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Professional Development Strategies: Page 3 of 9

Working on both competence and customer-handling skills improves your customer-service score, which is often the metric that makes or breaks your department's performance evaluation. With customer-service numbers so tightly bound to business objectives, tying this back to your professional development efforts will help enlist support and funding.

In general, a good plan will provide better staff capability, and therefore better IT project capability. "You need someone in the job who can find the efficiencies in that job," Turner says. "You can't buy that."

Finally, think of professional development as a way to tie into upper management's organizational initiatives, such as HPO (High Performance Organization), Balanced Scorecard and Six Sigma. All these plans have staff expectations that go beyond technical skills, and your professional development plan will help deliver on those expectations.

Once you've established the need for a plan, chart a course for each role. It's important to tie plans to jobs, not individuals, as the expectation should never be based on personality, but rather on function.

Most folks like to know where they stand regarding promotion, and a professional development road map conveys that information instantly. From a manager's view, the road map formalizes expectations and prevents misunderstandings. It defines what must be done to achieve the next level. One organization's professional development track for network engineers and consultants is shown on page 64.