How to Create a Growth Plan for Employees

Having a team of competent, skillful, and productive employees is the ideal for every company. However, creating a rockstar workforce doesn’t happen overnight. To build a thriving company where a growth mindset and continuous learning are the norm, you need to create an employee growth plan.

According to LinkedIn, 94% of employees would stay with a company longer if they had more opportunities to learn and grow. A stronger focus on employee growth and development has a ripple effect: recruiting is easier, retention improves, and employees grow with the company. An employee growth plan can help in so many ways. So, how do you create an overarching growth action plan? How do you adapt it for individuals?

In this guide, we’ll give you steps to create an employee growth plan, plus tips and tricks to make it easier. But first, let’s get started with the basics.

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What is a growth plan for employees?

An employee growth plan is a structured roadmap that helps guide employees through advancing their career within your company. It typically includes specific, actionable goals and a framework personalized to the employee’s abilities and long term career goals.

An employee growth plan often includes:

• An individualized approach that caters to the employee’s preferred way of learning
• A list of skills and competencies employees need for their current or future roles
• Training and development programs such as workshops, courses, and certifications that support employee upskilling
• A clear timeline for employees to track their growth and understand their progress

An employee growth plan makes it easy for employees to track their progress toward their individual career development goals. They also have the chance to develop new skills to prepare for new positions and responsibilities.

An employee growth plan often includes short and long-term goals. Depending on their goals, the results may be certifications, promotions, or role changes.

Why does an employee growth plan matter?

Employee growth plans are a win-win for both your employees and your company. Employees get more opportunities to build skills and advance their careers, while companies see improved retention, better performance, and a more engaged workforce.

Many employees leave to find growth opportunities if few or none are offered at their current company. By offering a clear employee growth plan and career pathing, your employees are more likely to stay and grow within your company.

To put it simply, your company should consider implementing an employee growth plan if you want to:

• Increase employee satisfaction
• Improve employee motivation and performance
• Support talented and well-performing employees
• Attract high-quality applicants 
• Boost company profitability and efficiency

Types of employee growth planning

“Employee growth plan” is kind of a blanket term that can encompass many different types of growth. It all depends on what “employee growth” means to you, your company, and your employees. Looking at it this way allows for a lot of customization and flexibility to build unique and impactful programs.

Here are a few ways growth planning can look like:

• General professional growth plans: These initiatives offer a flexible way for employees to take ownership of growth within their current role. They focus on developing core competencies and reaching predetermined milestones.
• Leadership growth plan: A leadership growth plan is designed either to prepare high potential employees for future leadership or to build relevant skills in current leaders.
• Role-specific or specialized growth plans: This kind of growth planning is designed to target specific technical skills and competencies in your organization to improve that function, such as engineering, sales, customer service, etc.
• Career transition and internal mobility plans: Career paths aren’t always linear and sometimes companies have a hard time filling certain roles. Transition and mobility growth planning hits two birds with one stone by finding current employees who want to move their career in a different direction and matching them with a skilled role within the company.

No matter the type or purpose of the program, the core outcome is the same: to support employees in learning and developing skills that contribute to company goals.

How to write a growth plan

For HR and L&D, creating an employee growth plan requires careful consideration and a deep understanding of employee needs—both as a whole and on the individual level.

Here are seven steps to help you create an overarching employee growth plan and how to customize it to each individual.

1. Start with a skills gap analysis

Before you create a growth plan, evaluate where your workforce is at with a skills gap analysis. This process helps you pinpoint key development areas and employees that would benefit from certain learning opportunities—as well as help you brainstorm skill-specific training programs.

Here’s how to conduct your own skills gap analysis to help create a growth plan for employees:

• Review organizational goals: Check in with your company’s short and long-term strategic goals to give yourself a starting point for employee development goals.
• List out key roles: Identify the key roles that directly impact the achievement of each of these organizational goals.
• Identify required skills: Outline which skills and competencies each role needs to succeed.
• Assess current skills: Evaluate your employees' existing skill levels through surveys, assessments, and performance reviews.
• Analyze gaps: Compare current skill levels with the required skill levels to find areas that need more development.
• Prioritize skill needs: Rank skills based on their importance and relevance to organizational goals and how pressing the need is to fill skill gaps.

With your skills gap analysis complete, you can use this information for the next step.

2. Outline development goals

Setting clear goals will be both yours and your employees’ guide throughout the growth plan. As always, use the SMART framework to build specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals.

Clear goals not only provide direction, but help both you and your employees track progress and stay motivated for the duration of the employee growth plan.

Here’s an example of a SMART goal for a company-wide employee growth plan:

• By the end of Q2 2026, increase the leadership readiness score of identified high performers and current leaders by 25% through management training programs, workshops, and mentorship programs—as measured by quarterly leadership assessments.

Here’s an example of a SMART goal for an individual employee growth plan:

• Within the next six months, improve personal leadership readiness by 40% by completing three training courses on leadership skills, measured by a leadership readiness assessment and score during skill application scenarios.

