how to write a career development plan

Ep #217: Get Promoted Faster By Co-Writing Your Career Development Plan

Has your boss ever created a career development plan for you…and nothing really happened? Months or even years go by and you still don’t have the promotion or pay you want. Does this mean your boss doesn’t care about you? Nope. It just means that 1. It’s YOUR job to make your promotion happen, and 2. Relying on your boss to do all the work to get you promoted is usually a career dead end. So in this episode of Women Changing Leadership with Stacy Mayer, I’m going to show you how to create a super effective career development plan with your boss and I’m going to give you my step-by-step process for turning that plan into reality so you can fast track your next promotion.

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What to put into a career development plan to really engage employees, motivate them and keep them doing the best job they can. Learn about 6 actions to drive retention, motivation, and performance. 

 Creating a career development plan takes some thought and putting the career plan into action takes effort. Career planning is good for you, the team and the individual.

 Career development proactively helps the employee to learn new skills and gain new experience which helps them deliver more for the company in which they work. Retaining staff makes all the investments you have made in the staff even more worthwhile, and you get the benefits of their increased skills for longer.

 Writing an effective career plan requires at least 6 actions. The first is helping the team member decide on where they want to take their career. i.e. What is their professional goal. Without a goal, it is hard to work out where their career is heading and therefore how to help them. 

 Once they have chosen a goal, the next step is working out all the steps between where they are now and where they want to get to. Create a career map to capture all the career development roles available on the route.

 I recommend choosing to focus on the next two role along your prepared career route so that you have a career development plan covering the next 5 years. 

Fourth, Get the team member to spend time researching the skills, experience and qualifications needed for the next two roles. I suggest several effective ways of doing this.

 Then look at the gap between where they are now and the skills etc they need to progress to the next role for their career development. Look at the specific gaps and the scale of those gaps. 

 Finally, you are in a position to assign projects, tasks, activities i.e. the actions that will help the employee develop their career towards their career goals. I take you briefly through 11 different ways of helping your employee build their skills and experience.

 You will know what to put in a career development plan, have plenty of tips on how to put it into practice and hopefully more committed and motivated employees with building skills to help the company be even more successful.