Academic Skills Advice
10 Takeaway Tips
Personal Development Planning (PDP)
- PDP is a key element of graduate level employment and should be taken seriously. Professional positions often require you to be committed to your ongoing development – updating your skills, reflecting on how you can improve and grow, and implementing actions that will allow you to do this. For your own PDP you may set goals, engage in reflective writing or use feedback to identify areas of improvement.
- Be specific and ensure your personal planning process is tailored to you.Generic statements are best avoided. E.g. ‘get better at writing’ is not tailored and too broad, whereas ‘I need to work on structure and flow when drafting assignments’ is about you, your development and your skills improvement.
- Planning in your head is different from formalising a plan that you can share, view and evaluate. Talk to a personal tutor about creating a written up and agreed upon plan, identifying long-term, medium-term and short-term goals. Sharing them with someone like a tutor will also help you to self-monitor and evaluate. See our goal setting tips if you need help with this. A proforma, such as the ‘Individual Development Plan’, can also help to get you started.
- Talk to students in the years above you – what do they wish they had spent time doing? What skills had they not realised they needed to work on before it was ‘too late’? If you can, speak to people who have already graduated and are now working or a qualified professional on a placement - what do they wish they’d invested more time in when they were studying at university? Are there skills that they felt were trivial at the time but they now need to use every day?
- Most good PDP is about reflection (Cottrell 2010). Get into the habit of questioning your choices. Ask yourself about what you have managed to do, where to you want to be and how you can make that happen – don’t just assume that things will happen ‘by accident’ during the time you’re studying.
- Does your future profession or career trajectory have standards or performance indicators? If so begin to use these as soon as you can to plot and review your development. Not all of these may be immediately relevant but at least you’ll be familiar with the experience of assessing yourself against skills, knowledge, understanding and values criteria.
- Many professional level roles require evidence of what, when, where and how development activities have taken place. If your course does not already require it, think about beginning a portfolio of all the things you’ve engaged in, what you feel you gained from them, and any attendance information or materials to prove your involvement.
- ‘Softer’ transferable skills are just as important as subject-specific competencies. You could be the most talented laboratory scientist in the world but if you can’t speak to a room full of people or engage in logical evidence-based discussion in writing then all that ‘hard science’ will go unnoticed. Our resource ‘Transferable skills in action’ can also help you to identify activities you may wish to engage in as part of your PDP.
- Extra-curricular activities, such as those offered by the Students’ Union or the university’s support services, are important to your development. Sign up early and honour those commitments to yourself.
10.Try to make sure that your development planning has one “daring aim”. You
may not achieve it but aims like this can help to keep you motivated and often
lead to creative thinking in how to achieve them.
References:
Cottrell, S. (2010) Skills for success: The personal development planning handbook. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Goddard, A. (2011) Top ten tips: personal development plans. RCP Insight [online]. Available at: Accessed 26th March 2015.
E: : 01274 236849@UniBradSkills
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