What is personal development?
‘Personal development’ is a popular catchphrase, but what exactly does it mean? It is a broad term, encompassing any activities that are designed to improve a person’s talents, potential, employability and even wealth. Any time you make a conscious and deliberate effort to improve yourself, you are engaging in personal development. This includes improving your personal as well as professional life.
In a professional context, personal development relates to the steps that people take to further their careers, increase their knowledge, sharpen their skills and become more well-rounded, productive employees. Personal development often involves building soft skills, technical skills, job specific skills and professional skills, all of which contribute to career growth and alignment with organisational objectives.
The benefits of employee personal development for employers
Investing in the personal development of your employee is clearly good for them, but it can also benefit your business, including in the following ways:
- It can help you to attract and retain staff. When employees are deciding whether to accept or stay in a job, they consider more than just the salary and benefits. They want a job that gives them room to grow professionally and personally. And they want a manager who values them as a person, not just an employee.
- It can foster better professional development as well. When employees have a better understanding of their personal values, needs and strengths, they’re more likely to have a greater focus and sense of direction in their career.
- It allows you to identify employees who are being under-utilised. By understanding their skills, talents and interests, you can get a better idea of how to develop your employees more effectively. Similarly, you can more easily recognise if an employee would be better suited to a different role within your organisation. This facilitates their career advancement and ensures that their growth aligns with your business objectives.
- It can increase the productivity of your workforce. Supporting your employees to develop personally is likely to make them generally happier. And happy employees are more productive than unhappy employees. Personal development leads to improved business outcomes and enhances job satisfaction, contributing to a more engaged and effective workforce.
Personal development strategies
Here are 12 strategies to promote your employees’ personal development for you to consider implementing.
1. Encourage self-awareness
Being self-aware contributes to overall wellbeing, which in turn leads to better performance and higher productivity at work. Emotional intelligence plays a crucial role in understanding oneself and others in the workplace, helping employees manage emotions, practice empathy and improve workplace relationships.
Consider helping your employees develop their understanding of themselves by offering free workplace personality tests. Encourage group discussions about the results of the assessments, so that employees can gain insights into their co-workers’ personalities as well.
Workplace personality assessments can help employees identify how they can best use their strengths in their work. For example, an employee who mainly works independently may discover they are more relationally focused than they realised. If they are given work that provides more opportunity for connection, they’ll most likely be happier and more productive.
2. Provide personal development resources
Make sure that your employees can easily access a range of personal development resources. There are many free online resources, such as videos, podcasts, articles and training courses. By offering materials in multiple formats, you cater to diverse learning styles, ensuring all employees can benefit from the resources provided.
Gather these resources in an online database, which your employees can access at any time. Continually update it with new resources. The more material available, the more likely it is that your employees will find something that resonates with them.
3. Create personalised employee development plans
An employee development plan documents your employee’s intentions and learning outcomes, as well as the support they need to achieve their growth goals. General frameworks and questions are useful, but development plans should be tailored to each employee.
A one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to benefit your organisation or your employees. Work together with each individual employee to develop a structured plan with clearly defined objectives and targets. These should be based on their specific skills, strengths, career goals and opportunities in your business. Conducting a skills gap analysis is an important step in the development process, ensuring that employee growth aligns with both individual aspirations and organisational needs.
Finding time for training and education can be a challenge for busy professionals. Consider offering flexible learning solutions, which employees can access on their mobile devices at their convenience.
4. Encourage personal goals
It’s important to recognise that your employees have lives and interests outside their job. When you ask your employees about their professional goals, find out about what they want to achieve in their personal lives as well. Then, offer your support to help them achieve those goals.
Encouraging personal goals helps to foster a growth mindset among employees, promoting continuous learning and adaptability. Allow them space and time to pursue their passions. For example, if an employee is an avid painter, why not organise an art-based team building activity that everyone can get involved in?
5. Provide informal training opportunities
Incorporating informal training sessions into the workweek is a cost-effective way to make development easily accessible to your employees. Get creative with it. You could start a book club where employees read books relevant to your industry and discuss the latest trends. Or you could set up 15-minute ‘lunch and learn’ sessions where employees teach each other a new skill. These sessions can also be used to develop communication skills, enhance public speaking skills and provide communication training to help improve collaboration and teamwork.
