What are the best practices for creating and updating individual development plans (IDPs)?

Its primary purpose is to help employees reach short and long-term career goals, as well as improve current job performance. An IDP is not a performance evaluation tool or a one-time activity. IDP is a process you direct, in partnership with your manager, to enhance your professional growth by: Setting goals for professional development. Identifying ways to learn or improve in important competencies you will need now or in the future to achieve these goals.

In my experience, its good to help employees think about their personal development and skills development not just in courses, but also to explore finding mentoring, developing peer to peer support groups, and cross sector working. It is also time to look beyond traditional CPD and explore the ways in which YouTube, online course creators and the great extent of free courses and MOOCS that Universities like Harvard and MIT offer to the workforce, for little to no cost. Training budgets are less of an issue, and your staff will benefit greatly from developing global networks.

It's also good to explore the two way relationship, for example how does the employee feel about the organisation's brand, strategy and direction? It's key, so many learnings on the ground translate to better strategy development in the future. It's also great to listen to employees who engage with stakeholders and gather a range of external feedback about the business' direction.

I think, on top of this, building goals back from ambitious goal setting, rather then forward from the present day is really helpful. This is because when you explore with people how to plan forward, they do it with current resources, if you plan from your goals backwards, you find out what new team members or resources will be needed to make the goal happen.

Prioritization is essential in setting IDP goals. Make sure you do not have too many goals in an IDP. Having too many IDP goals waters each IDP goal down and competes for the employee’s time working on other performance goals. Limit IDPs to the few most important and urgent skills and behaviors employees need to make improvement in. When they check off one box enough, consider dropping it down or off future IDPs to make room for another behavior or skill that has emerged as more important. Development is a moving target so IDPs should be living documents and change over time.

When we take a step forward on a new path, test the outcome, and then re-evaluate, we open ourselves up to accelerated growth towards our goals. This is where informal and experiential learning comes into play. At Disruption Advisors, we offer the S Curve Insight Tool which not only shows where someone is in their journey of growth but also helps identify opportunities for growth. Using this tool or others like it, individuals can guide their conversations with their manager, coach, or mentor to determine where they want to grow and what tool will be the best fit to help them reach their goals.

Building in quarterly reflection points is an ideal time to take stock, but also to change direction if the strategy is not working. Learn from failures and build out from these, but don't linger on them, the chances are your employees have already beaten themselves up enough on anything that hasn't worked.

A great way to do this is to build the plan into an Asana or a project tracker, so employees can check back and update progress regularly.