Employee Development

Employee development is a strategic organizational approach that promotes employee growth and productivity. It applies strategies to increase an employee’s knowledge of the job and supports the employee to develop skills over a period of time. To reduce costly turnover, the organization redefines an employee’s responsibilities and specific job duties. The focus of employee development is to increase the employee’s competencies. This helps an organization achieve its mission and vision. A good job description alone is not enough. Organizations need to create learning and professional development opportunities to increase productivity.

Job Analysis

Employees work on many different types of job tasks each day. Some tasks may be in high demand and more important than others. Employers often conduct a job analysis to determine which job tasks are critical to the success of the position. A job analysis is where an organization takes a deep dive into defining the role, responsibilities, and expectations of their direct support professionals (DSPs) and frontline supervisors.

Assessing Employee Performance

Ongoing feedback to DSPs and frontline supervisors is important for retaining quality employees. Employee performance assessments help the employee understand their strengths as well as areas where additional training or support is needed. Assessing skills regularly allows the organization to understand an employee’s competency, identify skill gaps, and determine training needs. Our Assessing Employee Performance webinar describes methods for assessing employee performance and strategies for developing an employee performance assessment process.  It also previews the competency-based assessment tools available in the DSP Workforce Toolkit.