IPR – something you can brag about at an interview or in a bar

IPR – something you can brag about at an interview or in a bar

We are on Habr Career we help IT specialists to earn more, and companies to stay abreast of trends in the hiring market.

Recently, we began to implement IPRs in Khabra, and it turned out to be difficult. We became interested in which specialists they are suitable for, how they affect motivation, promotion, and how to collect them so that employees are really interested in using them.

We like to study everything related to professional growth, so we decided to understand the effectiveness of IPR as a tool for development. We hope that the article will help those who want to make an IPR for themselves or create a system of development plans for their team or company.

A team was involved in the study corporate training platform Grade from Yandex Praktikum – it turned out that the guys know how to coolly fill IPRs and collect individual educational tracks for each specialist.

And to make the article more useful, we at Habra did service for compiling IPRin which you can choose a goal, deadlines and plan tasks to achieve the result.

Why did you want to explore with Grade

grade – This is a platform for team training and employee growth. It now has 1000+ skills and the ability to collect training on demand. The product has a full set of tools to download software and hard skills, measure training results or grow employee loyalty.

Each educational track at Grady is assembled individually, so you can study exactly what you need.


Who was contacted for the study: with those who develop IPRs and with those who compose and develop them within companies. These were specialists from the companies Surf.ru, Yandex, Selectel, Gazpromneft, Ozon, Khabr, Lanit, KVINT, one secret bank and one large integrator.

But what is your IPR?

We specifically started the entire interview with a request to describe what IPR is – it seemed to us that this tool on the market has different definitions.

Most often, IPR is deciphered as an individual development plan, less often as an individual development program.

IPR is a development plan that adapts to the individual goals of a person/team/practice. A cumulative artifact with tasks, clear acceptance criteria for tasks, a clear evaluation form and results, within the framework of which the specialist will move towards his goals and close his growth points – hard and soft.

Anastasia Rekshinska

Head of Grade:

This is a strategic project developed jointly by the employee and his manager, which includes goal setting (the final goal – career, business or both, ideally – clearly measurable, you can even use SMART), a certain timing and, of course, the resources necessary for implementation .

If that’s not clear, here are a few more definitions to learn:

  • IPR (individual development program) is goals (built together with a mentor) and results (what is given to management, achievements). The results include all achievements, pet projects that were not in the plans, a description of the specialist’s role in some task. The result of the IPR is the resume of a specialist.

  • IPR – goals + decomposition of the goal into tasks (the reason why the task appeared + the task itself) + criteria for accepting tasks + useful materials and tools that will help achieve the goal.

  • IPRs are development milestones that must be aligned with employee desires and company goals.

What does IPR consist of?

An individual development plan includes several elements. Below is a complete list, but keep in mind that different companies may exclude some components from it:

We know from experience that it is more effective to collect educational tracks for a specific request, so that learning is interesting and fast. To do this, you can collect IPR according to ready-made templates or use various services – there is a constructor for spot training Grade teams.

IPR is something I will take with me when I retire

During interviews with IT professionals who have IPRs, we heard a cool idea several times: IPR is what I will take with me from the company when I leave.

It is about the fact that IPR allows you to collect and develop those skills that specialists can monetize even more profitably in the future. Often, high-quality IPR motivates the development of those specialists who are just starting their career path: interns, juniors, sometimes middlemen.

We also often received the following answer: IPR is a project that you can be proud of at the next social gathering or in a bar.

This is about the fact that IPR can include those projects or technologies with which you really want to work, but which do not fit into the main plans of the company.

IPR is needed by “talents”

In several companies, we encountered a system in which different specialists are offered a different approach to training.

Conducted interviews and caught the following insight: development plans work well for those who already want and are ready to develop themselves. If a specialist does not have the motivation to upgrade his skills, then no IPR will help him. And if there is motivation, it will develop even without IPR — the plan will become an additional tool that will help grow faster and more efficiently.

Therefore, in most companies IPR is a voluntary practice, and for “talented” some employers create their own development programs.

