Employee development plan software is meant to draw a clear line between development activity and the goals a business is trying to reach. Most organizations have no shortage of courses, assessments, and leadership programs. What many lack is a connection between that activity and what the business needs next. This article explains what to look for in employee development plan software and how the Optimum platform powers Loxis to keep people, development, and business goals connected.
Key Takeaways
- Development plans lose value when they drift from business goals. Goals, skills, and training records are easy to store. Keeping them connected and current is the hard part.
- Good employee development plan software ties every action to a goal. It also brings in skills and assessment information, assigns an accountable owner, and shows progress in context.
- Loxis is designed to connect people, development, and business goals. The workflow runs from a goal, to skills information, to an owned action, to a progress view.
- Optimum supplies the platform underneath. Configurable workflows, role-based access, connected data, and room to adapt help keep information current.
- Ask for a working example before you choose. The best test of any employee development plan software is a real goal carried through to a real action.
Why Development Plans Lose Their Connection to Business Goals
When LearnKey announced that its LIFT UP Professional Development Series is now available through Loxis, their post described the problem well: employee data, training, surveys, and strategy tend to live in separate places, so leaders rarely see them together.
This article picks up where that one stops. It looks at the mechanism behind employee development plan software like Loxis. What has to happen behind the scenes for a business goal, a person’s skills, and a development action to stay connected? And what does Optimum supply to make that possible?
A development plan usually starts with good intentions. A manager and an employee agree on a few areas to grow, maybe a course or a stretch assignment, and the plan gets written down. The trouble starts afterward.
Goals, skills, and training records can all be stored somewhere. The harder part is keeping them connected and current as priorities shift, teams change, and people grow. Consider what typically happens:
- Goals move faster than plans. A priority changes mid-quarter, but the development plan still points at last quarter’s objective.
- Information sits in different places. Assessment results are in one tool, training completions in another, and goals in a planning document. Nobody is responsible for reading them together.
- Ownership is vague. A plan says someone “should” build a skill, but no named person is accountable for the action or for checking whether it happened.
- Progress is measured by activity. A completed course is easy to record. Whether it moved the business toward its goal is much harder to see.
None of these problems come from a lack of effort. They come from information that isn’t connected, and from software that wasn’t built to keep it that way. Closing that gap is the job of employee development plan software.
A completed course is easy to record. Whether it moved the business toward its goal is much harder to see.
What Employee Development Plan Software Should Do
Plenty of tools can store a development plan. Fewer help an organization keep one useful over time. When you evaluate employee development plan software, it helps to look past the feature list and ask what the software does with the information it holds.
Strong employee development plan software should be able to:
- Tie each development action to a business goal, so it’s clear why the action matters.
- Bring in relevant skills and assessment information, so actions fit the people involved rather than being generic.
- Assign an accountable owner for every action, with a clear next step.
- Show progress in context, so leaders can see how an action relates to the goal it supports.
- Adapt to the organization, because every company sets goals, structures teams, and defines roles differently.
That last point is where the technology underneath employee development plan software matters most, and it’s why the relationship between Loxis and Optimum is worth explaining.
How Loxis Connects People, Development and Business Goals
Loxis is the product organizations use. The sequence below shows how employee development plan software can work when it is tied to goals, and how Loxis approaches it.
1. Start With a Business Goal
The sequence begins with something the organization is trying to achieve, for example improving how a particular team handles a type of work. Starting from the goal, instead of from a list of available courses, keeps every later step tied to a reason.
2. Bring In Assessment and Skills Information
Next comes the information that bears on that goal: how the people involved work, and where their skills are strong or thin. This is what lets employee development plan software turn a generic plan into one that fits the team. Organizations looking for software to track employee skills often find that the data exists but isn’t connected to anything that drives action.
3. Turn the Gap Into an Action With an Accountable Owner
The gap between the goal and the current picture becomes a specific development action, such as a course, a coaching conversation, or a stretch assignment, assigned to a named owner. Naming an owner is a small detail that does a lot of work: it makes the action something a person is responsible for, not a suggestion in a document.
