Create a development plan template

What this achieves

A template is a development plan written once and reused, holding the goals and milestones you would otherwise retype for every person growing towards the same role. Applying it to an employee copies its contents into their own plan, which they and their manager can then edit.

Required role: Administrator.

Steps

Go to Career & Growth → Templates.
Select Create Template.
Enter the Template name.

Example: Engineering Growth Template.
Enter a Description.
Choose the Target Role and the Target Grade the template is aimed at.
Set the Duration (Months).
Under Goals, select Add Goal.
Enter the Goal title, choose a Category, and add a Description.
Under Milestones, select Add Milestone for each checkpoint within that goal.
Repeat for each goal, then select Save Changes.

Goal categories

Option	Description
Skill Building	Reaching a level in a capability.
Certification	Obtaining a formal qualification.
Experience	Doing the work that only doing it teaches.
Education	Formal study.
Project	A defined piece of delivery.
Mentorship	Growth through a mentoring relationship.
Other	Anything the categories above do not cover.

The category is how a plan’s goals are grouped and read later. Use it consistently, because “what are we mostly asking people to do” is only answerable if the categories mean the same thing across templates.

A template with no goals does nothing

The form says this plainly: add at least one goal so that plans created from the template have content. A named template with an empty goal list produces an empty plan, which is worse than no template, because it looks finished.

Example: a template at HC Corp UK Ltd aimed at a senior engineering role carries three goals — a skill-building goal, a project goal, and a mentorship goal — each broken into two or three milestones.

Applying a template

Select Use Template on a template card. You are choosing between two different outcomes.

Option	Description
Development Plan	Clones the goals and milestones into editable plan items. Pick the Employee and a Target end date.
Stretch Assignment	Summarises the template into a single assignment description. Pick the Employee, a Start date, and an End date.

The difference is structural, not cosmetic. A plan arrives as goals and milestones that can be tracked and completed individually. A stretch assignment arrives as one piece of work with one outcome.

Example: applying the engineering template to James Whitfield as a development plan gives Olivia Bennett three goals to review with him. Applying it as a stretch assignment gives him one assignment to accept or decline.

Managing templates

Option	Description
Duplicate	Copies the template, so a variant can be built without disturbing the original.
Archive	Retires the template. Archived templates appear on the Archived tab.
Activate	Returns an archived template to use.

Deleting a template removes it, and the confirmation states that plans already created from it are not affected. That is the important guarantee: a plan is a copy, not a link, so editing or deleting the template never changes a plan somebody is working.

The corollary is that fixing a mistake in a template does not fix it in the plans already created from it. Those have to be corrected one at a time.

What happens next

Plans created from a template behave exactly like plans created by hand — goals can be added, edited, and linked to a skill, competency, or course, and progress is tracked against milestones. The template stays where it is, ready for the next person, and changes to it apply only from the next time it is used.