Fyodor Lezhnev

IT director at Alfa-Capital:

A good IPR duplicates the standard work of the manager. A bad IPR demotivates an employee and reduces efficiency. The form of employee self-evaluation is of great importance:

  • I am driven by my role and tasks,

  • I have reached the level of a professional

  • I understand what I want to do in 3-5 years,

  • I understand what skills and actions I need for this,

  • I receive all the necessary help from the company and the manager for my development,

  • I understand my weaknesses and limitations.

But even “talents” need a manager

Loss of motivation is one of the main problems called by specialists. IPR falls out of the pool of tasks, so no matter how much a specialist wants to develop, he needs help in this process.

In large companies, a special person is often attached to the employee along with the IPR, whose task is to help them go through the IPR, remind them about checkpoints, help search for courses, articles, etc., so as not to forget to develop and not to delay the process. Somewhere such specialists are called resource managers, somewhere – lnd-partners, somewhere they hire external mentors for this role or connect a specialist with an experienced colleague. In small companies, this role is most often taken over by the manager.

Anastasia Rekshinska

Head of Grade:

Often, to increase motivation, it is enough to simply show the employee what part of the journey is already behind, help to reflect on what has changed and in what way it was possible to get closer to the intended result. If you need to adjust the vector together, and if in the process of reflection it turns out that the movement is going in the right direction, support and validate the already achieved result.

IPR – for interns, juniors and middles

It is clear that creating IPR for senior specialists, especially for the lead, is a big problem. It is not clear where to develop – often more difficult goals and long deadlines are set for highly qualified specialists. Specialists and employers also admitted that it is becoming more and more difficult to select interesting tasks in IPR that will move the specialist forward.

The study found that there is only one scenario in which IPR works well for a senior — if he decides to retrain as a manager or becomes a lead. But experts do not think so:

Anastasia Rekshinska

Head of Grade:

IPR is important for employees at all levels. Seniors and top managers also need development, whether it is mastering new technologies, developing leadership skills or strategic thinking. Continuous training allows them to remain efficient and competitive. If you want to increase the complexity and level of the tasks being solved, then you will still have to develop the skills necessary for this, only they may be different, not always obvious or easily formalized.

IPR and communication with promotion

There are three scenarios after the end of the IPR:

  1. End of IPR = promotion (grade, patches).

  2. The end of the IPR = one of the parts of the promotion – the most frequent

  3. The end of the IPR does not lead to anything.

IPR is an argument for increasing the grade and salary. By itself, IPR in companies does not promise anything, but in combination with achievements, evaluation and other factors, it works for growth.

There is no general rule on how to do IPR

The most important thing we understood is that there is no single practice on how to do IPR. If a developer comes to an echar or a lead and asks him to draw up a development plan, or if someone in the company decides to deploy an IPR system, then they face the same questions. Most often, they are: how to do it, where to start, what IPR should look like, what it should lead to, who should or should not control it, etc. And everyone copes with it as best they can.

Anastasia Rekshinska

Head of Grade:

See if you and your team need this tool right now. If so, do not neglect the “less important” elements of IPR in favor of a faster or mass implementation: consistently go through all the stages, without missing the goal, nor the evaluation (come to Grade anyway!), nor the control and adjustment: “do it halfway” will fail by missing half of the required steps. If you do not skip these steps, then the implementation will be quite successful and will bring satisfaction to both the employee and the business.

Currently, among employers, the best IPR systems are built in Tinkoff, Ozon and Avito – this is what experts told us in an interview for this study.

The scheme for drawing up the IPR is general

We listened to experts, studied several recommendations and tried to put together a general scheme for those who want to create their individual development plan, but do not understand where to start. Focused on how IPR works in companies.

If it is still difficult to understand, you can try learning designer from Grade – guys can make an IPR at the individual request of each specialist. The authors of the courses quickly make changes to the training programs if something changes in the IT market.

And if you already understand your goal, take a look at the convenient one service for compiling IPR from Habra – choose the skills you want to upgrade and learn along the track.

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