Growth plans
A number, and the list behind it.
"How close am I?" deserves a better answer than encouragement. Pick a target and get a readiness percentage, the expectations still missing, and the skills that would unlock them.
The question you cannot dodge twice
Every report worth keeping eventually asks where their career is going. The first time, "let's talk about it" is a fine answer. The second time it is the reason they start taking recruiter calls.
What they are actually asking is narrower and more answerable than it sounds: what specifically would have to be true for me to get there, and how far off am I? That is a question with a real answer, once somebody has written down what the target asks for.
Readiness is one number and a colour
Not a twelve-page scorecard nobody reads twice. Every expectation the target role carries is weighted by where the person currently stands on it, and the result is a percentage you can say out loud in a one-to-one.
Under 30% — this is a direction, not a plan for this year.
30–69% — genuinely in progress, and the gap list is what the next two quarters are for.
70% and up — time to start making the case, with the evidence attached.
The number comes from behaviours alone. Skills are shown beside it as context, because a missing skill is a thing to go and learn, where a missing behaviour is a thing to go and do.
Careers are not a ladder, so this is not one
Roles connect to other roles in whatever direction makes sense: up, sideways, or into something genuinely different. A designer moving into research, an engineer moving into management and back out again — all of those are real career moves and none of them are rungs.
So a target can be any role, and you can compare readiness against several before committing. The sideways option is often the honest answer, and a system that can only go up cannot offer it.
- Set a target for a report — deliberately a managerial act, not a self-declaration
- Compare readiness against any candidate role before you pick one
- The person can see their own plan and their own number, always
Skills with one number on them, and it is yours
Your report claims the skills they hold. You set the level, on a three-point scale, against work you watched. A skill that is claimed but not levelled says something useful and different from one you have assessed — "we have not looked at this yet" is a conversation, not a gap.
1 · Learning
Can apply it with some support. Handles the standard cases.
2 · Proficient
Works independently. Handles the complex cases.
3 · Expert
Teaches others. The person everyone routes the hard version to.
Three levels, not ten, because a scale where nobody can defend the difference between a six and a seven is a scale that produces arguments rather than information. And nobody levels themselves — setting a level is a separate permission from claiming a skill, on purpose.
You never sit down to write one
This is the part that matters. Development plans do not fail because managers write bad ones — they fail because a document written in January is stale by March and nobody reopens it.
Here there is no document. The plan is a live read of what the target asks for against what has actually been evidenced, so it is correct every time it is opened and there is nothing to maintain. When a behaviour reaches consistently demonstrated, the skills it depends on rise with it, and the milestone lands on the person's timeline on its own.
The practical upshot: a growth plan is something you read together in a check-in, not something you promise to update afterwards and then do not.
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