogik — Best for advanced benchmarking and performance comparison tools
8. 8. ClearCompany — Best for automatically scheduling performance review cycles
9. 9. Leapsome — Best performance management software for integrated goal management
10. 10. Workable HR — Best for multi-level performance feedback