New employee development plan examples in PDF
will boost employee job performance
Free downloadable employee development plan examples and templates in PDF and Excel
If you are an employer or small business up to about 30 employees, now you can offer your employees development plans with these example templates.
They are designed to improve work performance from day one. Free to use, with instructions and how-to screenshots.
Each individual development plan sample comes in PDF, Excel and MS Word format.
You can find out more about how to put together the ultimate employee development plan example here:
Gain massive employee performance with these individual development plan examples in PDF
Now you can improve your employee’s job performance in all areas.
These individual development plan examples bring together the best of aspects of employee development and performance improvement together.
For these innovative employee development tools, I reverse-engineered a performance improvement plan, and built it into a quarterly employee development plan. The result is the most advanced yet simple development plan available.
You can download your individual development plan templates.
Your employees are desperate to develop their job skills
Your employees are clamoring for a skills development plan.
70% of employees surveyed on LinkedIn said they want to develop work related skills, so they can perform at higher levels in their job. They want their job experience to result in being more valuable in the marketplace.
This is an especially acute need, because of an 8.5% decline in college enrollment since 2012.
An employee development plan helps solve this. It increases job skills, which increases productivity and job satisfaction. Productive employees are more profitable, engaged and loyal to the company.
The big problem is most EDP’s are focused on goals instead of job skills. These templates solve that problem.
About the Author and Course Creator
Larry LaFata is a talent development specialist and founder of The Modern Leadership Center.
He has a unique ability to synthesize research and innovation into organized, usable concepts. This provides clients with streamlined leadership skills training and employee development solutions they can implement quickly.
After 30 years experience working with Fortune 500 companies, Larry turned to his passion: leadership development and talent development. The core of his course creation approach is customized self-assessment and skills development templates. No psychometric tests or psychology assessments are ever used.
Larry is the author of Leadership Development Programs, Employee Development Plan with skill templates, Career Change Planning Programs and an Employee Rewards Program.
Larry’s mission is to better humanity through innovative talent development strategies. His continuing efforts in talent development keeps him at the forefront of thought leadership in the industry.
Three reasons most employee development plans go wrong
Most employee development plans make the mistake of focusing on goals instead of job skills.
- You may have seen the crappy EDP templates online – very hit or miss – because they do not concentrate on job skills
- You might have tried SMART goals, only to find they are complex and focus your employee on future goals instead of skills development
- And forget those expensive monthly EDP software programs. They are pricey overkill for most employers under 50 employees. Typical employee development software requires time consuming data entry, dedicated labor, and end up comparing employees instead of developing their job skills
That changes now with these free employee development plan templates and examples in excel and pdf.
The innovation of these individual employee development plan templates
The innovation of these edp templates is that they combine the best of both worlds:
- The EDP is modeled on a career development plan but focused on quarterly performance improvement
- This allows you to focus on exactly where employee needs skills development
That makes it much more manageable for the employer and more effective for the employee.
The secret to your employee’s performance improvement
The secret to increasing employee job performance is to focus on work-related proficiencies, on a quarterly cycle. This employee development plan integrates both.
The advantages to this are huge:
- By focusing on job related skills, you can zero in on exactly where employee needs improvement
- A quarterly development cycle provides employees with a continuous feedback loop, so they always know where they stand. This reduces their stress and anxiety
- By working on different proficiencies each quarter, after a few quarters they will be fully knowledgeable about the total scope of their job
- This makes your employee performance review so much easier to manage and much more satisfying for employee
It’s all included in these innovative employee development plan templates examples.
Here they are: Downloadable employee development plan examples in PDF, Excel and Word
These sample employee development plans help you focus on key areas of development for employees.
Now you can help employees reach performance goals by focusing on job skills development.
How to deploy these Free employee development plan examples and templates
You can use these Free employee development plan templates to model and deploy to your employees right away.
Templates are customizable. The PDF has fillable fields and the Excel template can be fully modified to suit your organization’s needs.
No need to struggle for ways to improve work performance with this versatile employee development plan template
The beauty of this template is in its versatility for multiple uses.
This individual development plan template can be modified to use as:
- Quarterly Employee Review Template
- Employee coaching template
- Employee training and development template
- Performance improvement plan template
- Job performance evaluation
- Leadership development plan template
- Professional development plan template
- Employee rewards program for employee recognition – included
- Performance review template
This EDP template works well for up to about 25 developable employees.
