Completing a Personal Development Plan (PDP) is another component in your development arsenal and one that is used by professional bodies your career progression to determine membership level.
What is it?
A PDP is usually produced in a table format and is used in conjunction with the Learning Log. Whereas the Learning Log is about past events, what you have learnt, a PDP is about future events, what you want or need to learn.
Your Learning Log can be produced in any format you prefer but, your PDP must be a written document as it forms a planned record of development.
What does it contain?
The PDP is a series of questions that needed to be answered in order to make it clear to someone reading your PDP how you have or will complete the learning you need. The questions you ask yourself are
- What is it that I need/want to learn?
- How will I achieve this?
- What resources will I require?
- Whose help will I need?
- What will my success criteria be?
- What is the time scale?

Set out your PDP similar to the one above and include your name, company, and the start and finish dates that the PDP refers to. Create the table in a word processor and layout the page in landscape to give you room to see all the columns. As you type the table will expand to fit the text.
The questions themselves are self-explanatory but, I will go through them here.
- What so I want/need to learn? – This is a straight forward enough question but, you do need to think it through. Does the want satisfy the need? Will it be of benefit to your career to learn it? Or is it something you just want to learn? Learning the ins and outs of Excel to an advanced level if you deal with a lot of data is want and a need if it will ease your job. Learning to skydive might be a want but, if you are in an office every day is it a need?
- How will I achieve this? – This is where we look at the logistics of the learning. How are you going to learn? Will you attend a course, a seminar, an exhibition or read a book or articles on the subject? Choose which the best option for you is.
- What resources will I require? – Think about what you will need, include your time here because learning takes time! Who will you want to speak to to learn or get information? Will you need time away from work? Access to the internet, money. All these determine the medium you can use to learn.
- Whose help will I need? – Depending on what you undertake as your learning be it a qualification or a secondment to a different department or different part of the country or even world, you will need the support of your family and your Manager to help you achieve the learning.
- What will my success criteria be? – How will you measure your success? This is important with any learning, if you learn something new and never use it the learning has been a waste of your time. You need to be able to measure the success or otherwise of the learning you undertook. Did it get you that job or the promotion, has your job become easier, have your outputs increased. All valid questions that should be asked of all training. Training has no impact on what you do or act is a waste of time.
- What is the time scale/target completion date? – Put an end date on your learning task if you can. Some things can have ‘on-going’ next to them depending on the subject. If you wanted to learn about Employment Law for example, you could put ‘on-going’ next to it as it is always being updating so an ‘expert’ is an expert today, tomorrow their knowledge may be out of date!
At the beginning I said that the Learning Log is related to the PDP and this is because the Learning Log will feed in items that you want to learn or learn more about. The PDP will feed into the Learning Log as you will be learning so will need to record it. The two documents are linked and to do one requires to the other to be completed as well.
AiTraining Consultancy provides a variety of resources for your Personal Development. For more information visit www.aitraining.net or email andy@aitraining.net or call +44 (0) 20 3286 5165.

