Your Competitive Advantage 6. Career Development For Your Business And Your Employees
Creating an Employee Development Plan helps your workers envisage a future in your business. It elevates your employee engagement, improves your employee retention, and attracts top talent all of which develop your productivity and bolster your business resilience giving you the competitive advantage to produce goods or services better or more cheaply than your rivals.
This enables you to generate more sales or superior margins. 74% of employees believe they are not reaching their full potential due to a lack of development opportunities in the workplace and this is a number 1 reason employees leave a business.
The most important thing to remember when developing an Employee Development Plan is to capture the interest of your employees otherwise, they won’t engage. The opportunities should be aimed at developing the employee in their existing role and meeting their individual professional growth goals.
Development opportunities are the most highly prized benefit keeping employees in roles for ‘the long term’ and they can include internal and external initiatives. Here are a few easy steps to get you started:
1. Your plan should consider the future vision and goals of the business as well as the employee and it may also include internal promotion opportunities.
2. Development plans are the responsibility of the business and the employee. They should be agreed upon and committed to jointly with regular reviews scheduled to keep them on track.
3. Development opportunities should be paired with measurable outcomes.
4. Opportunities can be internally and externally available. Inter-departmental collaborations can offer internal opportunities and the financial and time investment of external opportunities can be carried by the employer or the employer and employee jointly.
5. Both hard and soft skills can form part of a development plan.
Keeping informed on industry trends and practices will help you provide learning and development opportunities that will add more value to the role of an employee and greater benefits to the business.
The success of all opportunities is measured by the achievement of the agreed outcomes, employee engagement surveys, increased productivity, and improved employee retention.