Get the ultimate employee development program
These free EDP Template Examples in PDF and Excel are part of a complete Employee Development Program, called Employee Development Plan Template Kit.
Its an individual development plan with a focus on performance improvement.
These innovative EDP templates along with Quarterly Review template helps you boost employee job performance from day one.
The EDP program includes:
- Employee Development Plan Template with instructions
- Completed Individual Development Plan Example to follow
- Managers guide to completing the Employee Quarterly Review
- Employee Quarterly Development Goals (EQD)
- Bonus 1: Leadership Development Plan
- Bonus 2: Employee Rewards Program to motivate your team and provide employee recognition
Why wait? If you want the most effective employee development plan available for up to 25 developable employees, you can get it here:
How to build the ultimate employee development plan
Focus on quarterly performance improvement for best results
The innovation here is to integrate the performance improvement plan into the career development plan from the beginning.
The benefits to your business operations are tremendous:
- You develop employee accountability expectations from day one
- Increase employee performance metrics to ninja levels – preventing employee from floundering and requiring PIP intervention later on
- You can zero in on exactly where the employee needs performance improvement
- You can use this template as a leadership development plan and for professional development
- Use the “soft skills” area of this template for coaching an employee with a negative attitude
How do we accomplish all this? By building a lean plan from a bucket of job role proficiencies.
Why your individual development plan template needs to concentrate on job skills
There are several benefits to both the employer and the employee when you refocus your individual development plans on job skills, including:
- Employee works on factors they can control: An EDP focused on job proficiencies increases employee buy-in and engagement, because they are working on factors they can control
- Employee performance metrics: A development plan that is job-role focused makes it easier and faster for managers to measure employee performance metrics each quarter
- Reduce employee overwhelm: Large annual plans that focus on too many objectives are overwhelming. Sadly they have become an exercise in CYA for both employees and managers. It’s better to maintain a tight focus on only job skills and soft skills each quarter, which reduces overwhelm for both
In order for you to be confident in implementing this employee development plan example, this article guides you with step-by-step instructions and screenshots.
You are on your way to setting up an innovative employee development plan that gets massive employee performance improvement results.
It will become the cornerstone of your employee engagement strategies.
I explain all about how to complete these employee development templates in this resource.
Employee development plans that please HR instead of employees
In order to include every possible contingency, and add every possible wish list, many organizations HR departments end up building these huge, sprawling, bloated, unworkable beasts:
- US Dept of Energy individual development plan examples is 33 pages long – imagine how time-consuming that is for both manager and employees?
- Some career development plan examples say there are 17 examples of employee development objectives
- The Chamber of Commerce says there are 6 stages of career development
- Many career planning professionals – even Indeed.com – confuse Career Action Plans with career development plans
From this small sample of the approaches to employee development objectives, you can see a wide disparity about what exactly employee development is. It’s everything to everyone.
To cover for this confusion, many HR teams build a huge scope to the plan, which makes it a burden for everyone.
Is your HR confusing Corporate Development with Employee Development?
This is the one big mistake many organizations make, that I see in the field. They try to mix corporate development goals with individual employee development goals.
Unfortunately, this confuses the key objective of employee career development.
Rather than a lean tool to build ninja employee performance and job skill growth, a “corporate citizen” oriented development plan will fail to build performance because:
- It does not build buy-in from the employee, who is overwhelmed and distracted with the huge scope of the plan, and ends up just filling it out because it’s mandatory
- It asks employees to focus on corporate factors that are outside of their control, such as climate change and social justice initiatives, creating anxiety and confusion
- It does not build buy-in from busy managers or directors, who often have multiple employees to manage – they can’t stand to oversee these bloated development plans – so they also mechanically complete them just to CYA
If you have your employees chasing a corporate ‘wish list’ of development goals that are not urgent, you are wasting everyone’s time and energy. The employee has enough to do to excel at their job; don’t ask them to save the world, too.
Worst of all, you are dissipating their focus to areas they can’t control or improve, such as climate goals or social justice.
Too many goals create employee development confusion
There are just too many goals for an employee to manage if your development plan includes HR goals, social goals and corporate goals. It creates confusion that interferes with employees’ skills development.
It’s like giving each of your employees a Rubik’s cube to solve!
