The terms Individual Development Plan and Employee Development Plan are often used interchangeably, but the outcome is the same: a document outlining a person’s professional and career goals with an action plan to get there.
Does every employee in your organization have an IDP? Or if you’re here to make one, has your manager discussed a plan for your professional development?
If your answer is “no” to either, you can’t afford to ignore individual development plans any longer. Companies that invest in employee development earn, on average, 11% higher profits than those that don’t. You’re also risking your workforce as 86% of professionals would switch jobs if the new one offered more growth and development opportunities.
Not to fear: Here’s everything you need to know about creating useful individual development plans to boost your profits and attract and retain top talent.
Click to jump ahead:
- What is an individual development plan?
- Why do you need an individual development plan?
- 13 individual development plan examples and tips
- How to make an individual development plan
- Individual development plan FAQs
What is an individual development plan?
An individual development plan (IDP) is a collaborative document between a manager and an employee to define career goals and map out how to learn new skills or improve current ones. It matches an employee’s strengths and interests to key business objectives.
Usually, individual development plans are part of the annual performance review and general employee development discussion. But you can make or update one anytime.
You can also create an individual development plan for yourself to pursue career or personal learning goals.
IDPs usually include:
- Short and long-term career goals the employee wants to achieve.
- Current skills the employee wants to improve, or new ones to learn.
- Skills the manager wants the employee to further develop.
- Specific action steps to achieve the goals (e.g. taking a course, attending a workshop, finding a mentor, etc).
Many different formats work well for individual development plans, from plain text documents to elaborate tables and timelines. Mix and match blocks, tables, and more with this flexible IDP template to customize it to your needs.
Why do you need an individual development plan?
Individual development plans are beneficial to everyone, including the company. IDPs encourage your employees to voice their career goals and co-create a plan to get there. Even if they end up leaving for another company in the future, you benefit from their new skills until then.
Your employee will likely also be grateful for their growth with you and happily refer others to open roles. Since we’re in one of the tightest labor markets ever, referrals and word of mouth can mean the difference between filling your open positions or not.
Individual development plans also address a real business need: 56% of businesses surveyed by Statistics Canada in 2022 said most of their employees weren’t “fully proficient” at their jobs. If your company has over 100 employees, that most certainly applies to you as 93% of large companies responded that way, whereas only 33% of companies with less than four employees did.
IDPs help your employees learn the skills they need to achieve their own goals, but they’re also key to ensuring your business needs are met.
13 individual development plan examples and tips
A stylish table format is effective for communicating goals and action steps which are both important parts of an IDP. List the goal category on the left, the action step in the middle, and a target due date on the right.
For example, a goal category could be “improving public speaking skills.” An action step could be joining a local Toastmasters group or hosting a Lunch and Learn for the office.
Give this worksheet-style template to your employee before your IDP meeting to find out their goals and how they view their progress so far. By getting their ideas on paper first, you’ll make better use of meeting time to discuss actions and solutions.
Are you (or your employee) a visual person? Just because most individual development plans look like traditional documents doesn’t mean yours has to. Try out this creative and colorful quadrant template to prioritize goals and actions by their importance, due date, or any other criteria that make sense to you.
This template is structured as a corrective action plan but could also work well for an IDP. As a reminder, IDPs aren’t a disciplinary tool or for underperforming employees. Everyone should have an individual development plan focusing on their strengths, while also acknowledging weaknesses that may impact the achievement of career goals.
Another great template for visual folks, this serves well as a progress tracker for the action steps in your IDP. The simple, one-page format is quick to update and makes it easy to see progress toward your goals.
This template could be another self-evaluation tool for your employee to fill out prior to your IDP meeting to rank the importance or priority level of specific actions or goals. Or, use it as a progress tracker by listing out the actions and ranking them from “Not Started” to “Complete.”
Often, an IDP has a big goal in mind, like being the head of a division or something else several steps ahead of you. In order to get there, you need to break it down into smaller goals along the way.
Growing into a C-suite position could mean first managing an important project, then a small team, and then a larger team, and so on. By visually planning the smaller goals along the way, you (or your employee) have realistic expectations of what’s needed to get to the ultimate goal and a focused approach to get there.
An individual development plan is a lot like a product roadmap, except with your goals instead of new features. This simple timeline template is a good way to work through the order you’ll need to accomplish action items in and set target deadlines.
It’s also useful for visual thinkers to see a simplistic overview of their trajectory on one page. You can detail each goal or step in subsequent pages.
