7 Inspiring Individual Development Plan Examples (+ Templates)

Whether you’re a startup of 50 or an enterprise of 2000, your people are at the forefront of your organization. And if there’s one thing that guarantees a successful business, it’s investing in your employees’ career growth.

Picture it: Your employees are thriving, engaged, and ready to conquer new challenges.

But how do you get there? How do you create employee development plans that work?

We’re giving you 12 inspiring examples of employee development plans. For all these employee development plans, we go through what they do well and how to improve them.

See also: 7 Individual Development Plan Examples for Leadership: Nurture Your Future Leaders

Basic employee development plan

Creating a basic wireframe of your employee development plans is a good way to kickstart this program. Here is a sample template taken from the career website Indeed.

While it’s basic and not specialized for a role or even an industry, this sample development plan guides you to think in the right direction.

The biggest advantage of this template is that it’s a blank slate and gives you the freedom to customize it (via Microsoft Word or Google Docs).

At the same time, it comes with a drawback. You need to closely follow each employee’s progress to be familiar with their strengths, weaknesses, and desires for their future careers.

To make it even better:

• Start with listing the strengths, needs, and professional goals of each employee. This creates an opportunity for you to spend 1:1 time interviewing your employees, and build a development plan that aligns with their expectations
• Next, create an actionable list of steps they need to take to grow in their current roles. This is a great practice to gain foresight into how your company and each department will scale in the months and years to come

Employee development plan for company growth

Similar to the previous example, here’s another template – one that can be used across different industries and roles.

This is a great example of a career development plan best suitable for a junior accountant role. One of the key highlights of this plan is that it has a section for estimated costs.

There are two main benefits of this template: ‍

• First of all, it gives you an overview on how much budget needs to be allocated per employee. This means that your employees will know from the start that you’re willing to invest in them - they can see cold, hard numbers rather than promises you make
• At the very end, there’s a section for manager notes. As hard as we might try, we often cannot categorize and label all our employees. This section gives you some room to leave additional notes for individual employees

To make it even better, create a more comprehensive follow-up process, to ensure that the employee stays on track, offer feedback, and provide additional support if they ever get stuck.

Career development plan example with comments

Here is another great example of an employee development, complete with manager notes.

This employee development plan spans over two years and has comments from the manager related to the assessment of their employees’ skills as well as specific plans for the future.

In this plan, you can see the manager taking care of external training in the form of courses and degrees, as well as internal training through one-on-one mentorship

One thing that sets this template apart compared to the previous ones is that it has accountability for both – the employee and the manager.

While the manager is in charge of designing the development plan and choosing the right activities, the employees are given the responsibility to create their own timeline to complete the assigned tasks.

This is a great way to present the potential of career development to your employees. Through this, they can see opportunities to develop their role. At the same time, they can realize that the success of this plan largely depends on their own willingness and hard work. This is strengthened by the fact that this is a long-term, two-year development plan and not a short-term initiative.

To make this development plan example even better, use the SMART goals framework. With specific, measurable sub-tasks and a set time frame, it is easy to measure one's professional development.

Skill-based development plan

The examples we shared above, all focus on the bigger picture: the soft and technical skills and the necessary training to develop an employee’s career. However, you don’t have to go into such a level of detail if you plan to develop skills by yourself.

Here is an example of such an employee development plan:

The plan is quite simple: managers list their employees’ skills and grade them on a scale from 0-10. Then, there is a "Desired State" explaining what the manager expects from the employee to advance in their careers and within the company.

The "Gap" section defined what employees need to advance in their careers. The "Initiatives" section offers the specific actions that they need to take to achieve their goals.

To make this example more impactful:

• Ensure that your skill-focused development plan is not exclusively based on the managers’ assessment of employee skills (skills gap analysis)
• To achieve this, add employees’ self-assessments and even peer reviews to get more accurate results, and to prepare an effective skill-based development plan

Side-by-side employee development plan example

Here is another example of a detailed individual development plan:

There are three elements that that set this plan apart:

• There are two sections: one for the employee and another for the manager, adding an organizational context to the employee perspective
• There is a clear alignment between the individual career goal and the organizational needs and goals
• There are dedicated sections for progress reporting and feedback sessions

Having these two sections in one place gives a clear overview of the two different perspectives: individual and organizational. For example, you understand whether employee self-assessment is objective or not.

Overall, this is a perfect example if you’re looking for a template that makes the employee and their manager equally responsible for planning and execution.

Professional development plan example

Let's analyze a new professional development plan example:

Professional development plan for [Employee name]
Include as many learning needs as required to achieve your agreed-upon objectives for the upcoming year.

What’s interesting here is that the employee is the one who is responsible for doing all the "development work:"

• They have to search for a peer member to shadow, rather than receiving a specific suggestion from their leader
• They have to search for their own learning resources, rather than receiving access to a library of learning materials

To make this even better, make development planning a more collaborative task. The team leader can act as a coach and facilitator, for example by assigning tasks to mentors, providing access to training materials etc.

Individual employee development plan example

Although single on first sight, the individual development plan example from Adobe masters strategic alignment.

What part of your job do you find most satisfying?

What are your short and long-term career goals?
This includes experiences you would like, not just promotions (e.g. running an event, speaking at a conference, or managing a team)

What type of assignments, experiences, coaching, and/or learning do you need to meet your goals?

Action plan: Complete during or after development discussion with manager

Next steps

Best practices indicate that you should review development plans every 3-6 months as part of a check-in.

Next development plan review date: [Date]

The first part of this plan example focuses on employee self-reflection on:

• the most satisfying part of the job;
• key skills or strengths;
• skills or strengths to further develop.

By identifying their unique strengths and skills, employees can focus on areas where they excel and build on their strengths, which can lead to increased engagement, job satisfaction, and productivity.

The plan then differentiates short and long-term goals. This approach can help the employee prioritize their development efforts and stay on track toward their goals.

We really like that each development opportunity links to concrete action items. This will ensure that the employee has a clear roadmap to follow and understands how their development activities contribute to their professional growth. And to go one step forward, these also clearly link to business impact.

Strategic alignment between employee and company objectives mean that the employee's development efforts will also contribute to the organization's strategic priorities and goals.

Bonus: Employee development strategy

This employee development strategy example showcases the 70-20-10 model of learning:

• 10% formal training
• 20% Social learning though: manager support, coaching, comparing experiences with peer
• 70% on the job learning, feedback, stretch-assignments

Bonus: Performance improvement plan template

Use performance improvement plans for employees whose performance has been declining. You can see PIPs as roadmaps that show employees how to get to their destination of increased performance.

Plan for your workers’ development with Deel Engage

When managing employee development for a significant number of people, the process can quickly become unmanageable:

• Individual development plans are dispersed across various formats, whether in Excel, PDFs, or PowerPoint presentations
• There is no centralized method for tracking progress
• A lack of centralized competency models for each role can lead to confusion and goal misalignment
• Daily work pressures can cause your people to overlook important development activities

With Deel Engage, you can manage your talent development strategy in one centralized location and automate the process. Transform your static spreadsheets into dynamic tools by:

• Engaging all participants with clear guidance and motivational messages
• Assigning learning journeys from the extensive external learning library
• Ensuring the relevance of development plans by linking them to career frameworks and feedback systems

Additionally, Deel HR, our truly global HRIS solution, is always included for free

Book a demo to see how our solutions will help you develop, motivate, and retain your best performers.