Especially if you mix corporate HR goals, community outreach, and DEI goals along with employee development goals. It doesn’t make sense and is shown to cause overwhelm.
Plus, mixing in all these different objectives increases the complexity of getting a handle on employee performance metrics.
Yet many businesses try to do just that.
In an attempt to maintain consistent, uniform corporate performance standards across the board, many managers and HR often end up throwing everything under the sun into the development plan.
Ultimately and sadly, this ends up giving the same set of development goals to every employee!
This creates growth flatline, mediocrity and does not increase employee growth or effectiveness in their specific job role.
Keep the focus on employee development
As a career development coach, I know the focus needs to be on the employee’s job role, not vast, all-encompassing company goals.
So I designed this individual career development plan with examples in PDF and Excel to focus on two things:
- Employee performance improvement through job skills development
- A fast and easy process for managers to set up and administer
Building a lean and organized employee development plan template by limiting its scope
As an employer or dept manager, you will be relieved to discover these lean and organized employee development plan example templates.
Using a super easy and innovative process, you can quickly build a reusable template in three steps:
- Manager builds a one-time bucket of desired proficiencies from the employee job description; (once these templates are set up, they take less than 15 minutes to revise each quarter)
- Employee and employer sit down (or zoom) to rate and rank development proficiencies together using the simple checklist template
- They agree on development plan action items together for the quarter, and sign off on a quarterly summary they can refer to regularly
This keeps you to a tight, workable scope of professional development that has buy-in from both parties.
PS: For corporate leadership development or long-term career path action plans you need to devise a separate plan.
This way you don’t conflate short-term performance improvement with long-term career path objectives.
Building ninja job performance
To vastly increase employee performance levels, you need to define the daily steps that answer: what is most urgent for the employee to develop this quarter?
In my employee development coach role, I’ve learned that the best employee development plan templates are based on daily action steps.
This helps employees to increase mindfulness by concentrating on the now, over a quarter (in rare cases, monthly).
This concept uses the principle known as Kaizen: focusing on small, simple improvements consistently, to generate ninja performance levels. This is possible for any employee.
Small daily improvement action steps work because the short-term steps automatically add up to accomplish long-term career growth over time. It works like a savings account.
By adhering to only the proficiencies in their job descriptions, the employee masters what is important for success in their role.
The key difference between career action plans and employee development plans
One BIG problem with typical employee development plans is they are confused with Career Action Plans, which have different objectives.
Action plans are intended to cover way more ground and scope and a longer timeline. Treating a development plan like an action plan allows sprawl and mission creep to bloat what should be a simple objective.
And there is disagreement in career development theory on what a development plan is!
Let’s clear these differences up right now:
What is a career action plan
A Career Action Plan is a mid-term to long-term career path management plan
- It starts with a long-term or ultimate career goal of 1 to 3 years out
- It is achieved by working backward through mid-term proficiency goals, short term goals, and daily action steps
What is career pathing
Career Pathing is more of a leadership development plan, 3 to 5+ years out, wider in scope than an action plan, intending to groom employees to senior management
- It may include a position growth path, working in multiple departments or roles, gaining additional education, executive mentoring, travel between locations, skills development, etc. as needed
What is an employee development plan
An employee development plan (EDP) is a quarterly performance growth plan focused on job proficiency skills development.
- It is a recurring quarterly growth tool that enables the employee to master a bucket of job role skills masterfully and permanently
- It focuses only on a few urgent growth priorities at a time
- It is short-term, quarter by quarter proficiency improvement plan
- It maintains employee performance metrics
- EDP includes management input, guidance, and engagement
- It’s built on a shared consensus between employee and manager
- It develops long term career goals by focusing on quarterly growth
The gist of the EDP is to maintain concentration on employees’ performance development and growth into their role. This is accomplished with short-term objectives.
The employee development plan is not the place to focus on serving the entire career path function.
Yes, the employee development plan may include objectives to prepare employees for a larger future role. This is done through employees’ skills development in their current position.
If they grow to be superstars in their current position, that is intrinsically readying them for the next step up their career path ladder.
Developing each employee’s individual strengths using an EDP
Every employee has different strengths, and different proficiencies in need of development.
Even two employees in the same role can have differing proficiency requirements. (For example, one salesperson may handle inbound leads and another outbound. It’s the same sales role ‘on paper’ yet it is two different sets of skills to develop.)
