Interviewed
by: Saleh Abdullah Alkhamyasi
PDP is an acronym we normally hear in the corporate world, academia and
conferences. What is it? What benefits can it bring about and many other
questions we took to an authority in the field of learning and development.
A man, who has touched many lives and empowered many aspiring and
talented individuals during his extensive years of Professional experience.
 |
| Lawrence Alva CEO, National Training Institute |
Our Guest is Lawrence Alva, the CEO of National Training
Institute. He enjoys over 30 years of experience in learning and
Development. He is a professional facilitator of learning whose entire
career span has been built in and around human development organizations right
from vocational training to management training with special emphasis on
individual development and grooming.
He is a
Chartered Manager with full membership of the Chartered Management Institute
UK, Membership of the Indian Society for Training and Development, certified
alumni of the Leadership Academy of the New Horizons University, USA and holds
a MBA in Educational Management from University of Leicester, UK.
HR
fragrance approached him to share his thoughts on this important aspect of
individual development and he wholeheartedly welcomed our initiative with an
open heart and willingness. Our conversation with this HRD expert proceeded in
the following direction:
PDP: A Personal
Development Plan is one of the tools in L&D? It is about goal setting can you elaborate on
the concept?
Personal development plan (PDP) is a tool to achieve the goal. In other words, the process of chalking out a
PDP begins with the end in mind. One
should know towards what end he or she is planning to develop. Let me elaborate by asking a series of
questions. What is the need for an
individual to develop or why does an individual aspire to develop? The obvious answer would be that the
individual aspires to be successful. The question is successful in what? A very generic answer would be to be
successful in life. If we dig deeper the
answer would be clearer; to be successful at one’s career (at work), to be
successful socially, to be successful in family life or personal life (from a
spiritual point of view). Therefore, an
individual could aspire to be successful in different spheres of his or her
life. This is the starting point of
drafting a personal development plan; deciding on which sphere of life one
would like to focus. One could choose
multiple spheres. For the purpose of
this discussion let us consider the most popular sphere of an individual’s life
i.e. one’s career. All individuals, for
a major part of their lives, focus on building a successful career. Therefore, I would like to dwell on the
process of preparing a personal development plan towards a successful career
How do we
go about identifying learning needs for an Individual?
The first step is to obtain clarity on where we are and where we plan
to go. All of us are very clear about
our Job titles but many of us are not at all clear about our job roles! Try it; take a blank sheet of paper and write
your job role. After a little bit of
struggle you do manage to express your understanding of your job role. Do please show it to your line manager or you
look at it from your employer’s point of view.
Why has my organization employed me?
Is this what my employer expects of my job role? When you review the job
role from the employer’s point of view there will be better clarity and the
description of the job role will be accurate.
It is important that in this part of the exercise you keep yourself out
and purely look at the job title and the job role as required and specified by
the organization. You must keep the
subjective elements out and be very objective in defining the job role. It is critical to be objective even in the
next step as well, which is listing out the competencies required to fulfill
the described job role.
What
should be considered in the process of designing a practical PDP?
As discussed earlier, our end in mind is a “successful career”. We have already defined our job role and have
full clarity on what the job needs to deliver.
The next step in the process is identifying the competencies required to
deliver the goods. Let us first understand what competence is; competence is
the ability of an individual to perform a task to a given standard. The ability here is demonstrated through
performance (skill) and the underpinning knowledge required to performthe task.
Now, you must honestly make a list of competencies required of any
individual to perform effectively to the defined job role. Again I am reminding you to be objective in
this exercise.
When you have completed identifying all the competencies required to
perform the job role, you will discover that all competencies neatly fall
within three distinct categories. One category would be the area of specialization
of your job role. A number of competencies would fall under this category which
I would name as the area of “TechnicalCompetence”.
