Personal Development Planning Overview

Personal Development Planning

Introduction

One of the more important things you can do for yourself is to create a plan for your personal development.  For me the personal development plan is an ongoing activity.  Every 60 to 90 days I review the plan and adjust the plan as needed.

Background

Over the years I have tried to set both personal and career goals for myself.  As I have written before I like to learn and grow.  I use the format of a development plan as a way to help me stay focused.  It has also been a way for me to measure my growth from month to month or year to year.

Today’s blog entry will focus on what is a personal development plan and how to put one in place.  I will be writing a series of blog entries on this topic as it will take several entries to go through all the steps. 

Personal Development Planning

• Identify Need to Change – This is one of the most important criteria to a good development plan.  You need to identify what skill or area you of your life you want to improve.  You can also identify an area or skill that you want to grow or develop.   Do not necessarily think of a list of your weaknesses but rather on a set of skills or competencies that are needed in your job/career or your personal life.
• Accept Change – this is not as simple as it sounds but you need to be willing to change or grow.  Otherwise, you will spend a lot of time on the activity and are not likely to accomplish your goal.
• Create Plan – this is the activity that you go through to write down the details of how to accomplish the goal.    You will want to identify the detailed steps that are needed to get the goal or activity accomplished.   A key to this task is to break the tasks down into enough detail that you understand what each task will accomplish.
• Take Action and Measure Progress (Deming Quality Circle) – one of my favorite models that can be used in a many ways.   This is a model that will help you assess and measure your development plan.  (BTW – I also wrote about this model as one of the steps to help you overcome the “Fear of Failure”.

Here is a diagram that depicts the steps that are needed to put a development plan in place:

Conclusion

I hope this entry helps you to understand the basic steps in putting together a development plan.  I will continue this topic with additional entries to provide more details of the development planning process.  I will be writing detailed steps on each of the four steps in developing a Personal Development Plan.