As market demands evolve, the gap between the skills you need and the skills you already have in your workforce will continue to grow. The solution? Expand your current workforce’s capabilities to meet these changing needs by incorporating employee growth plans into your talent strategy.
A well-thought-out employee growth plan provides your employees with opportunities and clear direction on how to acquire new skills for their current job while expanding their talents for new roles in your company. And with a more expanded skill set, they have more tools to help your business forge ahead. It’s a win-win for you and your staff.
Here are eight steps to create your employee growth plan, from roll-out to reporting.
1.Think about the business goals
To start, think about where your company is right now, where it wants to be, what your major goals are, and where opportunities and challenges lie. How do you need to shape and strengthen your workforce to achieve your objective? Consider your long- and short-term business objectives. Do you need one of your salespeople to move into a district manager role? Does someone in accounting need to learn to use and implement new software? Remember that your business is powered by your people and to motivate and inspire your employees, you need to invest a considerable amount of time engaging and supporting your team members.
Establish specific goals for the business and know them well before you meet with team members to go over the employee growth plans. Once you identify your business objectives you can identify the necessary skills, knowledge, and competencies that support those goals.
2.Onboarding
This is a very important step in developing your employee growth plan! You have to make sure that every new employee is fully prepared for the demands of their role by providing them with all of the tools they need for success.
Onboarding is a complex process when working with multiple new hires, especially if they’re spread across multiple departments. With Hivelaya you can communicate general company information to them and deliver specialized training. Using Hivelaya LMS for onboarding allows you to fulfill both purposes in one virtual setting.
3. Start with a skills gap analysis
Another step in developing an employee growth plan is by identifying areas where employees need to be upskilled. You can identify which employees require training first and the skills that are missing (or underdeveloped) by doing a skill baseline assessment.
This training needs analysis puts your organizational goals at the center of anything that comes next. By identifying what you’re already doing well (and what needs work), all training efforts can be streamlined for maximum benefit.
Hivelaya Baseline Skill Assessment helps you to map the learning need of the organization as a whole, as well as each team member to curate a customized learning path. Based on the assessment, Hivelaya recommends blended packages (self-paced, virtual, or in-person) that meet the organization’s vision and suit its need and budget.
4.Align with the employee and company goals
Creating an employee growth plan depends on each individual’s specific motivations for their career paths. You should encourage and expect your employees to take responsibility for their career development in terms of research tools, resources, or training that they’d like to explore. Your role as a manager is to provide guidance, resources, feedback, and support.
Once you have identified areas of need and employees interested in growth, make sure your goals for both are connected. Consider not only your employees' career goals in general but also those specific to your company to strengthen career succession plans.
Hivelaya Baseline Skill Assessment also provides you with a report that will help to understand your team's strength and a dedicated team of experts from Hivelaya can guide your organization to choose the right courses for the team that aligns with your company goals
If growth programs focus on the organization’s goals over the employee goals, then the content will be less relevant and can cause workers to disengage. However, if those plans prioritize employee development over the organization’s goals, then what’s being created is a career development plan, not an employee growth plan.
Ultimately, to maximize engagement and profitability, an employee growth plan should strive to satisfy the agendas of each party.
5.Create a Clear Action Plan
This employee growth plan serves as a blueprint for employees to feel valued, recognized, and appreciated by their employers. If you can meet employee needs, you are supporting the growth of strong and capable individuals who are adding significant value to the team and the organization as a whole. Needs must be communicated and actioned on.
With clear goals and a learning format in place, develop an action plan to help employees achieve their learning goals.
Managers and employees can collaborate to identify specific projects and tasks they can complete to apply their knowledge. Exercising new skills and abilities as they’re learned improves outcomes. Managers play an important role in emphasizing the connection between the employee’s learning goals and the business strategy.
6.Consider the skills and training needed
Now that you know what the objectives are, it’s time to figure out how your employee will acquire their new skills.
Creating employee growth plans will make you aware of the needs of your current employees and if they have an interest in acquiring the needed skills to achieve business goals. Developing an internal candidate to bridge the gap between a current employee's skill set and a skill set needed for the future is simply an intelligent business decision. This time and effort that you were going to invest into recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, and training a new individual can be saved, boosting productivity and retaining valuable talent.
Finally, consider how your employees are going to achieve their goals. Think about which opportunities are available such as coaching, mentoring, cross-training, job shadowing, succession planning, or even group training classes for a common need. Other online resources can be of great value to team members such as videos, podcasts, webinars, articles, or quizzes.
7.Track results and use data to inform your decisions
As employees begin implementing their learning plan, have managers track their progress and check in frequently. Because employee learning goals are aligned with organizational goals, assessing the learning plan’s effectiveness should be part of regular employee performance conversations.
Through Hivelaya learning management system (LMS), managers can assign courses and also continuously monitor and track the engagement of learners and modify learning paths.
Meet regularly with employees to see how it’s going and to get their feedback on what they would like more (or less) of. Identify what obstacles make it hard to follow through, like not enough hours in the workday or interruptions. Identify ways to make their training time available, easier, and more effective. Managers can offer constructive criticism and positive feedback to help employees continue moving forward.
If the learning plan isn’t producing the desired results, you may need to revise it.
8.Ongoing repetition
Make small changes to the employee’s growth plan to see whether they produce better results. Consider changing the learning format, for example, to accommodate a particular employee’s learning style.
You may need to revisit your business plan on a larger scale, too. We can’t afford to just look at strategies and objectives only once a year. Part of embracing and adopting agility is learning to let go of goals that no longer serve the business and reprioritize objectives according to changing circumstances.
Sometimes you have to stop doing certain things so you can focus on what matters most. However, this can have a ripple effect on employee growth plans. Put contingency plans into place to help employees become more agile in their learning.
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