 Creating a career development plan with your team members and then putting it into action creates a very strong message to those team members that you value them and you want to develop their skills and careers. I've always found that developing employees skills and what they can deliver for the business is great. Firstly, for motivation of those employees. Secondly, improving retention. Employees who are growing professionally have less reason to leave. Third, improves the manager employee relationship. Fourth, improving the skill level of your team so the team can deliver more or deliver better or deliver faster all of which help the company and you. Having a career development plan is a great tool every manager should use. If your manager doesn't create a career development plan with you then you should create one for yourself. Creating a career development plan will help your own career progress significantly faster. So what to put into a career development plan? Here is what you're covering today and towards the end of the video I share 11 suggestions of ways to build employee skills and experience that I've used or have seen used very successfully. All great for what to put into a career development plan. My name is Jess Coles and I've had a 25-year management career in corporates and household names through to SMEs. In my experience, career development plans are such a good exercise to go through and deliver against to motivate staff members and to get the best out of them. And if you're new to this channel enhance.training shares business and people management expertise to help you improve your performance and that of your team and business. And if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. So the first action to create a career development plan is deciding on the goal. Work with your team member to help them decide on their career goal. A useful starting point can be deciding on the time frame for that goal. For instance, if you have just started your career your time frame may be fairly short because you're not sure where you want to end up and you have so many routes open. Or for example you might have professional exams to complete before expanding your horizons. If you're further on in your career you are likely to have longer time frames as you have a clearer direction. I recommend a time frame of five years or more for your career development plan. If your employee doesn't really know what they want a good default is the head of function in which they actually sit. For example you know marketing or sales or finance. Just remember everyone is different. Some people don't want the hassle and effort of pursuing a career into management or senior management. For others the head of function or beyond in a particular size and type of company is exactly where they want to get to. Employee to be as specific as possible. The team member needs to identify a specific role to aim at which we will call the target role. The target role may or may not be in your company and to get this role the team member may need to do your current job too. Try not to worry or feel threatened by employees wanting your role. I've always used team members wanting my job as a great opportunity to free myself up to allow me to move on to the next level myself. Succession planning is very useful to do for your own career development. And lastly the career goal in your career development plan is not set in stone. Your goals may change as time goes on. That said sticking with the goal chosen and focusing your efforts to achieve that goal will progress a person's career that much quicker than changing goals periodically. The second action for how to write a career development plan is to create a career map. Once your team member has decided on an end goal you know a specific position that they want to get to then create a career map showing the different routes available in terms of specific roles between where they are now and where they want to get to. Within the career map group the different roles at similar seniority levels so you can see the options available as you progress through each seniority level. The career map may have few levels between the current role and the target role say you know a marketing manager to the head of marketing or there might be many levels say with a marketing trainee all the way through to marketing director. Get your team member to think about which of the routes available to them would appeal to them the most. Help them to work through the suitable routes based on what you know of their current strengths abilities and interests. If the team member is unsure on their preferred route get them to do some high-level research on each of the roles to see what skills experience and qualifications are needed. In action four we go through how to do this. The third action in how to build an effective career plan is to decide on the next two roles. Ask the team member to choose their next role that they would like to work towards. Ideally this role will be available in the business. Choose the next role to target as a minimum before undertaking any detailed research. The average person spends just over three years in each role during their career per recruitment stats. So as a result I recommend getting your team member to choose the next two roles of their career path so they are focused on a career development plan covering the next five years. You might be thinking that if I help my employee work out their career path or their next step on their career path then they are much more likely to leave my team. I've found the opposite is the case. If they want to leave they will leave. Taking actions to help them get to their next step delays them leaving the company and it also gives you the knowledge of what they want and think and the ability to help them meet their career aspirations. These steps all help you retain your staff not encourage them out the door. Career development plan templates are available in our management skills hub to speed up creating your team's career development plans and capturing all the points. The fourth action when thinking about what to put in a career development plan is research the skills experience and qualifications needed. The easiest part of the research is identifying what qualifications are needed. Does the team member