3. Gain stakeholder support

Without the support of others at the company, your growth planning will flounder. Creating a proposal with your findings from the skills gap analysis, development goal creation, and expected outcomes along with third-party research and benchmarking data will go a long way to gaining support from senior leadership, managers, and employees alike.

Stakeholder buy-in can help you secure funding and other resources while helping promote growth planning initiatives to the entire company.

4. Personalize growth planning

Now that you have an idea of your overarching growth planning goals and how to narrow them down to the individual level, you’re ready to personalize a growth action plan for each employee—with help, of course.

This is where all levels of management come into play. You’ll support each manager through completing a personalized growth plan for each employee using a slight variation of the steps for a skills gap analysis.

Here’s how to guide managers through the growth planning process:

1. Review skill assessments: In the skills gap analysis, managers did performance reviews and skill assessments. Have them review and note each employee’s current skills, strengths, and areas for improvement.
2. Understand career goals: Managers then need to work with employees to understand their career goals and aspirations, whether it’s to move into leadership, move into a different skilled role, or become the best they can be in their current role.
3. Identify skill gaps: Help managers analyze the gap between where the employee’s skills are now and what skills they need to reach their goals.
4. Curate development opportunities: Here you can assist managers by suggesting relevant learning resources, such as classroom training, online modules, mentoring activities, a job shadowing program, etc. Work together to make sure the resources fit with the employee’s needs and learning styles as well as the company’s existing or planned development capabilities.
5. Establish milestones: An employee growth plan needs clear, measurable targets. This is where that SMART goal comes in. Each growth plan can have multiple goals. These will help the administrator, the manager, and the employee track progress, recognize achievements, and address any challenges.
6. Adjust plans as needed: Check in with managers regularly to revisit and refine employee growth plans to reflect any changes in employee goals, job role or responsibilities, or company priorities.

5. Provide or create learning resources

A large part of this process is assessing what your company’s current development capabilities are. This means identifying:

• What resources and training do you have ready and available?
• What tools do you have available to support employee development program administration?
• What do you already have plans to create?
• What is feasible to outsource to third parties?
• What learning resources do you see as an immediate need, based on the skills gap analysis?
• What is your current budget for creating new resources or outsourcing?

But, before you start throwing out recommendations or building entirely new training modules, you need to understand how your employees learn. Here are a few sample survey questions to send out to your employees:

• What types of learning experiences do you find most engaging and valuable? (ex. hands-on workshops, online courses, videos and podcasts, mentorship, etc.)
• What currently prevents you from participating in learning and development? What would make it easier for you to participate?
• Would you be interested in more flexible learning options, such as mobile apps or micro learning modules?
• Would you be more likely to seek out formal training (certifications, degrees, etc.) if the company fully or partially reimbursed you for it?

Answering these questions can help you start providing resource recommendations to employees and managers while prioritizing the creation of new assets that your employees will find valuable.

6. Establish a feedback system

Here’s where you start building structured avenues for feedback. This means feedback from:

• Manager to employee
• Employee to manager
• Employee to HR and L&D administrators
• Manager to HR and L&D administrators

This is where everyone can review progress, address any challenges or barriers, and make any adjustments to the employee growth plan.

Whether it’s regular check-ins via Teams or Zoom, quick emails, anonymous surveys, etc. it’s important for all parties involved to be able to provide and receive feedback to make sure the individual and company-wide employee growth plan stays on track. 

7. Track and measure progress 

Another crucial step is monitoring the employee growth plan. Tracking and measuring employees' progress—as well as the whole company’s progress—is necessary to make sure your growth planning initiatives are reaching the intended outcomes.

Here are some KPIs to help you track employee growth plan performance:

• Training completion rates
• Skill assessment improvement
• Employee retention rates
• Promotions and internal mobility statistics
• Employee engagement scores
• Leadership readiness and competency scores
• Time-to-competency
• Program participation rates
• Feedback ratings for training content
• Manager feedback on employee growth

Keeping track of these performance indicators can help you determine what’s working, what’s not, and how to adjust individual or company-wide growth planning.

8. Recognize and celebrate

Everyone wants to be told they’re doing a great job. Creating a formal recognition program to celebrate individual and company growth achievements is a great way to show your employees how much you appreciate their efforts and keep them motivated to succeed.

There are some different types of recognition you can use:

• Publicly acknowledge achievements during team meetings (training completion, earning certifications, mastering a new skill, etc.)
• Awarding digital badges and certificates for reaching milestones
• Highlight employee success stories in internal newsletters or on company social media
• Offering gift cards, bonuses, or additional paid time off as a reward

Support your employee growth planning initiatives

Now that you understand how to create a growth plan for employees—both on a company and individual level—it’s time to get to work.

Whether you need a central location to make sure all your resources are accessible, training event management, reporting and surveys, or a way to build your development programs, Together’s mentoring platform and engagement tools can help!

‍Book a demo with one of our experts to get started.