The Individual Development Plan (IDP) is a tool that is usually linked to Performance Assessment, but not necessarily. It helps to reconcile individual career goals with the desires of organizations, aligning expectations and allowing strategic and focused steps to be taken, accelerating professional development.
It is important to remember that every process of improvement, growth or upskilling is, first and foremost, a learning process. And learning is dynamic: interests, sources and references, format, and many other aspects change according to the objective, the need, and the moment.
However, the most widely used PDI model disregards this dynamic, proposing a plan that needs to be followed to the letter, without close monitoring, which will only be revisited after six months or a year and which ends up becoming yet another bureaucratic requirement for HR, since in the day-to-day work there is little or no space for people development in the agendas.
The problem lies in the premise of T&D as a set of formal actions, such as meetings, filling out information, assessments, etc., commonly disconnected from daily tasks, which must be done in addition to jamaica email list daily work and which aims at long-term objectives. It is necessary to change the perspective and integrate people development into everything that is done, since it is essential for the performance of the work itself.
Therefore, an innovative IDP can (and should!) combine different learning solutions: corporate university, training platform, e-learning, gamification, learning journeys, community building, among others. See the example of Accenture (click here), which carries out multiple, frequent and short micro-actions of learning and practice, which can generate engagement, confidence and productivity.
Accenture began reinventing its L&D with a Pay-it-forward movement, a kind of “chain of goodness” in the form of a 30-day challenge proposed to all teams. According to the article in the cited link, in free translation: “Instead of focusing on HR regulations, policies and processes, we focus on employees and their experience.”
To make it happen, they used just one blog and reached 52 countries with 8,650 people from all levels of the organization. With the success of this first movement came spin-offs, a learning platform, gamification, training, coaching and social media to continue their development plan.
To inspire your company to follow this example, we have listed here some issues that can be reviewed to leverage your organization's PDI, with benchmarking suggestions.
1 – What if it wasn’t a plan?
A much more attractive and feasible proposal is to undertake a learning journey guided by a challenge question, in which the person has some conditions guaranteed for the autonomy of their learning and, at the end of a cycle, makes a delivery that compiles their discoveries and evolution. After all, the perception of evolution on the part of the learner and their leader is worth more than any plan.
2 – What if it wasn’t just individual?
Another practice that can facilitate people's development is to invite them to form partnerships in pairs or small groups. Mutual support and closeness, in addition to identification, increase engagement and commitment.
How people come together depends on the company culture. This is a great opportunity to innovate. People can come together because of similar interests, shared skills, common references or sources they want to research, such as reading a book, for example, or because of the diversity of their learning styles or personalities, to create a wealth of possibilities.
3 – What if leadership positioned itself as a facilitator of the journey?
Within this vision of Development as a continuous path and not as a plan or a result in itself, management needs to abandon its supervisory, controlling stance and focus on bureaucratic actions, to:
Facilitate and sustain the necessary conditions for the route to occur in short cycles, in practice;
Create spaces for exchange between different areas of the company;
Promote learning how to learn (which is the purpose of a learning journey), including in the way you will “sell” the idea to your team;
Follow the journeys, sharing your experience as an apprentice, offering recognition of learning, inspiration and example.
Given all these practices and ideas, we can see that an innovative PDI constitutes a very important differentiator for the empowerment of people, directly impacting business results.