6. Focus on soft skills
Soft skills are highly useful in both personal and professional contexts. In a professional context, helping your employees to develop their soft skills can improve the way they interact and work together, enhancing collaboration and overall performance. Key soft skills to focus on include communication, teamwork, emotional intelligence, creativity and critical thinking. To track your employees’ progress, consider implementing key performance indicators for soft skills.
There are many ways you can provide in-house training opportunities to develop these skills. For example, you could run communication workshops or provide emotional intelligence training. Giving employees opportunities to host seminars where they break down a complex problem into manageable parts can promote critical thinking. Internal contests, where team members compete to develop a new product or idea, are great for developing creativity.
7. Use task or job rotations
Allowing your employees to rotate roles with colleagues in their team or in another department gives them opportunities to practice their skills, develop new skills and to discover new talents and interests. Cross-functional experiences, such as participating in cross-functional projects, enable employees to collaborate across departments and explore different career paths within your organisation.
Consider offering this development opportunity if an employee shows a desire to gain practical experience or develop additional skills. Moving an employee to another department also helps to improve communication between departments, thereby increasing the efficiency of your entire organisation.
8. Give them stretch assignments
A stretch assignment is one that pushes the boundaries of your employee’s existing role or responsibility. Work with your employee to find out where they want to improve, and then find challenging assignments that will allow them to develop their skills.
Stretch assignments can be horizontal or vertical. Horizontal assignments require the employee to use additional skills to do work that is similar to their current role, but not exactly the same. Vertical assignments extend the scope of your employee’s role to include upstream and downstream responsibilities.
Stretch assignments are great for training flexibility and adaptability. They also give employees a chance to develop the skills, knowledge and competencies that they will need for higher-level positions. In addition, stretch assignments help employees to build critical thinking skills by encouraging them to analyse situations from multiple perspectives and question assumptions as they tackle new challenges.
9. Create coaching opportunities
Coaching involves a senior employee working one-on-one with a less experienced employee. Intentionally pairing employees for coaching can foster knowledge sharing and help to build a strong learning culture within the organisation. The focus is usually on developing a specific skill or addressing a performance issue.
Coaching tends to be a very practical, hands-on method of skills development, which is ideal for teaching technical or analytical skills. However, depending on the focus, it could also be a fast way for employees to learn specific leadership, team management or organisational skills. Keep in mind that coaching can be quite time-consuming, and it ties up one of your most valuable resources – a seasoned employee.
10. Assign a mentor
As with coaching, mentoring involves senior leaders or management working closely with junior employees and supporting their development. Whereas coaching focuses on performance and improving or learning a specific skill, mentoring tends to be more focused on the mentee’s overall personal and professional development. It is also typically more long-term than coaching and reciprocal – both the mentor and mentee learn and develop by sharing their diverse experiences. Structured mentorship programs are valuable for identifying and developing future leaders, while also providing clear pathways for career progression within the organisation.
Find ways to connect your junior employees with internal or external mentors. They could be senior managers in your organisation, industry leaders or other successful individuals. Consider creating a directory of professionals who want to share their insights and mentor younger professionals. Alternatively, you could encourage your employees to take initiative and seek out mentors themselves.
11. Support work-life balance
Your employees’ personal development efforts are less likely to be fruitful if they don’t have a healthy work-life balance. They need time and energy to commit to their personal and professional growth. Help your employees to work smart and maximise their efficiency by setting aside time for their interests outside work. By supporting employees in achieving work-life balance, you can foster a resilient workforce that can adapt to challenges and remain engaged. Promoting a healthy work-life balance can also keep stress and burnout levels down, boost employee morale and enhance your workplace culture.
12. Give employees time for personal development
Support your employees in their self-discovery and personal growth by scheduling time for personal development into the workweek. You could give each employee a set amount of time each week to work on their personal development goals. This approach enables employees to take charge of their growth, helps them to learn new skills and provides them with valuable opportunities to develop professionally.
This time is a long-term investment in your talent. When your employees see that you care about them as people, not just workers, they are likely to be much more motivated, engaged and loyal to your organisation. Plus, your business will directly benefit from the new skills that your employees acquire, which they can apply to their work.
