How to Generate a Development Plan Report in Acorn

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Track employee growth with a development plan report

The problem with traditional performance reviews is that they rarely provide any actionable development outcomes for employees. Ideally, performance management should be supporting employees’ career progress, but that’s not possible without a development plan. And simply having a development plan isn’t enough if you aren’t meaningfully keeping track of them.

In this guide, we’ll cover how you can track and report on development plan progress using our PLMS platform to better support your workforce’s development and progression.

What is a development plan?

For employees, a development plan outlines the capabilities they need to develop and how, whether that’s through a course, shadowing a peer, or receiving coaching. For managers, it helps them track how their direct reports are progressing so they can offer support and development opportunities as needed.

Why tracking development plans is important

77% of companies have lost talent due to a lack of career development, and if you’re not tracking development plans within your organization, you’ve got no idea if your people a) have them, or b) if they’re even effective.

Visible development plans give employees a clear path forward and managers a live coaching dashboard. It provides your people with the means to meet goals, ensures learning targets capability gaps, and creates a line-of-sight to career pathways.

Those career pathways can and should look different for all. Not everyone wants to climb the corporate ladder or become people leaders. In the past, career mobility has more or less been entirely linear—and vertical—when in reality, it should also include lateral moves to best suit individuals’ career goals and interests.

People are more likely to stay with your company if they can see a future for themselves in terms of internal mobility, which is why providing personalized development plans is so crucial.

Using Acorn, development plan reports enable this in three ways:

Identifying users who don’t currently have a development plan, so that one can be assigned.

Tracking individual and team progress through their development plans, highlighting where managers should be offering further support (if any).

Evaluating completion rates to guide capability uplift strategy.

How to generate a capability development plan report

To generate a gap analysis report using our platform, you’ll first need:

The Capabilities module switched on

A connected LMS, not necessarily Acorn

A capability framework, your own or pulled from our Capability Library.

The ability to generate reports is limited to administrators, supervisors, and reporting officers.

Step 1: Select new capability development plan report

Through your Admin menu, scroll down to Reporting and click Reports. Select New Report from the top of the dashboard, and choose Development Plan Report from the list. The report should generate automatically, but it can take longer if there’s a lot of data.

Screenshot of the Reporting Dashboard in Acorn

Step 2: Understanding the report

The report will be broken into two parts: 

A pie chart showing the percentage of users who do or don’t have active development plans and whether their development plans are in progress or completed.

A list view of each user and details about their development plan.

You can use the filters under the list view to sort and display data based on specific users or the status of their development plan. This makes it easier to find people who don’t have one or are currently progressing through theirs so managers can offer targeted support.

The detailed list shows you:

The status of users’ development plans (e.g., in progress, completed, or no plan)

Each user’s completion progress through their plan

Users’ active or past development plans (if any). Viewing their development plans will show you their assigned capabilities and proficiency levels, as well as any associated learning content. In particular, past development plans can show what training employees have done before and how it improved their performance from there.