Jo Detavernier, SCMP, APRAre there any investments that a PR agency or in-house communication department could undertake that are of more critical importance than investments in the training of their staff? Personal development plans help communications professionals gain and maintain the knowledge and skills that they need to stay to do their job and keep current. While they can be a boon to organizations and their staff when administered in a professional manner, personal development plans that are designed or followed up upon in haphazard ways are poised to miss the mark. There is a necessary process that needs to be followed and in what follows, I take a look at what that process looks like. 

 1) Map the requirements for every position

What does a junior account manager in an agency need to master? And what about a senior account manager, a director, or even the partner? In a professional organization,  the knowledge, skills and traits of every position ought to be mapped out meticulously. These requirements will guide the recruitment process and make for objective evaluations of staff performance. They will also (as I will discuss in the next point) inform the personal development plan. For a junior account manager in an agency you could for example decide that they need to understand (among many other things!) how business and trade media work (knowledge), that they need to have the skills to write press releases, pitch stories and supervise freelance copywriters (skills), and that they better be resilient and eager to learn new things (traits).The traits are very much a given and will not change much over a career, so you will need to pay very close attention to whether people have the traits you are looking for at the recruitment stage. Knowledge and skills are easier to acquire and maintain. The personal development plan will focus on both of them. All of what has been said here equally applies to agencies and in-house departments by the way. 

2) Make an action plan for every staff member 

Examen together with the staff how they perform in terms of the knowledge and skills that are required for their position. Are there any gaps where they would do well to pick up new knowledge or skills? Even if all foundational knowledge is in place, just keeping current is a challenge for anyone working in communications nowadays. (Is there really anybody out there who is reading this article and is thinking they have it “covered”? I hope not.) Deciding with staff what needs to be focused on as a matter of high priority and how this should be accomplished, and by when, and how progress should be measured are four of the most important building blocks of the personal development plan. Make sure to not overreach and keep the scope of the plan limited to two or three action points per year. The ways through which staff can learn vary widely: they can shadow a colleague for some time, attend a conference, a seminar, participate in an exchange program or even watch a series of courses on Lynda.When it comes to making time and budgets available, I recommend having everything articulated in clear terms in a policy so everybody knows up front what they can expect and nobody needs to think that a colleague received preferential treatment. 

3) Plugging in knowledge management and marketing 

What follows now is the part that is sometimes forgotten. Your staff made strides gaining knowledge and skills and the company made a considerable investment to make that possible. How can this now be scaled so other staff get to tap into what has been learned?  There are basically two different ways to go about knowledge management: you can have people meet up to exchange “tacit” knowledge in person or you can seek to codify knowledge by ways of reports, slide decks or other formal ways. Luckily you can actually decide to not choose between the two and enjoy the benefits of both. If a junior PR manager just learned about data-driven content marketing, he or she could convene the team to share that knowledge and make himself available for questions during and after that session. This staff could also draft a slide deck to guide the presentation. That deck can now become the codified version of the new knowledge acquired and remain available long after the staff has changed jobs. Finally, and this is only relevant for PR agencies, a learning trajectory could also come with a content marketing plan. I talked about the need to measure whether staff have picked up new knowledge or skills. That measurement can happen through the above mentioned team training, but you could also simply ask a staff to write a series of blog posts or even a white paper on a topic that they took a deep dive on as part of their personal development plan. Staff will consider this content creation trajectory a gratifying way to showcase their knowledge and your company will be one or more valuable content assets richer.

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