Intentional professional development is one of the most effective investments organizations can make in their own success.

Yet it’s something we frequently find lacking. Leaders know their employees need it, and there are so many other things on their plates. It gets pushed to the side, waiting for that elusive window of time when they’ll be able to focus on it, or afford it.

The problem is that the window rarely comes. And in the interim, employees begin to stagnate and become disillusioned. Turnover increases. Morale dwindles. Innovation slows down. Less productivity and resulting higher costs.

Sometimes it can be hard to put your finger on where things went wrong.

Not investing in professional development — with an intentional plan — is often a key culprit.

What do you need to know before you design a professional development plan?

If you decide to jump into creating a plan without doing some initial groundwork, your professional development will end up being an aimless mish-mash of classes or online training.

We see it all the time: a leader encourages their staff to take a course or get a certificate, but they’ve never had a conversation about the direction any employee is going. None of their professional development is tethered to a particular goal or direction.

Position description

Every single employee should have an accurate position description that defines their role’s accountabilities and the metrics of success.

People need to know what they’re responsible for and how they’re being evaluated before they can identify where they need to grow.

It’s also affirming for every member of the team to know how they contribute to the company’s success.

Organizational career path

What are the options for someone to grow within your organization?

Without a mapped-out path, you can’t see how to develop someone. Maybe there are positions an employee could advance to now. Maybe new positions will develop as the organization grows. Of course, you’ll need to have a plan for your organizational growth as well.

Remember: not everyone is going to advance through a management role.

For instance, you may have a Tier 1 support employee. Their professional development plan may be set up to help them move to Tier 2 and then Tier 3 support. Perhaps they ultimately grow into roles like sales, product management or quality assurance.

Employee’s personal interest

You need to find out what your employee is interested in so you can make sure their growth is aligned with the organization. What is their personal vision?

This can be a difficult discussion. I often start by asking a person where they want to be in three or five years. They may say they want your job. They may say they want to do something totally different, that this is just a foot in the door. You may not hear what you want to hear or even get an honest answer.

Even so, the conversation is critical. Without it, you don’t know what you’re investing in. You may find out that an employee wants to remain an individual contributor. They’re not interested in a management role. So the management training you were going to recommend no longer makes sense.

Employee’s strengths and gaps

You know where this person could grow, where they want to grow. Now it’s time to identify their strengths so you can build on them and identify their gaps.

Gaps can be either places they’re currently falling short or the space between where they are and where they want to grow.

These types of assessments should be a regular part of your performance management process. We use BestWork DATA, which allows us to get a full picture of strengths and gaps. That way, we can give meaningful feedback and create data-based plans for professional development.

See more: These are the Four Things You Need to Develop Your Leadership Team

The three pillars of a professional development plan

Once we have information about the role, the potential development paths, and the employee’s desires and strengths, we put together the plan.

Perhaps you have an entry-level marketing employee that wants to get really good at SEO. You’re outsourcing SEO at the moment, but you’d like to create an internal position soon. You tell the employee you’ll help them prepare to take that role in a year.

What do they need between now and then to fill that gap?

An SEO training course
A mentor in the SEO field
Someone to coach them through the process of learning

Training

A training program will help your employee fill the skills gap that lies between where they are now and where they’d like to be in the future.

The best option is a curriculum-based program, offered with a particular objective, a certified trainer, and a proven curriculum. You know it will be a worthwhile investment.

You may offer a mix of individual and group training. If you have one person who’s learning SEO, you’ll set them up with a course. On the other hand, if you have a whole group of employees on the management track, you might offer a course to all of them on how to do effective interviews or how to handle difficult customers.

If you don’t have the time or budget for formal education courses, classes on LinkedIn Learning or one of the other curriculum marketplaces provide good value.

As you’re thinking about training, remember that there’s a difference between courses you may need for your organization and professional development training.

For instance, you may implement a new CRM system and bring in a representative from the company to train everyone on it. Unless someone in the training wants to be a sales manager, that’s not professional development. That’s simply something you need everyone in your organization to learn how to do.

