How to get the most out of your Personal Development Plan

Personal Development Plans – or PDPs – can be a valuable tool for career development. But the tricky part, in my experience, is making them stick.

How do you make the most of a PDP, and really use it to understand your motivations, develop your strengths, and make progress in your career?

With these questions in mind I spoke with Kerryn Higgins, a Controls and Assurance Manager in HR. She’s been with us seven years, and in that time she’s made great use of PDPs to develop her career. Drawn from her experience, here are Kerryn’s top PDP tips, and a little insight into the role they’ve played in her journey so far.

1. Use your PDP to map out possibilities

‘When I started at RBS, honestly, I had no idea what I wanted to be. I didn’t join thinking I was going into risk or change risk, or anything like that. Something about HR appealed to me, but that’s as far as it went. My first job was in the Risk & Quality team, supporting with pre-employment screening checks.

‘It was about six months in when I wrote my first PDP. I started by writing down what I enjoyed most about the role, and using this to map out possible career routes with my manager’s help. There were several paths I realised I could go down – people management, projects or risk. I think it was the relationship building part of all of them that I enjoyed.

‘The PDP, for me, has always been a tool for looking ahead and exploring possibilities. It’s about learning what opportunities are out there, mapping where you want to be, and what you’ll need to take you there.

‘I absolutely love my present job, but I still use our career website as an eye opener. Not because I’m looking for another job, but just to see what’s possible in the future. I’ll think, ‘OK that job sounds interesting, what skills do I have that map to it, and what don’t I have that I’d need to develop?’ That’s how things find their way onto my PDP.’

2. Make it your own

‘If someone just gave you a PDP to work on, I don’t think anyone would ever do it. It has to be yours. Your thoughts, your goals, your motivations. And you have to be the one driving it. Equally, I don’t think PDPs should be mandatory; it has to be a personal choice. Managers, mentors, colleagues can all help, but fundamentally it has to come from you.

‘For me, this means making time to commit to it, both inside and outside of work: keeping it updated, making sure actions get done, and giving it serious thought. But it also means that you can have fun with a PDP. There are templates you can easily use, but it doesn’t have to be a formal document. I came up with my own model through trial and error. There’ll be factors in common, but you can experiment and find the approach that feels right for you.

‘Personally, I’ve found that the SMART technique is a great thing to build in. Set goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed, and you can’t go far wrong.

‘And it doesn’t all have to be work related. If you want it to, a PDP can incorporate just about anything. I have a part of my plan which covers life outside of work. With my manager, we just discuss the professional part, but he knows that I have a wider plan too. I find it really helps in terms of keeping a healthy work-life balance, and understanding my priorities.’

3. Don’t be afraid to ask for support

‘Once you’re the one driving it, it’s amazing to see how many people are happy to help with your goals and share their knowledge.

‘I’m fortunate that I’ve had great managers who have fully supported me with my PDP, and taken time to talk it through with me. I think that’s a big part of what good people management is about, and we’ve got lots of that here.

‘Again, it’s something you have to be proactive about. I make a point of booking a meeting with my manager once a fortnight to discuss personal development. Sometimes it’ll just be a check in or sometimes we’ll talk for longer, and get into some really interesting conversations. The important thing is that this meeting is on your personal development. Try not to start discussing current workload, which can easily happen.

‘Your manager can’t guess how you want to develop, but once you talk them through your PDP, they’ll be able to provide tangible help. For example, in my early PDPs, one of my first goals was to get more project experience. I tried lots of different things, and it was my manager who spotted a Project Management secondment opportunity, and helped me with my application. It was probably because I was working on that in my PDP that I got the job, and it’s hugely helped me in my current role.’

4. Consider bringing some Risk to your PDP

‘Maybe it’s not the first thing you’d think of adding to your PDP, but there are some really interesting development opportunities to do with Risk.

‘Just to give you a flavour of that, I work on the HR Controls & Assurance team and my role involves providing guidance on our major change programmes in HR. I work with Programme Managers to make sure we’re managing risk throughout the full programme life-cycle.

‘What I love about it is the sheer variety of projects and people I get to work with, and the relationships you build in the process. Risk can sometimes have a negative connotation but in reality it’s what we all do naturally everyday, in and out of work. Like crossing a road. You’d never cross a road without looking both ways.

‘Risk is a part of life, and nothing could remove it entirely. Our role is to understand it – to make sure we’re taking everything into account, and making sound decisions based on what level of risk we’re prepared to accept.’

5. Embrace change and new challenges

‘You have to be honest with yourself. Figure out what skills you need to develop to meet your long-term goals and be prepared to adapt.

‘If I look back over my last six years of PDPs, in the first five of them I was writing the same thing again and again: I wanted to build confidence presenting. But eventually I got to the point where I’d done plenty of presentations and I was getting positive feedback back for them, so why was I still writing that down? I had to dig deeper to understand my motivations, and say to myself – it’s time to move on to new challenges.

‘Having a way of marking when you’ve reached a goal and acknowledging your successes really helps with this. It’s a part of the process of evaluation that helps you understand what challenges to take on next, and actually having it on paper helps you see things about yourself you might otherwise miss.

‘Maybe part of this is embracing the fact that your goals, and what you need from a PDP, will change. Your PDP should evolve with you. So be prepared to use it to try new things and take yourself out of your comfort zone.

‘Ultimately, it comes back to understanding your motivations. Career progress shouldn’t be an end in itself. It’s not about climbing a ladder. It’s about finding out what it is that makes you happy, what you want to do most, and using a PDP to help you achieve that.’