Career and Training Plan
Continuous development is an integral part for the development of an organization, for a company is only as good as it's human resource is. Most companies engage in a yearly planning and budgeting activity for the long and short term. Most of the time, short term takes the front seat and included in this planning is budgeting for training's, seminars and other continuous learning activities.
It is a fairly easy task and being in a technical field, most would be able to get schedules and cost for the technical part/side of it. However, knowing that a person does grow and evolve, it becomes a challenge identifying non-technical aspects of personnel development. Aside from the behavioral aspect, soft/corporate skills will be hard to identify and justify, specially if the organization does not have a career development plan for each personnel.
I believe that the first thing to do is to have competent leaders who are able to plan together with the employee the career path, as well as milestones, requirements, expectations and development requirements. The Career path then becomes the basis for the developmental requirements as well as scheduling for learning activities for each employee, management of this aspect of personnel development then becomes easy.
Justification and budgeting also is directly benefited as the career path and it's milestones dictate when an educational activity is to be undertaken at the right time, making long term planning possible as well as budgeting ahead.
In concept, this is really easy, but in practicality it is a bit hard and tricky to do. In-grained cultures and misconceptions of how things are done are very well rooted in most organizations and it will be very hard to change these mindsets. But, it becomes more challenging and worthwhile to undertake when in situations like these.