4 Steps to create a professional development plan

The tech industry requires continuous learning and professional development skills for software engineering.

The most powerful and versatile tool to stimulate and support professional growth is to create a professional development plan (or PDP) for your employees.

In our recent article, we discussed why tech companies need professional development plans for software engineers.

Now, we’ll lead you through each step to write a professional development plan for your employees that will not only work effectively, but also significantly increase productivity of the whole tech team and bring professional skill development to the next level.

What is a professional development plan?

A professional development plan, or PDP, is one of the best tools a company can use to ensure its knowledge workers never stall or stagnate and always keep growing and expanding their skills and expertise. Any professional growth that occurs without a precise professional development plan will be erratic and may not help the organization that much at the end of the day. This is especially true for high-tech industries, such as software development, where new programming languages, tools and technologies appear every day.

A professional development plan outlines professional development goals, required skills for development (or focus skills), and learning activities, in order to continue to progress and advance in their career.

Step to create a PDP?

If you’re an engineering manager or a team lead, you might be wondering: how to write a professional development plan for your employees? Or what are examples of professional development?

To help you create a professional development plan and become a mentor for your tech team, we have created a framework.

STEP #1. IDENTIFY CAREER PATH LEVEL

At this stage, a manager assesses an employee’s skills, finds potential skill gaps, and identifies their career path level (or a grade). To do this, you should hold a skills review for the whole team and then analyze the review report.

To identify career path levels easily and fast, we recommend using AI tools that can do it for you.

Ace AI uses Git data to define the career path level of a software engineer. See how it works in practice:

Ace AI identifies career level based on Git data

STEP #2. CREATE A DEVELOPMENT GOAL

After a manager identified skill gaps and the grade of a developer, a development goal should be set.

Use Ace AI to create personalized development goals for the whole team based on identified skill gaps in Git. Ace AI will automatically provide you with development goals after you connect Git.

Connect Git and get a development goal in Ace AI

STEP #3. ADD INITIATIVES (TASKS) TO A GROWTH PLAN
In order to reach the development goal, a manager creates a growth plan and adds learning activities and working tasks to develop focus skills.

To save time on the search for personalized learning activities for each developer, you can use Ace AI which gives personalized recommendations on mentors and learning activities such as courses, books, etc. based on their skill gaps.

See how Ace AI recommendations work in practice:

Personalized recommendations in Ace AI

STEP #4. MONITOR PROGRESS
In order to make the process of professional development effective and implement continuous learning in your tech team’s workflow, an engineering manager should hold regular 1-on-1 meetings with team members to track the progress and adjust their growth plans if necessary, as well as provide feedback on their skill development.

To help you with that, Ace AI writes automatic feedback for specific skills for you to save time.

Automatic feedback for skills in Ace AI

Also, Ace AI builds automatic agenda for your 1-on-1 meeting to discuss growth plan progress based on developer updates from Git and growth plan initiatives.

Automatic agenda for 1-on-1 meeting in Ace AI

Key factors for a successful PDP

Now you understand how to create a professional development plan and integrate learning into the working processes of your team. However, there are strategies which are important to consider, in order to make the tool really work.

Here are the main factors of a successful professional development plan:

Factor 1. Mix working tasks and learning activities.

The tasks contained within the growth plan should offer a diverse and varied mix of educational and practical assignments. This will allow you to easily integrate this training process into your workflow, increasing the effectiveness of the learning process and saving time for development.

Factor 2. Hold regular reviews and make adjustments.

Professional development needs to be seen as a continuous process. A manager should regularly review and update the development plans. If an employee has successfully accomplished his/her development plan, you should create a new one. And if the process is underway, you can amend the existing tasks and add new ones. It should not be a one-time meeting; make it regular and schedule these discussions in your calendar.

Factor 3. Don’t be afraid to rely on external tools.

Using services, such as Ace, will help you keep all employee development and training processes on one platform, thus streamlining and optimizing this process.

Key ideas

• Tech companies should invest in the talent development of their team, especially software engineers, on a regular basis, in order to increase their team productivity and keep their skills relevant to the market.
• The stages of an effective development plan are: identifying career level, creating a development goal, adding activities to a growth plan, and regular monitoring.
• Engineering managers can hack the process of their team’s professional skill development with tools such Ace AI. It automates the process of creating professional development plans with personalized insights and recommendations.