How To Write a PDP in 5 Steps [With Free Template]

Most of us have goals in life. Maybe it’s to buy a house in the city, travel the world, or surround yourself with family and friends. We often have goals for our career too — although these can be harder to define.

When employees feel like you’re supporting their career goals, they’re happier, more productive, and doing their best work. But how can you identify these goals and what do you need to do to help your team members reach them? That’s where a personal development plan comes in.

In this guide, we’ll explore what personal development plans are, why they’re valuable, and how to create them. We’ll also share our best advice on how to make them a success, so you and your team members can get the most from the experience.

What is a personal development plan?

A personal development plan (also known as a PDP, or sometimes as an individual development plan) is a document that outlines how an individual wants to grow and develop as a person. It’s an opportunity to reflect on goals, progress, tasks, and habits, and organise them into a plan that allows you to move forward.

At its most simple, a personal development plan includes:

An assessment of where you are now
A statement of where you want to go
A roadmap of how you’re going to get there

People often create self improvement plans or PDPs for their personal lives, but for this guide we’ll focus on professional development and work-related PDPs.

Benefits of using personal development plans

Personal development plans help your employees figure out who they are, what they want, and how they can take steps to get there. They’re valuable for employers too, as they allow you to understand your employees better and create engaging experiences.

Introducing and using personal development plans effectively leads to benefits like:

Identifying employees’ goals and desired career paths
Uncovering strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for growth
Understanding levels of ambition across the company
Establishing goals that you can measure over time
Tracking progress and using this to inform key decisions
Higher levels of employee engagement, employee satisfaction, and productivity

If a team member isn’t growing, they’re leaving. Being able to develop your people and support their short and long-term goals makes employee retention easier and allows you to work with your employees to build an environment and structure where they can thrive.

How to write a personal development plan

While work-related personal development plans should involve both the employer and the employee, the drive should come from the individual. It’s a process that should be employee-led and employer-supported.

Try this personal development plan out yourself and share it with your team members to help them create a valuable PDP.

Step 1: Come up with a “north star” goal

Start by thinking about your longer-term goals. What’s something you really want to achieve, even if it feels like it’s far away? We call these our “north star” goals — they help guide us towards our destination. Some people may have only one, while others aim for 3-5.

Some examples of north star goals include:

Manage a 5-person sales team
Become competent at programming in Haskell
Understand how financial models work
Produce a podcast series
Develop a personal brand

Coming up with a big goal can feel challenging, especially if it’s not something you often think about. To help you find your goals, think about people you respect. What is it you like about them, their career, or their life? What’s a key area or attribute you admire about others that you want to improve in yourself?

You can also make this part of a group or team activity by getting your team to do some self-reflection and goal setting. Bring everyone together for a no-pressure session to talk about goals, share employee goal examples, and help each other come up with a list of goals you might like to focus on for the year ahead.

Step 2: Assess where you are currently

Make an honest self-assessment of your current position. What skills and responsibilities do you have? What is the function of your current role? Who do you know who could give you advice or mentoring? Think through all of these and write down the stuff that is relevant to your year-long goals.

The absolutely crucial element to this stage is honesty and self-awareness. If you’re too confident or too modest about your current position, the rest of the process will fall apart.

A useful way to understand your current performance against your big goals is with performance reviews. Invite feedback from team members, discuss your performance with your manager, and take part in a performance review process that’s highly engaging for the biggest impact — like what we offer at Charlie.

Step 3: Plan how to reach your goals

You know what your end goal is, and where you stand right now. What you need to figure out now is how to get there. This stage of the personal development plan process is all about considering the different skills and attributes you need to be successful in your journey.

What you need might be a combination of:

New skills
Enhanced skills
Resources and materials
Access to tools and apps
Training courses
Support
Mentorship

Consider your goals carefully and work out what practical, emotional, and financial support and development opportunities will help you reach your full potential. Compare this against your learning and development budget to see what’s possible, and discuss plans with your manager to see if they’re do-able.

Step 4: Create sub-goals or “focus areas” with deadlines

With the knowledge of what you need to hit your PDP goal, you can now start creating short-term goals or “focus areas” that help you stay organised.

Turn the requirements you found in step 3 into SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) and put them in an order that makes sense. Set milestones, add realistic deadlines, and include some buffer time in case you encounter any roadblocks or challenges along the way.

Once you’ve plotted out your sub-goals, you might discover the timeline isn’t exactly what you expected. It’s better to figure out now that it’ll actually take you 15 months to reach your north star goal than feel like you’re behind in progress, when actually you’re right on track with the expected timeframe.