So a manager’s ultimate goal in any EDP is to prioritize focus on where each individual’s performance needs growth. To bring the employee up to master best practices for their role.
The three simple steps to build the ultimate employee development plan
You can build a focused employee development plan in three simple steps as follows:
Develop a bucket of proficiencies from employee job description
- Break out job role proficiencies into three job role modules: job role, support role, and soft skills
- Keep the plan employee-centered to avoid overwhelm and complexity
- Avoid loading up the plan with long-term career path goals or ‘corporate citizen’ goals – create an annual plan for those
Employee and manager rate and rank which skills to prioritize development, then they agree to a final shortlist together
When done with prioritizing and agreeing on quarterly goals, manager creates a summary sheet of quarterly goals so the employee can refer to them daily & weekly
The result is a simple, clean focused plan that is a partnership between employee and manager, focused only on increasing the employee’s effectiveness and growth.
Once it is set up, it can be administered in a 15-minute meeting each quarter, and the employee is self-motivated from there.
Who can benefit from this innovative EDP template?
This template concept can be used by all levels of management, including:
- Dept. Managers: Any department manager who wants to raise the standards of the entire team by growing each individual employee’s proficiencies
- Business Owners: A small business owner or manager who has minimal HR resources but has key employees who need accountability to role and skill development
- Individual self-improvement: This template concept works as an individual self-growth plan for any individual who wants to do-it-yourself to crush personal improvement goals or professional goals for work
- Directors: Corporate C-level directors who want to tighten their focus to motivate key employees to high levels of productivity and maximize labor ROI for the corporation
No matter what management level you are at, this innovative model works wonders to engage employees, and best of all, you are keeping things simple and low maintenance.
Before we get down to developing the three steps of this EDP, let’s talk about staying focused.
Maintain focus: Identify personal Improvement goals from a bucket of proficiencies
The innovation of this template is you can now customize each development plan quickly from a bucket of proficiencies derived from the employee’s Job Description. You only have to build out the bucket of proficiencies one time.
These proficiencies are organized into three modules for easy organization and priority.
Remember, you are not laying out a laundry list or wish list of every single area the employee ‘should’ develop, especially soft skills wish lists.
Your goal is to focus ONLY on key employee development areas that are pertinent to the best practices of the job position, as derived from the job description.
The beauty of this bucket approach is that all employee plans are held to the same uniform corporate standards, but each with different customized proficiencies, specific to their roles.
Note on corporate required proficiencies: For some of the more professional development plans, you may need to draw up a permanent bucket of mandatory/required corporate proficiencies. These are found in corporate governance, sustainability, or operating model documents.
For example, all employees are expected to follow the same job site safety and technology security protocols.
Keep these corporate development proficiencies to the minimum, or better, set up a separate process or plan.
Ok, let’s get to the three steps to build ninja employee performance, using a lean development plan.
Module one: Job role functions
Identify the universe of all job-related functions into a bucket, the “best practices” for the role:
- all role-specific functions for main job role of employee from job description and job requirements
- industry and company-specific proficiencies
- technology platform-specific
Module Two: Assess what support functions need development in order for employee to be most effective in their job role.
- composing emails
- customer service best practices
- safety protocols in how every employee operates
- concise phone calls
- etc
Module Three: assess what ‘soft’ areas need development or to be minimized
- interpersonal communication skills
- leadership skills
- cooperation
- etc.
The power of soft skills
In today’s digital age, interpersonal communications, listening skills, and attention spans have suffered.
You can use soft skills as a powerful tool to:
- Build communication skills, empathy, tact, etc.
- As a leadership development plan
- To develop insubordinate employees by helping them learn to manage their behavior
- Guide career planning for leadership skills and educational achievement
A one time EDP process
Once built out, this is a one-time process that you can refer back to indefinitely, each quarter.
Note: When you break each of the job role areas into specific proficiencies, get as granular and detailed as possible.
For example, a job role support proficiency can’t be “Compose more prospect emails per day.” It is better to be stated as specifics such as “Shorten the amount of time it takes to compose emails by 50% this quarter.” Or “Work on emails only from 9 to 10 am, and 3 to 4 pm.”
Now that you have identified the permanent bucket of specific development proficiencies, organized in three modules, you are ready for step two.
