Personal Development Plan (PDP)

Introduction

Personal development is a lifelong process of nurturing, shaping and improving your skills, knowledge and interests. The aim is to enhance your effectiveness and adaptability, and minimise the chance that your skills might become obsolete or you might be made redundant.

Personal development does not necessarily imply upward movement, rather it is about enabling you to improve and use your full potential at each career stage. It is about making you a more rounded person.

A personal development plan (PDP) involves establishing what you want to achieve, where you want to go, and when you want to do it. It should include short term and long term aims, identifying your needs in terms of skills, knowledge or competence. The plan also defines the development that is appropriate to meet those perceived needs. Scheduling and timing (planning) are important, but should not be too regimented.

Benefits of having a PDP

A PDP provides the structure of a schedule, facilitates motivation, and offers a framework for monitoring and evaluating achievements. It can be the basis for:

• reappraising where you want to go and how you can get there
• revitalising technical skills that date very quickly
• building up transferable skills
• lifelong learning
• gaining satisfaction from a sense of achievement
• ensuring your employability and survival in an age where fewer jobs will be the same five from now
• taking advantage of opportunities that may arise, or that you can create

Action Checklist

Maintaining a PDP is a cyclical process - you don't have to start at the beginning if you have already decided where you are going and what you need to do to get there.

1. Establish your purpose or direction - (Career goals)

Identify the purpose of your development cycle. These may emerge from intended or actual new tasks or responsibilities, discucssions with your manager or others, or dissatisfaction with your current routines. It involves:

• knowing what you are good at and interested in
• getting a sense of your potential within your chosen sector
• taking account of the organisational realities you encounter and linking your plans to organisational needs as much as possible

You should consider:

• your own value system, your family and private life, work and money, constraints and obstacles to mobility, now and in the future
• the characteristics of work that fit with your value system

2. List your current skills, knowledge and competences (Your toolkit)

Some of us know what we are good at, many of us do not. Various instruments can help, including self assessment tests, benchmarking exercises against management standards, structured personal diagnostics that elicit your view of yourself, or 360-degeree feedback to elicit how other's view you.

Draw up a short list of your current skills, knowledge and competence. You don't need to list evrything, just the things you think are relevant for your future plans. You can always add to this list during Step 4 if something become relevant.

3. List your required skills, knowledge and competences

Identify what skills, knowledege or competences are required for your planned future.

4. Identify your development needs (gap analysis)

Your development needs depend on your career goals.

Using your self-assessment in Step 2, and your future needs in Step 3, draw up a list of the skills or knowledge you need to acquire, to update or to improve. Consider:

• If you intend to remain in similar employment, do you want development to re-motivate or re-orient you, or is the aim to improve your current performance and effectiveness?
• Or do you intend development to prepare you for promotion, your next job, a change in career, or perhaps for retirement or self-employment?

5. Identify learning opportunities

What methods are available to you to close the gap. Consider:

• your preferred learning style: some people learn best from trying new things, some prefer to observe others
• the resources available to you think laterally when trying to indentify sources of help for development. In addition to you own organisation, consider government and private advisory agencies, libraries and internet, clubs, colleagues, family and friends
• the range of learning options available formal educational courses and qualifications; internal or external training courses or workshops; developmental opportunities- for example, job rotation, secondment, shadowing, mentoring, coaching, private reading, leading workshops, presenting papers, community involvement, volunteering, etc.

6. Formulate an action plan

For each of the gaps you have identified in Step 4, set yourself development objectives using the learning opportunities identifed in Step 5.

Your development objectives need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely (often shortened to SMART). Make them challenging so they stretch you and carry you onto new ground, but make sure they are viable and attainable within a relaistic time-frame.

7. Record your outcomes (Your PDP Record)

Keeing a record of what you planned and what you have achieved keeps you focused on what you have got out of the development activity and what is still to be done.

Development need	Date identified	Development method	Target date	Outcome	Date achieved	Further action
Development 1
Development 2
Development …

8. Evaluate, review and plan

Evaluation is the key stage to the self-development cycle because it enables you to discover whether that development activity was worthwhile and applicable; whether and how you skills or working behaviour improved as a result.

You should ask youself the following questions:

• What am I better able to do as a result of the development activity?
• How well did this dveleopment method work?
• Could I have gained more from this activity?
• Would I follow this approach again?
• Has this experience thrown up further development needs?
• Has this experience thrown up chnages to my career goals?

See also…

Your values are important when identifying the characteristics of work that fit with your value system.
Evaluation is the key stage to the self-development cycle. Consider using the PDSA cycle.