As a graduate student, you need to develop a range of academic and professional skills during your degree and to set goals for your research progress. However, it can be hard to determine what you should focus on, and how to prioritize working on those areas. The Centre for Graduate Professional Development (CGPD) recommends engaging in a structured planning process for your academic and professional development, as one way to help your organization and prioritization.   

While there are different approaches to structure your planning process, CGPD highlights the value of an Individual Development Plan (IDP) in approaching the organization and prioritization of your goals. IDP is a relatively new tool in graduate researcher development, but there is a growing literature about the positive influence IDP tools can have on research productivity, time to degree completion, 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 graduate school, 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 to implement and achieve your goals for developing new skills, making progress on your research and other degree milestones, growing professionally, and exploring your career.   

Completing this process as a recurring task during your graduate degree can not only help you stay on track with your degree 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.  

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.   

CGPD recommends that even if you complete a more tailored IDP tool as part of your academic program, you consider exploring Imagine PhD or myIDP as well. These more general tools can help highlight additional areas of academic and professional development and can provide information about a wide range of careers to explore.  

Once you have completed an IDP, you should be able to identify areas in which you want more training or education, goals you want to prioritize, and potential career paths you would like to further explore. Once you have worked through an IDP tool, come back and check out our pages on professional development strands and the resources available to you at the University of Toronto. 

Choosing an IDP tool

CGPD recommends two discipline-general, widely used IDP tools, which can help guide you through the process:

• myIDP is 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.

There are a number of other IDP tools available, some of which are more tailored to a specific field of study. Some examples include:

American Psychological Association
Canadian Institutes of Health Research
ChemIDP: American Chemical Society’s Career Planning Tool

Attend our workshop on getting the most out of your IDP. Find upcoming workshop date(s).

Note: the MyGPD program is no longer open to enrollment. If you are already enrolled in MyGPD and have questions about completing the requirements, please email us at cgpd@utoronto.ca.

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