Overview
As a postdoctoral researcher, you need to make research progress during and develop a range of academic and professional skills to set you up for a successful entry to the job market. Postdoctoral appointments and fellowships are often relatively short in duration, however, making it difficult to determine what to prioritize and how to best use your time. The Centre for Graduate Professional Development (CGPD) recommends engaging in a structured planning process such as an Individual Development Plan (IDP) in approaching the organization and prioritization of your goals. IDP is a relatively new tool in researcher development, but there is a growing literature about the positive influence IDP tools can have on research productivity, supervisory relationships, goal ascertainment, and career preparedness.
An IDP is a planning process designed to prompt self-reflection, help you inventory your current skills, interests, values, and goals, and structure a conversation about your plans with a supervisor, mentor, or peer. The IDP process is a cycle that includes reflection, exploration, goal setting, discussion, implementation, and refinement.
Practically speaking, completing an IDP means taking stock of your current skill level in areas you expect to develop during your postdoc, and thinking about which skills you actually enjoy using and wish to keep using in the future. This information is used to guide you in prioritizing areas for learning and skill development, as well as to set specific goals for the next year. Using this plan as the basis for a conversation with your supervisor or other mentor helps you both to monitor your progress through your degree, and implement and achieve your goals for developing new skills, making progress on your research, growing professionally, and exploring your career options.
Engaging with IDP during your postdoc can not only help you stay on track with your research progress, but also give you space to organize your thoughts about future plans and clarify what additional support you may need in order to achieve your goals.
CGPD offers a workshop on getting the most out of your IDP. You can find the upcoming workshop date(s) here.
You will need to choose an IDP tool to help guide you through the process. The two most widely used tools for research students are myIDP and Imagine PhD. myIDP was based on the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology’s Individual Development Plan for Postdoctoral Fellows and was developed for doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers working in the sciences. Imagine PhD was developed by the Graduate Career Consortium for doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars working in the humanities and social sciences. While there are many other IDP tools available for specific disciplines, and you can see some of these in the additional resources below, each of these tools provides a good assessment of generalizable skills that early career researchers can expect to develop during their graduate training and use in their future careers.
Once you have worked through an IDP tool, you should be able to identify areas in which you want more training, goals you want to prioritize, and potential career paths you would like to further explore. You can then return to our pages on resources available to support your professional development at the University of Toronto.