Hi Everyone,
It is that time of year in my organisation when Personal Development Plans are being returned to the L&D department so we can see the learning needs across the organisation and then plan learning solutions to meet the needs.
I have done this analysis for the past couple of years and I an looking to see if there is a different way of analysing this information. Currently the requests are broken down into catagories such as IT, management skills, communication skills or finance. Under each of these catagories there would be sub sections so under Communication skills you would have sub sections such as Presentation skills, written communication or Internal communications. In these sub sections we note what the specific learning need is for example under presentation skills you would have building confidence, constructing presentations or pitching.
This is then reviewed as a whole to see where the trends are and what learning needs there are as an organisation, so that appropriate learning solutions can be developed.
I have had a quick research to see if there are any different ways of doing this and I have not been able to find anything useful as yet, there is loads of information about writing PDP's but not much about analysing them. It would be good to hear from the community to find out how you analyse your PDP's and what catagories or reports you produce during your analysis.
We have had some ideas of catagorising the requests into: needed to develop your role, for your longer term development and nice to have development or behavioural/soft skills, technical knowledge, developmental and industry knowledge. These are broad ideas and do need some development.
If you have any good experiences or advice it would be great to hear from you.
Thanks
Stuart
2 Responses
well that’s quite a task
..It's really interesting that you, as the L & D Department are asked to analyse PDP's rather than that being done by the manager as part of a coaching approach. Not sure how many people there are in your organisation but I would suggest that this activity should be pushed back to those people really responsible for development; the individual and their manager. They can then have a conversation about just how important (and linked to business performance), the various categrries are.
What they could do is add some ratings to the request; I would suggest applying two criteria to make it more 'real'. Examples would be; how important to the job is this skill 3=essential, 2=important,1=not important and how often would you use it; 3=daily,2=monthly,1=occasionally. Once you have the values; you can then build up your list of offerings based on the values; the higher the value the more important. It should be quite straight forward to do it on this basis but getting the managers to do it will be the challenging part.
Thanks Clive
We are a small (250) organisation so it is a bit more achievable to see what learning needs there are across the organisation.
These needs drive what our learning will include and what new areas of learning to develop.
I like the idea of the rating scale about the importance of the need and how often it is used as this as it does help to sort out how valuable the request is.
Thanks
Stuart