4. See Progress Against the Goal
Finally, leaders and owners can see where the action stands against the goal it supports. A progress view that sits next to the goal answers a better question than “did the training happen?” It shows whether the plan is still pointed at what the business needs.
What Optimum Supplies Underneath
Loxis is the product. The Optimum platform is the software it runs on. The workflow above depends on several capabilities at that layer, and they are the same capabilities any employee development plan software needs to stay useful over time.
Configurable Workflows
A goal, an assessment, an action, and a progress check are steps in a process. Optimum is built so processes can be configured to fit how an organization works, instead of forcing the organization to fit the software.
Role-Based Access
Leaders, managers, and individual contributors need different views of the same information. A manager needs to see their team’s actions, while an employee needs to see their own.
One Place for Connected Data
When goals, people information, and development actions live on the same platform, they can be read together instead of reconciled by hand.
Room to Adapt
Goals get rewritten, teams are restructured, and new roles appear. A platform that can be reconfigured, instead of rebuilt, is better suited to keeping information current.
Role-based access matters for another reason: it is a prerequisite for people to trust a system that holds information about them. And flexibility is what makes employee development plan software practical for organizations whose goals don’t stand still.
How to Connect Training to Business Goals
Regardless of the software you use, the logic of connecting training to business goals follows a similar path. If you’re building or rebuilding a process, these steps give you a starting point:
- Write the goal in plain terms. Be specific about what the team or business is trying to achieve and by when.
- Identify the skills and working styles that goal depends on. Compare them with what the team has today.
- Choose actions that address the gap. Training is one option. Coaching, mentoring, job rotation, and changes to who does what are others.
- Name an owner for every action. One person, one next step, one date.
- Review on a regular cadence. Check whether the action is moving the goal, and update the plan when the goal changes.
The hard part is rarely deciding on these steps. It’s keeping them connected as conditions change, which is where employee development plan software earns its place.
What to Ask When Evaluating Employee Development Plan Software
Whether you’re considering Loxis or any other employee development plan software, these questions separate tools that store plans from tools that keep them connected:
- Can every development action be traced back to a specific business goal?
- Does each action have a named, accountable owner and a next step?
- Can the software reflect how your organization is actually structured?
- Who sees what, and how are those permissions set?
- How does information stay current when goals and teams change?
- What can you configure yourself, and what requires the vendor?
- How does the platform treat employee data, and what security standards does it meet?
FAQ
What Is Employee Development Plan Software?
It’s software for creating, assigning, and tracking the actions that help employees build skills and grow in their roles. The more useful versions connect those actions to business goals and to information about skills, so a plan reflects what the organization actually needs.
What Should an Employee Development Plan Include?
At a minimum: a goal the plan supports, the skills or behaviors being developed, specific actions, a named owner for each action, a timeline, and review points to check progress and adjust.
How Do You Connect Training to Business Goals?
Start from the goal, identify the skills it depends on, choose actions that address the gaps, assign owners, and review progress regularly. Employee development plan software helps by keeping these pieces linked as goals and teams change.
How Are Optimum and Loxis Related?
Loxis is the product organizations use to connect people, development, and business goals. Optimum is the platform it runs on, as noted in LearnKey’s partnership announcement.
Development plans fail less often because of effort than because of disconnected information. When goals, skills, and actions live in separate places, keeping them current becomes manual work that rarely gets done.
Good employee development plan software ties each action to a goal, brings in the right skills information, names an owner, and shows progress in context. Loxis is designed around that sequence, and the Optimum platform underneath helps it adapt to the way each organization works.
The best way to judge any tool is to put a real goal to the test and see how far it carries from the goal to an owned action to a progress view.
See Loxis in Action
If you’re evaluating employee development plan software that connects people, development, and goals, look at the product itself. Explore Loxis to learn more or request a demo.