Understanding SAP SuccessFactors Career Development Planning

Watch the video to get started on SAP SuccessFactors Career Development Planning unit.

SAP SuccessFactors Career Development Planning (CDP) enables employees to benefit from a wide range of employee development and career planning activities, and provides managers with standardized methods to track the success of their direct reports. Career Development Planning includes the following:

• Development Plans

• Career Worksheets

• Career Paths

• Opportunity Marketplace

• Mentoring

Career Development Planning provides many important benefits, such as:

• Focusing on engaging and retaining top talent by helping employees build career development plans and track their progress.
• Allowing for new growth and development opportunities with an AI-enabled guided experience powered by talent intelligence.
• Empowering employees to plan their careers through identifying job roles that are of interest and researching the competencies and skills necessary to do those jobs well.

Career Development Planning also integrates with SAP SuccessFactors Succession and SAP SuccessFactors Learning.

The Development Plan is the page where Employees and Managers can add, view, and update their development goals. These are the goals that users set up to help them not only develop in their current roles, but also develop for future positions.

The Development Goal Plan is an important component of Career Development Planning (CDP), and offers the following benefits:

• Enables key players to create actionable plans that address career goals.
• Analyzes progress in one central place, similar to an online worksheet.
• Allows users to enter, edit, and track development objectives and learning activities directly online.
• Benefits employees’ personal development, career planning, and job satisfaction.
• Offers managers standardized methods to keep their reports on the right track.

Watch the video to learn how to add goals to your development plan.

Development goals can be composed of several fields, including custom fields. The most frequently used fields are as follows:

• Name
• Measure of success
• Status
• Start and due date
• Competencies
• Comments

Development Goals can be created in a couple of different ways:

• You can create development goals using generative AI. Write a brief description/prompt of what you’d like to achieve with your goal, and the main fields will be created for you. The Generative AI feature is only available with a SAP AI Unit License.
• You can create development goals from scratch.
• You can create development goals by copying them from another goal plan.

Comments and Continuous Performance Activities can be added to each goal to help employees complete them.

The competencies field type links a development goal to one or more attributes (competencies and skills) that the employee is trying to develop. Adding attributes to development goals also links the development goals to roles within the Career Worksheet. Only one competencies field is allowed per development goal, but multiple attributes can be added to each goal.

Development goals can also have one or more learning activities associated to them. They can be added directly from the development goal. These activities can come from the catalog or users can add custom learning activities. If you are using an integrated system with the LMS, these learning activities can tie directly to a course in the LMS.

The Career Worksheet allows employees to select a future role and then compare their current competencies and skills with the ones required for the future role. From the Career Worksheet, employees can compare their last competency rating with the expected rating for their roles. Users can also add, edit, and remove development goals directly from the Career Worksheet and they will be updated on the Development Plan.

Users can add target roles that they are interested in by browsing through all roles. Or they can select from Suggested Roles, which provides a list of roles based on their competencies, targeted roles, career paths, and roles selected by peers.

The Role-Readiness meter automatically calculates the percentage of competencies met divided by the total number of competencies required for the role and turns it into a percentage.

If competencies are not met because they have not been evaluated yet, the employee can trigger a Role Readiness form from the Career Worksheet to evaluate their readiness for the competencies.

Watch the video to learn how to use the Career Worksheet.

The Career Worksheet has been redesigned to improve the user experience as they’re managing their current and target roles and the associated skills and attributes.

The new experience starts from the Growth Portfolio, where users can preview the information about their current role and target roles in the Roles and Aspirations section. The information includes top skills and attributes they've already achieved or they need to improve, and their readiness for a role. Choosing Explore Career Options directs users to a page where they can explore recommended career roles.

Users can dive deeper into each target role to discover which attributes they’ve already mastered for the role, and which attributes they need to improve upon. With an AI units license, users can also leverage generative AI capabilities to gain insights into development actions they can take towards their target role.

The Career Path displays information about the expected path for a position or various positions. Administrators or other assigned roles (HR managers, for example) are responsible for creating or managing Career Paths. Employees utilize the paths as visual next steps in career progression or transition.

If end users select a role from the Career Worksheet that is included in a career path, they will be able to select a link to open the career path. When employees review the career path, they will see a star for roles that are already selected in the career worksheet. They will be able to add or remove roles from the career path.

Mentoring is partnering with a more experienced colleague to enhance knowledge, skills, and self-awareness in a certain area.

Through Career Development Planning, you can formalize your mentoring process by using the program wizard to identify details, determine mentor and mentee groups, and set timelines for each individual program. Mentoring supports the creation and administration of mentoring programs, with automated recommendations and matching.

Most organizations have mentoring programs but no integrated way to administer them. Without an automated process, hours of work are required to match mentors and mentees by hand or import data and configure niche solutions. Setting up mentoring programs is easy with SAP Success Factors Mentoring, and the Mentoring solution is integrated with the entire SAP SuccessFactors suite.

A variety of program options exist to meet your organization's flexibility or structure level:

• Supervised: In supervised matching, a matching job will run based on your preference and configuration. The administrator can review and edit the matches. The program dates strictly follow the program process, for example, mentor sign-up and starts.
• Unsupervised: In an unsupervised matching, the system provides guidance but mentees make direct requests to mentors. The program dates are also more flexible in unsupervised programs, for example, mentor sign-ups can continue even after mentee sign-up starts.
• Open Enrollment:Open enrollment programs do not have strict dates, and are open to all or a subset of the company. Users can be mentors, mentees or both at the same time. This option allows you to keep mentoring programs open at all times and allow self-registration.

Once the program type is selected, mentoring admins have the option to define the mentoring program details (program name and description, owner, dates, and so on.), select the mentors and the mentees, define the criteria for the sign-up form, and review the summary.

Users can select from the open enrollment programs, the programs they have been invited to, and those programs they are already participating in as a mentor or mentee using the Mentoring page. Users can also review their matches and their mentoring preferences.