Step two: Self-rating and ranking areas of employee development by both employee and manager
The EDP is presented to employee, where they and manager go through a simple checklist in each module of the plan worksheet. It can be emailed ahead of time.
Employee self-rating column: employee self-rates proficiencies and ranks the most urgent ones for development this quarter
- First, the employee breezes through a uniform list of the proficiencies for their career role. They self-select the areas of growth they feel they are in need of, using a self-rating scale of 1 to 10 to assess their competence in each proficiency
- For each self-rating, employee then ranks the urgency of need for improvement, like an A, B, or C, A being most urgent
- For example, a self-rating of 4 in the number of customer contacts per day has much more urgency than a rating of 4 in email compose time
Manager rating column: manager rates and ranks each proficiency in need of development
The manager goes through the same list of proficiencies as employee
- Manager double-check rating and ranking of each chosen proficiency for accuracy and agreement
- Mgr. can assign their own rank and ratings of proficiencies
Agreed on areas to improve column: employee and manager discuss and agree on which proficiencies to prioritize.
The manager goes through the same list of proficiencies as employee
- Manager double-check rating and ranking of each chosen proficiency for accuracy and agreement
- Mgr. can assign their own rank and ratings of proficiencies
Caution: To avoid overwhelm in your individual development plan, keep it employee-centered!
The goal here is to prioritize focus on those 4 or 5 urgent areas most in need of improvement, so the employee can build kaizen improvement: steady gradual improvement over time
Please keep the individual career development plan employee-centered.
This means avoiding the temptation to throw in a ton of deliverables. Choose only 3 to 5 proficiencies out of all three modules.
This limited focus of 3 to 5 proficiencies is how you create permanent kaizen growth and improvement.
Have the patience and trust that less is more here.
Step three: Summarize quarterly employee development goals in a goals summary, so employees can refer to them daily
Once the final set of proficiencies is rated, ranked, and agreed upon, the worksheet is complete.
But the development plan is not.
To maintain employee ninja focus, these final proficiencies are transferred to a one-page summary sheet.
The employee can save it in tasks, calendar, or hard copy to refer to it daily.
- For the most powerful employee development results, I strongly suggest you have employees schedule 15 minutes per week where they review progress, ask for help, work on specifics, research issues etc. so they can continue to tighten their mastery of proficiencies
Going full circle: Employee Quarterly Review by Manager
At the end of each quarter, the manager conducts a quarterly review with employee:
- Determine proficiency improvement results of previous quarter
- Assign new priorities for coming quarter
- Determine what additional resources the employee might need to achieve goals
- Optional – assign earned rewards and awards for improvement goals met
Unfortunately the quarterly employee review is a huge missed opportunity for employee development planning.
Many employers prefer annual reviews, which is way too long of a time period to maintain employee motivation and engagement.
Adding rewards and recognition to reinforce employee engagement motivation
Recognition, awards, spiffs, or other rewards, helps build special motivation for employee to exceed development plan performance goals.
I include how to set up and implement a Rewards program as a Bonus to the EDP program.
Employee Development Program
Growing beyond the free EDP Example templates
You can implement an EDP from these free templates as a starter. However, over time it will become limiting.
Without strong quarterly reviews and rewards motivation your career development planning is only minimally effective.
For example, the free downloadable templates in this article do not include:
Quarterly reviews or employee progress: You need managers instructions and templates to fully set up and implement the EDP, QED (Quarterly Employee Development Plan) and daily development goals summary
Using soft skills to manage difficult employees: How to use the EDP to correct difficult and insubordinate employees
Leadership Development Plan as part of your employee development
Rewards Program: How to set up and implement a cost effective and motivational Rewards program
The complete EDP Template Kit does. It gives you a step-by-step guide to creating a customized plan, full guidance to manage the quarterly review and putting the plan on quarterly auto-pilot.
If you want to boost employee performance by keeping them engaged and focused on their job roles, this innovative Employee Development Program will be your favorite tool.
Improve your employee's job performance
from day one
Build job skills and soft skills quickly with concise templates
- Saves employers time: easy one time set up, fast quarterly reviews and employee completes their own self evaluation templates
- Build job skills, soft skills, leadership and emotional intelligence customized to the level of each employees current skillset
- Rewards program templates ensure employee motivation and retention
- Best for up to 30 developable employees.
You’re guided along with a step-by-step instructions guide and clean employee skills development template in excel.
Find out more below.