already have the right qualifications or will they need to study for them? Qualifications tend to be a serious barrier to get many jobs so it's important to plan how to overcome this barrier. Next help the team member list out all the different skills and experience that they will need to build over the next five years. It is important to go into some detail and specify the level of skills and experience needed. For example if the next role was operations manager just putting team management experience would not help much. Writing something like team management of 10 plus factory full staff plus app and staff including recruitment performance management planning and organizing and day-to-day direction would be a lot more specific and helpful. Another option is to grade the skills or experiences needed from one to ten with a score of one being a low skill level and low importance and a score of ten being a high skill level and high important. Different ways for the team member to research what skills and experience are needed for the next role include firstly looking at job adverts and listing down the common requirements. Secondly interviewing or speaking to individuals actually doing the role or who have actually done the role in the past. Third job shadowing those doing the role. Fourth looking at internal job descriptions if available. Help them fill in any gaps that they have if you can from your own experience and do share your views and experiences too. These can be extremely valuable for your team member. The fifth action when creating a career development plan is to analyze the gaps. A career development plan is fundamentally about filling the gaps between where the employee is now in terms of their skills and experience and where they need to get to for their next role or two. You have a list of skills and experience needed for the next role or two and have graded it. Now repeat the process of listing down and grading the employee's current skills and experience in the same way as you've done for the future role. Both of you will then be able to look at the skills needed for the future roles and the skills built up so far. This gives you an easy way to identify the gaps and the scale of the gaps to overcome. When you're both clear about the gaps your team member has in their skills and experience and the scale of the gaps you can start planning the actions to fill those gaps. The sixth action for what to put into a career development plan is to create an action plan. Your action plan will contain the actions needed to start filling in the gaps identified. Identifying the actions is going to require some careful thinking on your part. You're likely to have several team members each with different development needs and there are only so many opportunities available within the business to develop them. I found it easier to get to this position with several of the team members or all of them depending on the size of your team and then work out which task, activity, project or other development opportunity I will give to which employee. I tend to favor the better performers or those with the best attitudes first and then work down the list of staff. This usually gives you the most bang for your buck in terms of what you, the team overall and the company gets out for creating an action in career development plans. Each action should be focused on moving the individual out of their comfort zone to build skills that you've jointly identified and to deepen experiences that they need. More of the same will not help them very much. Some ideas to help you include if firstly swap tasks or reallocate responsibilities within your team for a period of time, say six months. Secondly, identify problems with processes, accounts, systems, etc. that you could give to a team member to build solutions and then implement those solutions. Third, look around for projects within your responsibilities that you could assign to a specific employee or a group of employees. Fourth, ask other departments to see what cross team projects or projects full stop could benefit the business that you could get your team members involved in. Fifth, ask team members to train others. Teaching is a great way of learning yourself. Sixth, introduce a buddy system or a cross training initiative within your team or across teams. Seven, build up a reading list of business books or a watch list of videos, etc. of relevant subjects for your team members. Eight, organize the comments to other departments or inclusion on specific projects. Nine, release your team members for say, I don't know, morning or week to work with another team. You know, for instance, finance to work with sales to work on new business tenders. Ten, book courses for your team members to attend and ask them to teach the rest of the team after taking the course. And eleven, enroll them for specific qualifications and provide study support in terms of time and money. There are lots of ways of helping to support team members develop their careers that directly helps you, your team and the business become even more successful. I would also suggest that you don't hand training and development on a platter to your team members. Create a mix of learning opportunities, some that need the employee to work from their own initiative and to motivate themselves and others that are provided as part of their day to day jobs. And as a final point, make the time to sit down and evaluate progress periodically with a team member. If you and the business are investing in the team member, you want to see them keeping up their side of the bargain, namely reaching the agreed milestones and targets as a result of creating a career development opportunities for them. So they have six key actions to take for what goes into a career development plan. A quick recap on the actions to take are firstly, decide on the goal. Secondly, create a career map. Thirdly, decide on the next two roles to take. Fourth, research the skills, experience and qualifications needed. Fifth, analyse the gaps. And then sixth, create an action plan. For templates and examples of career development plans, take a look at our management skills hub. And if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below and I will get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to seeing you again soon.