Step 5: Tidy up your action plan

Finally, take your messy notes and rough draft and turn it into a personal growth plan that you’re proud of. This is primarily a document for you to reference, but you’ll also share it with your manager — so make sure it’s easy to understand.

How to get the most value from your personal development plans

The five-step process to create a personal development plan feels more achievable once you’ve broken it down. As your team members work through the steps, here’s our best advice on how you can make the experience even more effective and rewarding.

Create a standardised process

Some people are naturally more likely to create a PDP than others, and they’re also probably better equipped with goal-setting knowledge. Level the playing field and enable everyone to create an effective PDP by introducing a standardised process that includes your best advice and easy-to-follow steps.

Develop a process or workflow that your managers and employees can follow to create a PDP, track progress, and celebrate the achievement of goals. This can run alongside your performance review process to provide valuable feedback at regular intervals.

If you use Charlie, you can upload your personal development plan template — and your PDP process workflow — into the platform so anyone can access it whenever they need to. Making your process, documentation, and templates self-service removes barriers and empowers your employees to take control over their career development.

Work collaboratively

Unlike a PDP that you’d set for your personal goals, a work-related PDP is much more of a collaborative process. As part of your standardised approach, include plenty of opportunities for discussion and collaboration.

Invite individuals to share their proposed PDP with their managers and team members for 360 feedback and useful suggestions. Host internal events or workshops where employees can discuss their PDPs, or plan accountability sessions where everyone can spend time working on their goals together.

Make the plans highly personalised

Even if they have similar end goals, nobody’s PDP will look exactly the same as anyone else’s. A personal development plan should be highly tailored to each individual’s own needs, goals, and wants.

This is much easier to achieve in a small business compared to a large one. In a big company, it’s easy to feel like you’re forgotten or being led down a defined career path that doesn’t quite fit. As a small business, you have the flexibility and freedom to approach employee development in a much more personalised way. What we often lack in endless budgets, we make up for in creativity.

Review progress on a regular basis

The nature of a personal development plan means that it should be reviewed regularly. Checking in allows you to monitor progress, identify issues before they affect your deadlines in a major way, and help you understand whether your north star goal still feels like a good fit or not.

At Charlie, we do quarterly reviews of PDPs as a team, and more regular one-to-one chats about them (once a month) – but you should focus on what feels right for your business and your employees.

Simplify the process with our personal development plan template

At Charlie, we’re big on personal development. We have an entire process dedicated to helping us create a meaningful PDP, and as a result we’ve refined our personal development plan over time into the best possible version.

To help you and your team create your own PDPs, download our free personal development plan template. Our PDP template has everything you need to note down and track your focus areas, so you can work towards your north star goals.

Support your employees with personal development plans

A personal development plan can help individuals focus their efforts on achieving their big goals. Use this guide to help you introduce a PDP process that empowers employees to think about and work towards their goals, with your support along the way.

If you’re looking for a platform to help you manage not just your performance management and personal development plans but all areas of HR operations, try Charlie. Our HR software was designed for small businesses like you that are passionate about simplifying HR and providing a better employee experience. Take a free trial of Charlie now to discover how you can use it to streamline the way you approach HR.

Personal development plans: FAQs

Want to know even more about personal development plans? Here are the most frequently asked questions about PDPs in the workplace.

How do you get people excited about personal development plans?

“Personal development plan” is not an exciting phrase. If you want people to pay attention and get invested in this scheme, you’re going to have to announce the introduction of PDPs in a punchy way which properly communicates the benefits to your team members.

Whenever I talk to members of the CharlieHR team about PDPs, it tends to go something like this:

“None of you joined this company because you’re passionate about HR software. I don’t think anyone is really passionate about HR software. You joined this company because you thought it would help you along the way to your own goals and aspirations. That’s why we use PDPs – they give us concrete information to improve our ability to help you achieve your goals.”

What is an example of a personal development goal?

It’s not always easy to think of a goal for your personal development plan. If you or your employees are stuck, try sharing a sample personal development goal with them. For example, “I want to learn how to manage projects” or “I want to become a mentor to graduates”.

Another way to inspire people to set goals is to have them think about different areas of work and habits or attributes they could develop to improve them. For example, they might want to focus on productivity, time management, networking, idea generation, design, leadership, self-confidence, or communication skills.

How do you write a personal development plan for an employee?

Personal development plans should be written by the individual, rather than a manager or HR representative. This allows the employee to lead the process and be fully involved, rather than feel like they’re being guided in any certain direction.

Another aspect of planning you should consider is what to do when an employee is leaving – our latest tip is to check out our succession planning template if you want to make sure you're covered against this eventuality.