What is a Personal Development Plan?
Every mentee has either some or no idea of what they want to do in the future. The Personal Development Plan helps in order to concretise this idea and develop a sustainable professional perspective. During the learning process, the mentees deal with the following questions: Where am I now? Where do I want to go? What do I have to do to get there? What measures should be taken to support my development and realise my plans? In general, the Personal Development Plan is a collection of decisions and agreements that were made. It is a competence management tool that helps to find a balance between the development of competences and potential employment opportunities. This considers the level of a mentees’s current competences and the plan for the future in terms of the needed competences with regard to the specific employment opportunities.
How is a Personal Development Plan created?
The information regarding the mentees’ competences and goals derive from the learning projects talent diagnosis and expert hearing. Further input regarding employment opportunities derive from either the founders’ workshop or the employment radar.
The idea of the talent diagnosis is to get an overview of both the employment opportunities in a region and the available talents of the mentee. How great is their potential? What can and what do they want to achieve? The market and talent are contrasted in an expert hearing. The main focus is the question where and how the mentees can find employment opportunities based on their individual talent diagnosis in their region.
During the talent diagnosis, a strengths profile is developed for each mentee. This profile is divided into the areas of personality, cognitive abilities, knowledge and interests while the focus is on the strengths and not on the deficits. On this basis, suitable future vocational activities are elicited in the context of the employment radar.
The talent diagnosis is carried out in the following steps:
- Introduction to talent diagnostics
- Curriculum vitae
- Talent tests
- Life portrait
- Evaluation in individual discussions
The result of the talent diagnosis is an individual talent profile for each mentee, which is used to reflect on career prospects of the existing potentials and strengths.
In an expert hearing, the mentees career perspectives are reflected as well as feedback and recommendations are given, which form the basis for the further development of the Personal Development Plan. Mentees are encouraged to proactively set goals and to express and pursue their interests. By matching the qualification requirements of the vocational project with the existing formally and informally acquired competences, specific competence development measures can be recommended afterwards.
The expert hearing is conducted in the following steps:
- Introduction to the rules of the expert hearing
- Preparing the mentees for the presentation of their personal projects at the expert hearing
- Presentation within the framework of the expert group
- Feedback from the experts and documentation
By involving experts and supporters, the mentees end up with a professional and sustainable basis for the long-term development of their Personal Development Plan.
If entrepreneurial potential or plans have been identified, the concept of the founder workshop can be used to promote entrepreneurial thinking and action. With the support of mentors, the mentees learn to further develop their business idea and to work out a business plan step by step. The founder workshop comprises eight learning sprints:
- Development of the business idea
- Analysis of the market
- Corporate strategy
- Marketing: The 4-P model
- Online marketing and communication tools
- Production / Procurement / Logistics / Management / Legal form
- Financial plan
- Summary (elevator pitch)
The result of the founder workshop is a fully developed business plan. The mentees gain insight into the most important steps of a business start-up, including essential (digital) strategies for the implementation of their business plan.
The concept of the employment radar is used to identify, define and localize the entire potential of employment opportunities in a region. The information obtained is compiled, processed and presented in such a way that the young people can take clues from it regarding their concrete employment potential. Guiding questions here can be, for example: What employment potential arises from new trends and lifestyle models? What employment opportunities (services and products) can young people generate from their own innovations? How large are the resulting regional markets? In this context, employment opportunities within the existing job structures can be recorded as well as unrecognized entrepreneurial employment potentials that aim to develop new services and products (see fig. 6) can be tapped with the help of trend analysis.
The implementation of the employment radar with the young people takes place in seven steps:
- Analysis of economic data
- Uncovering societal megatrends
- Reflecting on employment opportunities against the background of job families
- Customer segmentation on the basis of Sinus Meta Milieus
- Customer localization
- Identification and development of services
- Determining the market potential through appropriate interviews
The result of the learning project is a personal employment radar for each young person and the development of three service or product ideas with a regional connection.
What does the Personal Development Plan look like?
All results from the learning projects flow into the Personal Development Plan. It consists of four different main parts, the Overview, the Talent Matching, the Talent Profile and the Product Services.
Overview
The Overview page has a timeline to plan milestones for the mentee’s own project. Developmental goals which should be described according to the SMART method. It also has a list of the competences with a separation between given and aspired competences. Also, the development activities and tasks are displayed that sum up the open to do’s as well as doing and done. At the end there is a summary of the most important agreements that have been made.
Talent Profile and Product Service
While both Talent Profile and Product Service consist of Educational Background, Life Portrait and specific requirements the difference here is, that the talent profile contains the given competences and skills of the mentee and the product service focuses of the prospect employment opportunities. There information that display the needed (Product Service) and the given competences (Talent Profile) are then furtherly used in the Talent Matching part.
Talent Matching
Lastly within the Talent Matching both before mentioned parts of talent profile and product service are being put together and all given and required competences result in an individual needs analysis. This allows for the mentee to see, which specific competences that are needed are already there and which ones they still need to improve.
Summary
In general, the Personal Development is an important tool to gain insights in what developmental steps can be taken to achieve the wanted result and which specific competences need improvement. Through working on the different learning projects, the Personal Development Plan can be continuously updated and refined and the needed competences can be acquired step by step.
