An IDP is your personal roadmap of objectives and activities designed to help you realize your aspirations for your graduate education, future career, and personal wellbeing.
Creating an IDP involves identifying your career-related values, interest, and goals and your current skills, and making and updating a written plan, with specific activities mapped to a timeline, for developing additional competencies to meet your longer-term academic, professional, and personal goals.
Why Complete an IDP?
IDPs are a widely used tool for supporting the mentoring and professional development of early career scholars.
Graduate students who reflect early and regularly on career-related values, interest, and skills, and who regularly update a written plan with short- and medium-term steps toward longer-term goals, report improved productivity and success, more effective interactions with their mentors with respect to career and research goals, an enhanced sense of ownership of steps toward their future careers, and an improved sense of well-being.
At UVM, we use IDPs to support the success of all Ph.D. students and their career aspirations across the academy, industry, business, government, and the non-profit sector.
Forge Your Path, Build Your Team
An IDP is a well-tested tool for you to focus on what you need to succeed and thrive during your time in graduate school and prepare for a career of your choice. It provides a framework for you to:
- integrate your progression to degree, professional development, career preparation, and wellness;
- assess your career-related values and interests as well as current strengths and skills;
- be intentional about setting goals, building skills and competencies, and planning for a career while in graduate school;
- pursue goals for your professional development and update these as your career objectives evolve;
- make and update a written plan, with specific steps mapped to a timeline, for developing skills and competencies to meet longer-term academic, professional, and personal goals;
- forge mentoring teams aligned with your evolving career aspirations and your integrated academic and professional development, to include your advisor, other graduate faculty, as well as career mentors from beyond the university.
Team Mentoring
We foster a culture of mentoring that empowers Ph.D. students to forge effective mentoring relationships with multiple mentors to support their academic as well as professional development and their career exploration and preparation.
Career Diversity
We are committed to supporting every Ph.D. student’s career aspirations across the academy, industry, business, government, and the non-profit sector. Informed by national best practice, career outcomes data, and alumn feedback, we seek to make post-doctoral careers across all sectors visible, valued, and viable.
IDP Tools Recommended by the Graduate College
All UVM Ph.D. students are required to create and annually update an IDP. The Graduate College recommends students use one of the following IDP tools. Each includes resources for self-assessment of skills, interests, and values; goal-setting; and skill-building and career exploration. Programs may ask students to use a different IDP tool tailored to core competencies or learning objectives of their field.
myIDP was developed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science as a career-planning tool for early career scholars in STEM. A four-step process involves self-assessment, career exploration, goals, and implementation.
ImaginePh.D. was developed by experts from over 50 universities under the auspices of the Graduate Career Consortium. While this career exploration and planning tool focuses on humanities and social sciences, its IDP-creation function can readily be used by early career scholars across discipline preparing for careers in the academy, non-profit, government, or industry and business.
See also:
ChemIDP (American Chemical Society’s career planning tool)
American Psychological Association (short videos and checklists supporting IDPs)