Personal development plans: a focus for performance - Employees are increasingly being handed greater responsibility for their own learning and development. A tool designed to help such self-managed learning is also growing in use: Personal Development Plans (PDPs). We investigate three very different organisations' use of PDPs - from the reasons each organisation decided to become involved to the benefits they have enjoyed as a result. Using their real-life experiences, we highlight the issues that may need to be addressed by organisations thinking of making PDPs available to employees, and present a checklist of such issues for consideration.