Are Individual Development Plans Still Relevant?

It’s that time of the year again. Managers are chasing employees to complete their Individual Development Plans (IDPs). Employees are trying to remember what they wrote in last year’s plan. HR is sending reminders. L&D is collecting spreadsheets, updating trackers, and scheduling review meetings.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, someone is probably copying last year’s development goal and changing “2026” to “2027”.

Sound familiar?

IDPs were designed with good intentions. They help employees identify development needs, set career goals, and take ownership of their growth. In theory, everyone understands what skills they need to develop, how they will develop then, and what comes next.

But here’s the uncomfortable questions: Are IDPs genuinely building the capabilities our organisations need, or have they become another annual HR exercise that consumes time without delivering enough strategic value?

Because in a world where skills are changing rapidly, business priorities keep shifting, and AI is reshaping how work gets done, an annual development plan may not be enough.

Perhaps the problem isn’t individual development itself. Perhaps it’s the way we have been managing it.

The Problem: A Lot of Planning, Not Always a Lot of Progress

Let’s be fair. IDPs can be valuable when they are connected to meaningful development opportunities, supported by managers, and reviewed regularly. The problem starts when completing the plan becomes the objective.

Employees identify three development areas. Managers approve them. L&D recommends some courses. Everyone signs off.

And then?

The plan sits quietly in a spreadsheet until the next performance review.

Meanwhile, employees’ responsibilities change, business priorities shift, and new skills become important. The development goals agreed in January may no longer reflect what the employee actually needs by August.

This creates three challenges for HR and L&D.

First, administrative workload. Managing individual plans across hundreds or thousands of employees requires coordination, follow-ups, reviews, and reporting. That’s a considerable amount of effort before anyone has even started learning.

Second, limited visibility of workforce capability. Hundreds of completed IDPs do not automatically tell leadership whether the organisation is developing the skills needed to achieve its strategic objectives.

Third, the gap between planning and application. An employee may complete every activity listed in their IDP without becoming demonstrably more effective at work.

A completed plan is evidence of planning. It is not necessarily evidence of progress.

And if L&D is spending more time chasing forms than developing organisational capability, something deserves a rethink.

Why Traditional IDPs May No Longer Be Enough

1. They Focus on Individuals, While Business Challenges Require Collective Capability

Individual development matters, but organisations rarely succeed through individual development alone.

Imagine a company preparing to adopt AI across its operations. Employees need different skills depending on their roles, but the organisation also needs broader capabilities. AI literacy, critical thinking, data interpretation, change readiness, and responsible technology use.

If every employee develops independently through a separate IDP, L&D may struggle to identify common skill gaps and prioritise development at scale.

A more strategic approach asks: What capabilities does the business need, which roles require them, and how can we develop those capabilities across the workforce?

Individual goals can still fit into this picture. They simply become part of a bigger capability strategy, rather than the entire strategy.

2. Annual Plans Cannot Keep Up with Changing Skills

The future of work is not waiting politely for the next performance review cycle. Roles evolve. Technology changes. New responsibilities emerge. Employees move between projects and teams.

A rigid, once-a-year IDP process may struggle to keep pace.

L&D needs more dynamic ways to identify skills gaps, recommend relevant learning and adjust development priorities as business needs change. This is where skills-based workforce planning becomes important. Instead of relying only on job titles and annual development conversations, organisations can increasingly focus on the skills they have, the skills they need, and the pathways that help people move between them.

The objective isn’t to abandon planning. It’s to make development planning responsive enough to remain useful.

3. Completing Learning Activities Doesn’t Guarantee Capability

Another familiar IDP goal: “Attend a leadership programme.” Wonderful! But what happens afterwards?

Did the employee become a better coach? Are they having more effective conversations with their team? Can they manage conflict more confidently?

The course is an activity. The behaviour change is the outcome we actually want.

When IDPs focus heavily on courses attended and activities completed, L&D risks confusing participation with capability development. A stronger approach combines learning with workplace application, manager coaching, practical assignments, and feedback.

Because nobody becomes a better leader simply by collecting certificates. If that were true, every office would be overflowing with exceptional managers.

So, Should We Abandon IDPs?

Not necessarily.

IDPs can still support career conversations, personal aspirations, and targeted development. They are particularly useful when employees have clear development needs and managers actively support their progress.

But the traditional IDPs should not be the centrepiece of an organisation’s learning strategy simply because it has always been there.

Instead, HR and L&D leaders should consider shifting towards a more integrated approach built around:

· Skills-based development: Identify current and future capability requirements

· Role-based learning pathways: Connect development to the skills required for specific roles and career move

· Personalised learning recommendations: Help employees discover relevant learning without requiring every development decision to begin with a form

· Continuous development conversations: Replace the annual paperwork ritual with regular discussions about performance, aspirations, and changing priorities

· Learning analytics: Monitor participation, skill development, and workplace application, not just the number of completed plans

· Manager enablement: Give managers practical tools to coach employees and reinforce learning on the job.

The goal is to preserve what makes individual development valuable while reducing the administrative machinery surrounding it.

Less paperwork. More progress.

How Nixfon Learning Can Help with the Transition

At Nixfon Learning, we help organisations move towards a more strategic, connected approach to learning and capability development.

Our Professional Services team works with HR and L&D to align learning initiatives with business priorities, design meaningful learning journeys, and implement technology that supports development at scale.

Through our services and solutions, we can help organisations:

· Review their existing learning strategy to identify where traditional IDP processes create unnecessary administration or fail to connect with business outcomes

· Design role-based learning pathways that connect employee development with required capabilities, career opportunities, and organisational priorities.

· Use learning technology more strategically through platforms such as Docebo, supporting structured pathways, relevant learning content, reporting, and more accessible development experiences.

· Connect skills development with learning experiences by curating content libraries and developing custom learning that addresses identified capability gaps.

· Strengthen learning analytics so L&D can gain better visibility into participation, development, progress, and opportunities for improvement.

· Support change management and adoption to help managers and employees embrace a more continuous, practical approach to development.

The objective isn’t to replace every IDP with another shiny new process. It’s to help L&D spend less time managing development paperwork and more time enabling the capabilities that move the business forward.

The Bottom Line

Individual development will always matter. People need opportunities to grow, explore their potential, and prepare for what comes next.

But the way we organise that development must evolve.

If your IDP process requires months of chasing, reviewing, and reporting, yet provides little visibility into whether your workforce is becoming more capable, it may be time to question the return on that effort.

The future of L&D is not about producing more development plans. It’s about developing the right capabilities, at the right time, for the right reasons.

And if we can achieve that with fewer spreadsheets and fewer reminder emails, I suspect nobody will be asking for the old process back.

Till we meet again in the next episode!

About the author

Hazie Halim has more than 15 years of experience in Talent Management Solution and L&D Tech. Her approach has never been about the technology; it has always been about the people in the industry. She understands HR & L&D, she understands the pain and the stress, and she understands the fear and reluctance of system integration drama. Combining these has allowed her to be compassionate when sharing her experience and knowledge during project implementation. She is passionate about making the HR & L&D experts look good in front of their stakeholders. Their win is her win.

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