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Growing Skills with Development Assignments

Last Updated on October 24, 2021 – 6:40 pm

Every modern company prefers to attract employees with the proper skills and experience to work for them. However, hiring managers often face a different reality: searching for this kind of employee is like scouring the haystack for a tiny needle. As companies increase their spend toward employee development and training, they also go beyond a few traditional learning opportunities to create effective employee development programs. Training and Development Assignments are one way by which they can achieve this.

Employee development focuses on collaborating with employees to enable them to acquire, develop, improve, and hone existing skills. It aims to build a talent pool to bolster the company’s mission while creating highly engaged employees.

Skills themselves refer to the mix of abilities, experiences, and qualities one may use to get stuff done. Skills may include interpersonal, leadership, and organization skills – so-called  soft skills . Other skills such as accounting, application development, research, and writing are technical skills.

Deliberately improving skills can help employees achieve personal career goals, including earning a promotion or becoming more proficient in specific areas. An employee’s skill set may be necessary to advance in one career or pivot to another. Let’s now turn our attention to how employees can grow skills through development assignments.

Defining Development Assignments

Development or developmental assignments allow employees to take on tasks outside the purview of their primary work assignments. However, their tasks remain well within their functional area.

The idea behind developmental assignments is to grow a workforce adequately qualified to perform current and future career functions with equal skill. Leaders advance more through challenging assignments than by exercising routine competency.

There are plenty of opportunities that emerge when participants take on novel tasks of significant complexity. These developmental tasks can include any of the following:

• unfamiliar responsibilities,
• establishing a new program,  and
• developing solutions to complex multi-factor problems.

Interestingly, developmental assignments may not count much towards a promotion. But, they are critical in increasing skills, knowledge, and experience, which ultimately play a big role in career advancement.

Who Benefits Most from Developmental Assignment Programs?

While the employee seems to be the obvious beneficiary of developmental tasks, the employer stands to gain a lot down the road.

The new skills and experiences that employees garner in seeing out the stretch assignments primarily benefit the employer. These tasks typically last between 3 to 6 months before the employee returns to their primary assignment. During this time, the employee will be stepping outside their comfort zone but on mutually beneficial terms with the company.

As the worker grows professionally, the company can pursue projects using resources that would otherwise not be available.

Developing Developmental Job Assignments

Developmental job assignments should primarily proceed from an employee’s Performance and Development Plan (PDP). However, it should not stop them or the organization from seeking assignments external to this.

It’s important for developmental assignments to be flexible but within a readily identifiable framework of guidelines:

• Clear documentation and approval of the developmental job assignment by hiring and supervising managers and other stakeholders before advertising the assignment.
• Establishment and documentation of learning goals before the employee commences the assignment.
• The form of the developmental assignment may be full-time or part-time.
• The employee doesn’t need to possess all the necessary skills to perform the tasks or project independently. Nevertheless, they need to have an unmistakable aptitude, ability, and copious ambition to conclude the assignment with ample oversight.
• Assignments need to transcend the employee’s current skill level while supporting their growth and  career development . There needs to be a healthy tension between entry-level training and development and the development task in question, for instance.
• The salary of an employee assuming a development assignment remains the same.
• Clear communication that there are no guarantees of future pay increase, promotion, or job change due to this assignment.
• The developmental task may not evolve into a permanent position without competitive recruitment.
• Employees should return to their previous position after the assignment.
• Employees need to wait a specified period (usually six months) before accepting another developmental assignment.
• The line manager and employee should complete a detailed evaluation of the learning experience upon the conclusion of the developmental assignment. This evaluation should go into the employee’s personnel file.
• Development assignments are not official transfers.
• There have to be mutually agreeable reasons for ending a developmental assignment earlier than planned.

A developmental assignment task may end early for various reasons, including an unexpected end to the project, poor attendance, performance issues, or an unreliable employee.

Organizations need to carry the mindset that assignments are development opportunities. They must first understand that they can optimize the ROI from development assignments. It’s feasible if their operating principles include understanding the value proposition of development assignments, establishing effective career path strategies, and understanding the proper use of global mobility.

Employees and employers need to be keen on developmental opportunities if they will both be relevant in an increasingly dynamic age.

If you want to learn more about employee development, you can check out our blog posts  here .

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About the author: andrea pejoska.

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The Power Of The 4R Document

Published: March 25, 2020

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The 4R document is one of the most powerful assets you can create for your business. You already know It’s critical to have intention with your hiring.

Giving your team members clarity on their role and how it impacts the business is one of the most important things you can do as a leader.

I believe every team member truly wants to do a great job. If they are an under-performer in your eyes there is a great chance they aren’t clear on their role or how they can influence other team members’ work or important business metrics.

In my experience, you won’t hear about an employee having a lack of clarity on their role until reviews happen or compensation adjustments are due.

It can be really hard to know the right path forward for them if you don’t work with them on a day to day basis.

Why Use A 4R Document?

At Carrot, we implemented the 4R doc around 2017 and it’s been an incredibly valuable tool for us.

The 4 “R’s” stand for

• Responsibilities
• Requirements

These are standard sections of hiring documents but can often become boilerplate and non-helpful.

The purpose of the 4R document is to give clear expectations and alignment on what they are required to do.

If they want career advancement they can look at the 4R doc for their next role and see what would be required or expected and start building those skillsets now.

The hardest part of creating one of these documents is the “Results” section. Here are some tips to make a great result section

• The metric MUST be easy to measure and report
• You NEED to have a baseline so they know what has historically been accomplished
• Consider challenging them with a good/better/best model (10% is good but 25% is great)
• The results or metrics must be something they can DIRECTLY impact (not team or company metrics)

When To Create Or Update A 4R Doc

Before you hire a new team member, you should have a 4R document that is agreed upon with all levels of leadership. This allows for alignment and communication on how the role will impact the business. For example, if you want to hire a product marketer, you should make sure the product team and marketing team are clear on where this role will land, the activities they will perform and the metrics they will own.

This will make onboarding the new hire much smoother.

4R docs aren’t static documents. You are allowed to change them. If you are having issues getting results from a team member, you can align around the 4R doc and see why they aren’t able to report results.

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