The category headed by Technical Competence would have a list of all
the hard skills required to carry out a job role in a particular field i.e.
selling skills for a salesman, preparing a profit and loss statement for an
accountant, carrying out an incident investigation for a safety officer, designing
& erecting a steel structure for a fabrication engineer, preparation and
implementation of an effective staff induction program for a HR manager and so
on.
A second category would be in the area of “Personal Competence”. This
category would include a list of all personal soft skills i.e. ability to work
in a team, effective communication skills, the ability to dress and present
oneself professionally, demonstrate good etiquette at the workplace, at meetings
and other business events, the ability to manage time and resolve
conflictseffectively, make decisions etc..
The third and a very important category is in the area of “Business Competence”. When you are actually doing this exercise you
will notice that you have not identified many points under this category. This
has been my observation with a number of people that I have carried out this
exercise with. We fail to list the
competencies required under this category to be successful in our job
role. If any individual in any
organization aspires to succeed then he or she must demonstrate competence in
business skills. Every individual in any
organization should possess sufficient competence in the process of generating
revenue, managing costs and delivering profits.
These three areas of a business organization (which span from
understanding the market, customer, products, costs and contribution to
profitability) are critical to its success and every job role within the
organization should demonstrate competence in this area.
Therefore, as individuals, if we focus on developing competence in all
these three areas we are sure to be on the path to success.
The second step is to identify all the
competencies required to deliver to the written job role and categorise them
into the three categories discussed i.e Technical Competence, Personal
Competence and Business Competence.It is critical that all the competencies
required for a particular job role are identified and written with utmost
clarity and that there is no room for ambiguity. Each statement of competence should be
written in such a way that it is specific, measureable, achievable and
relevant. Ideally, each statement should
start with the words: the candidate should be able to….(use action verbs) .
The third, important and difficult, step is
to assess your personal competence against the required competence for the job
role and identify gaps. This is where you need a professionally designed
instrument to help you assess your personal competence against the standards
defined in step two. You could design a
questionnaire and obtain a 360 degree feedback i.e. from your line manager,
colleagues, subordinates and yourself on each of the competency statements. Alternatively, you can take the help of your
HR department to carry out this assessment.
The fourth and final stepis then to create
an action plan to develop your competence in areas identified to be weak. The actions identified and entered into the
plan should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time
bound). There is a general tendency to
conclude that external training is the only solution to developing
competence. It is not the case; a number
of competencies are developed through on the job learning. You as an individual must look out for all
opportunities which are open to you for learning and make use of them.Your own
line managers are very often the best source of learning and you must endeavour
to get into a coaching and mentoring arrangement with them. Whatever route you take for learning, you
must find a way of documenting the achievement as a credible evidence of your
competence.
What
could be some barriers that a person is likely to encounter in the
implementation stage?
They are likely to
encounter the following barriers:
·
Lack of your
own conviction and commitment to your development.
·
Lack of
support from your line manager and your colleagues.
·
Poor
management of work pressure and opportunities.
·
Organizational
culture not being very conducive for individual learning and development.
Evaluation
or measuring the achievements while putting PDP into action, how do we go about
it?
Clearly there are two areas of focus in the pdp. One is a learning plan to obtain competence
and the other is an assessment plan to confirm competence. As your action plan is SMART, achievement
should get measured in a timely manner.
If you slip, make your action plan SMARTER (specific, measurable, achievable,
relevant, time bound, evaluated and revised). If you are convinced on the need for
developing yourself and are committed to it you will find ways and means to
make it a success.
Apart from your work life, you can apply these very same steps and be
successful in all the roles you play in your social life, personal and family
life. Make sure to clearly understand your role, objectively identify the
competencies required to succeed in that particular role and sincerely work
towards achieving those competencies and success will be yours.
As the colleges and schools are being reopened I advise all the
aspiring to have their own PDP. Parents should be keen to assist their children
to have a personal Development plan this way they will grow with a mission in
life and use their time effectively. In turn we will have talents who are able
to serve their families, communities, countries in an informed manner.
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