7 Steps to Build an Employee Development Plan
Most employee development plans end up as a document nobody looks at again after the meeting where it was written. That is a waste of everyone's time. A development plan only works if it is specific, owned by the employee, and revisited regularly. Here is a simple 7-step process to build one that actually gets used.
1. Start With the Employee's Own Goals
Before you suggest anything, ask what the employee wants. Do they want to grow into a leadership role, deepen a technical skill, or move into a different part of the Organization? A plan built around what the manager wants for the employee, instead of what the employee wants for themselves, rarely sticks.
2. Identify the Gap
Compare where the employee is today against where they want to be. Be specific about the skills, experience, or behaviors that separate the two. Vague gaps like "needs more confidence" are hard to act on. Something like "needs experience leading a project with more than three stakeholders" gives you something to actually plan around. This matches decades of research on goal-setting theory by Locke and Latham, which found specific, challenging goals consistently outperform vague ones.
3. Pick Two or Three Focus Areas, Not Ten
A development plan that tries to fix everything at once fixes nothing. Pick the two or three areas that will make the biggest difference over the next six to twelve months. This is the same discipline good goal setting requires everywhere else: fewer priorities, done well, beat a long list nobody finishes.
4. Turn Each Focus Area Into a Concrete Action
"Improve communication skills" is not a plan, it is a wish. Turn it into something concrete: present at the next team meeting, shadow a senior colleague on client calls, write the next project update instead of the manager. Concrete actions are easier to schedule, easier to track, and easier to know you've actually done.
5. Loosely Connect Development Goals to OKRs, Without Overdoing It
You do not need to formally turn every development goal into an Objective and Key Result. But it helps to keep them visible next to the team's actual OKRs, so growth goals do not quietly disappear once the quarter gets busy. If an employee is developing a skill that also supports a team Key Result, say so explicitly. It gives the development work a clear, immediate reason to matter, not just a someday benefit. Tools like Easy OKR that keep individual growth notes next to team goals make this easy without requiring a second system to maintain.
Using Individual OKRs to Support the Plan
If your Organization already uses Easy OKR for team and Organization goals, you can turn on Individual OKRs from Admin Settings to give employees a place to track their own development goals alongside everyone else's. Once enabled, each employee can set private Individual OKRs for personal growth. These stay separate from Organization and Team OKRs and are visible only to the employee and company admins, so a development plan can live next to real work instead of in a separate document nobody opens again.
6. Set a Review Cadence
A development plan reviewed once a year is barely a plan at all. Check in monthly or at minimum quarterly. The check-in does not need to be long. Five minutes to ask what progress was made and what is getting in the way is enough to keep the plan alive.
7. Adjust as Circumstances Change
Roles change, priorities shift, and what mattered in January might not matter in June. Treat the plan as a living document, not a contract. If a focus area stops being relevant, replace it. The goal is growth, not compliance with a document written six months ago.
Keep It Simple
None of this requires complicated software or a formal talent management process. A shared document, a recurring calendar reminder, and a manager who actually follows up will outperform an elaborate system that nobody maintains. The best development plan is the one that gets revisited, not the one that looks most polished on the day it was written. For more on structuring an individual development plan well, see SHRM's guide to individual development plans.