Personal Development Plan: Beginning with an End in Mind

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.

 At this stage let me do a quick review.  The first step in developing a personal development plan is to write your job role as clearly and as objectively as possible,keeping in mind the organizational requirement.

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.