An employee development plan is an agreement on which skills an employee will acquire over the coming period, by what route, and what purpose it will serve. It is based on comparing what the position requires with what the employee knows, for which companies use a skills matrix. Forms of development are not just courses: they include internal training, mentoring, working on a different type of assignment, temporarily taking on responsibility, or participating in a project. A realistic plan contains no more than two to three priorities per period, a set deadline, and a method of verification. Funding can be partly covered from public sources, since employee training tends to be an eligible expenditure under several schemes. Development is also one of the few tools that simultaneously increases performance and retention of people.
See also: Grants for Employee Training, Employee evaluation, Employee AI Literacy.
