Towards an Approach to Formulating Personal Development Plan for Developers Based on Competency Framework and Data Mining

Companies face difficulties in managing employees’ professional growth due to the large variety of career paths available in the IT industry, as well as their high degree of flexibility and unpredictability. In this regard, a personal development plan is used to manage the career advancement of developers. However, managers struggle to create plans that align with employees’ professional aspirations. A competency framework was developed to increase relevancy of the plans by providing a comprehensive view of possible career paths for developers and required competencies. The framework was implemented in a software development company to assess its validity. It was discovered that a significant proportion of developers had competencies related to communication, project teamwork, requirements analysis, as well as to solving technical tasks such as programming and debugging.