Mentoring

Just like leaders need mentors to help achieve their full leadership potential, your employees need mentors to help them achieve success in their field.

In a large organization, you may have people inside the organization that can serve as mentors. In fact, some of your employees already have mentors they’ve sought out themselves. If your organization is smaller, you may need to help find a mentor for your employee outside the organization.

A mentor should be someone in their field — or the field they want to grow into — that will offer advice and guidance as well as be someone the employee can feel safe and vulnerable with. Someone who isn’t their manager. If they’re feeling stuck or struggling with some element of their progress, your employee may not want to talk to you about it.

They can engage in honest troubleshooting and problem solving with their mentor.

See more: What to Look for in a Business Mentor and the Mentoring Relationship

Coaching

Helping your employee find a mentor doesn’t mean you’ve removed yourself from the picture. As their manager, you should always be coaching your employees — not just giving them orders.

That means you’re helping empower them to reach their potential. Effective coaching involves a lot of listening, guiding, providing feedback, and encouraging rather than instructing.

Providing feedback, often called performance management, is a key element of your coaching job.

Without consistent feedback, employees often don’t know how they’re performing until it’s too late. They miss opportunities to correct problem issues and you risk that they’re development plans fall out of alignment. It’s best to provide very regular — continuous — feedback rather than a one annual or two semi-annual reviews.

Systems like 15Five provide structure and can help you keep up with continuous feedback.

Just as you might seek out a business and leadership coach to offer that outside-in and unemotional perspective, you must provide that to your employee — along with insight, accountability, and support. You won’t do the work for them. You’ll take them through a process of discovery and skill development, asking questions and offering reflections that lead them to their desired goals.

Conferences and workshops

I don’t think of conferences and workshops as one of the three main pillars of a professional development plan, but they do have value.

When an employee attends a seminar or a conference, they’re surrounded by like-minded people. In addition to the training that they may get, they have the opportunity to build a network, which is definitely part of their professional development.

The more people they know and the better connected they are, the more growth opportunities they’ll find. They may be able to use those connections to support your organization as well.

How to start creating professional development plans

All of this can sound overwhelming, especially if you find yourself with, say, 60 employees and no professional development plans to speak of. You waited this long, and now it hurts. Imagine how much it’s going to hurt if you wait even longer.

It’s not as hard as it seems.

For instance, you may have 60 people but only 25 different roles.

Create a project plan like you would for any other task. Have a manager get together with one of their team members to jointly create a job description, which takes, say, an hour per position. You’re done 35 hours later. Spread it out over six to eight weeks. How much time has it really taken? The process probably helped you identify career paths as well.

Now, you need to talk with your employees about their goals. Hopefully you’ve already had regular meetings with employees to discuss their progress and offer feedback. If not, now’s a great time to start.

You can bring someone in to do assessments with your team — like the BestWork DATA assessments we do — or work on identifying strengths and gaps internally. Self-assessment can be challenging, so using a tool is a helpful way to step back and get a more objective view.

Once you have all that information, you can work with your employees and other leaders in your organization to begin creating professional development plans. They won’t be static documents. A plan changes as an employee grows.

It can be scary to start this process because you’ve never done it before. There’s a backlog. It distracts you from the day-to-day tasks. Except that as a CEO, working on your business (not in your business) is your day-to-day task.

Final thoughts

I’m not pretending this isn’t a big lift, especially if you’re starting from zero.

Not doing it will put you in a worse position, though.

Businesses that don’t invest in professional development end up suffering from poor employee retention. People feel like they don’t have opportunities or like they’re going in circles. They believe the leadership doesn’t care about them or their growth.

Businesses that don’t invest in professional development have less nimble workforces that work in silos and are slower to innovate. Their cultures evolve in ways they didn’t intend or anticipate because of rapid turnover and external hiring.

The truth is, the cost of not investing in professional development is much greater than the cost of doing it.

We help leaders in all parts of the process — creating job descriptions, assessing their teams, learning to coach employees, and developing plans. Learn how we can help you.