Often overlooked or viewed as an employee’s responsibility, training and career development are essential functions of the supervisor to build a more educated and skilled team. Investing time and resources into your employee’s professional development and goals not only makes an employee better for the job they currently have but more prepared to advance internally when the opportunity arises.  

Government organizations may have standard templates or procedures for developing a training plan or a career development plan, so the first place to start as a new supervisor is to check with your Human Resources Department for your organization’s procedures.   

Training Plans

Training addresses a specific topic to enhance knowledge, capability and/or capacity for an individual, department, or whole organization. At the most basic level, a training plan is simply a document that details a training program. It includes the goals of the training, learning outcomes and how training will be delivered. It can be used to provide a big picture of the training needs of your whole organization or to help individual employees improve their performance and develop new skills. You may also use a training plan to ensure new employees receive all the training required to effectively perform their roles.

In the absence of a standard organization-wide approach, a supervisor could create a training plan for an employee simply by thinking of the job requirements and identifying training sources for all job aspects.  The supervisor could start by listing the required training, providing a source for the training and the date the training should be accomplished by.  Training sources could include on-the-job training with a coworker, manuals or guides, formal training courses or webinars, videos, etc. 

Career Development Plans

Career development is a series of linked and complementary approaches used to comprehensively develop individuals.  Training is one small aspect of this.

Career development consists of three foundational elements:

• Institutional – formal extra-organizational training (college, certifications like CPM)
• Organizational – formal and informal “training” provided by organizations to teach and inculcate skills and culture.
• Experiential – Those developmental experiences provided solely through the day-to-day performance of duty positions.   

A career development plan is a document that describes an employee’s career goals and the path the employee could take to achieve them. 

To develop a career development plan, supervisors should meet with the employee to discuss career objectives or goals and work collaboratively with the employee to develop a written plan for achieving those goals. The discussion and planning could include short term (0 – 2 years) and/or long term (3 – 5 years).  

As an example, a career development plan could include the following basic elements.   

Employee Name:    

Manager Name:  
 
Date:  
 
Background and Objective:  

Development Goal  What are you trying to achieve?  Be as specific as possible.	Development Actions  Action items should be specific, realistic and measurable.	Projected Completion Date	Resources Needed	Measure of Success	Date Completed
Short-term goals (1-2 years)
e.g. Learn more about strategic planning	Participate on the strategic planning workgroup	December 2024	Manager support to nominate me for the work group	Participation and development of strategic planning skills	To be determined.
Long-term goals (3-5 years)
e.g. Obtain a manager position	Develop leadership and management skills through the Certified Public Manager program.	March 2026	Support to attend 2 classes per month during program.	Successful completion of Public Manager Program	To be determined

Additional Information & Resources

Articles

• Fobes Advisor https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/career-development-plan/
• 3 Training Plan Templates to Develop Your Employees (indeed.com)