Using a 30, 60, and 90 day timeline is an effective way to break down large goals into achievable steps per quarter. This can also work as a one-page quarterly plan — just add an extra column — or a multi-year plan.
This template serves as a compact yet detailed action plan that’s perfect for goal tracking in your individual development plan.
This multi-page template is highly flexible so every page of your IDP will look professional and on-brand. Easily add tables, lists, and more to the content pages as needed to create a detailed and aesthetic development plan.
While this is set up as an orientation plan, you could easily customize it as an individual development plan.
If you like a quarterly planning approach, this template is helpful to detail the action steps you need to take for the rest of the year.
How to make an individual development plan
Any of the templates above can be your starting point for creating your organization’s IDP template, or choose from all our business templates. Some templates are available only to our paid subscribers, but all the options above are free for everyone to use.
Starting with a template saves time and ensures your finished IDP looks polished and professional. It’s easy to customize any of these with our free online editor in just a few clicks.
Step 1: Sign up for a free Venngage account
All you need is an email address to sign up for a free Venngage account.
No free trials, credit card numbers, or any of that. You can edit any of our free templates with your free account… for free, okay?
Step 2: Choose an individual development plan template to customize
Pick one of the templates mentioned above or browse our full database of Human Resources templates, including letters, plans, presentations, and more.
Step 3: Edit the template for your IDP
Once you’ve picked a template, the fun part begins: Making it your own. Click Create on any template to enter the editor where you can change colors, text, graphics, and more.
I’m using this IDP checklist template as an example:
I like to match a new template to my brand first as this saves a lot of time if you want to duplicate the page to add more content later.
Our Business and Premium subscriptions offer My Brand Kit to store your colors, fonts, and logos for easy template customization anywhere for your entire team. But no worries for our free account holders: Editing is just as easy.
Click on any text area or graphic to edit it. Type new text, or use the top menu to change color, font, size, spacing, and more.
You can replace existing graphics with one of our 3 million+ free stock photos, over 40,000 illustrations and icons, or upload your own.
Explore the left side menu to add a background or a new layout, like a graph or table. You can also click and drag objects around the page to your liking. Use the right side menu to duplicate the current page or add a new blank one to your document.
Step 4: Share or save your new IDP
Once you’re happy with your new individual development plan template, click on the Share icon or Download button to save it to your computer (Business or Premium accounts).
So easy, right?
Individual development plan FAQs
What are good IDP goals?
There aren’t “good” or “bad” goals as each IDP is as unique as the individual it’s for. However, effective IDP goals have a few things in common, like being:
- Related to the employee’s career path.
- Achievable in the specified timeframe. (You can list out big goals but ensure the action steps to start with are reasonable to accomplish, or at least start, within the next year.)
- Collaboratively planned between manager and employee, with both having input.
If your employee wants to lead their department one day but hasn’t managed anyone before, some good IDP goals to set for the upcoming year could be:
- Taking a leadership course or program from a nearby or online business school.
- Leading a big project, including supervising their peers and providing feedback.
- Finding a leadership mentor within the company and regularly checking in with them.
How can I support my employee’s IDP goals?
This depends what your employee’s goals are, but a few general ideas are to:
- Offer time to try new roles and responsibilities to learn new skills.
- Reimburse or partially cover courses, seminars, and other educational tools.
- Encourage your employee to start a side hustle or passion project to learn from.
- Offer professional development days, separate from vacation time.
- Create a mentorship program to connect junior and senior staff.
Unsure what would be most effective? Ask your employees what would help them the most, and check our guide to employee development for more ideas.
What should I put for areas of improvement?
Individual development plans encourage and motivate your employees to achieve their dreams. However, as their manager, you may have some insights they don’t about skills they’re lacking to get them to the next step.
It’s best to bring these up during the planning meeting, so your employee can hear why you think these skills are important and how you’d suggest working on them. Together you can add action items to address them in the IDP.
It’s key to frame these developing areas in a positive and constructive light. You don’t want your employee to feel like they’re doing badly at these things, or their job. After all, no one’s perfect! Be open and honest and chances are, they’ll be grateful for the feedback and eager to improve the skills you’ve identified.
Create a professional IDP today with a customizable Venngage template
Whether you’re preparing for an employee’s annual review or creating an individual development plan for yourself, we’ve got the free templates you need to knock it out of the park.
Get started now and have your new IDP finished by the end of the hour. While you’re at it, why not also create a branded offer letter or onboarding guide?
For everything in your business, we’ve got a template for that.