Abstract
The individual development plan (IDP) is a career planning tool that assists PhD trainees in self-assessing skills, exploring career paths, developing short- and long-term career goals, and creating action plans to achieve those goals. The National Institutes of Health and many academic institutions have created policies that mandate completion of the IDP by both graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Despite these policies, little information exists regarding how well the tool is used and whether it is useful to the career development of PhD trainees. Herein, we present data from a multi-institutional, online survey on the use and effectiveness of the IDP among a group of 183 postdoctoral researchers. The overall IDP completion rate was 54% and 38% of IDP users reported that the tool was helpful to their career development. Positive relationships with one's advisor, confidence regarding completing training, one's confidence about their post-training career, and a positive experience with institutional career development resources are associated with respondents' perception that the IDP is useful for their career development. We suggest that there is a need to further understand the nuanced use and effectiveness of the IDP in general, to determine how to execute the use of the tool to maximize trainees' career development, and to generally enhance the career development support for PhD trainees.
Highlights
The Individual Development Plan was first introduced by the U.S Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in 2002, and in 2014 the National Institutes of Health implemented a policy requiring the reporting of the tool’s use by graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in grant progress reports[1,2,3]
As we have recently shown with PhD students[5], the effectiveness of the individual development plan (IDP) among its users is associated with positive mentorship relationships (Figure 2 and Supplementary File 3)
62.2% of those who indicated that they could have an honest conversation with their PI/advisor found that the IDP process was helpful to their career versus 24.2% of those who did not agree (p < 0.001)
Summary
The Individual Development Plan was first introduced by the U.S Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in 2002, and in 2014 the National Institutes of Health implemented a policy requiring the reporting of the tool’s use by graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in grant progress reports[1,2,3]. We recently conducted a multi-institutional study on the use and effectiveness of the IDP in 663 PhD students and found that 57% completed an IDP and 51% of users reported it being useful to their career development[5]. More research is needed to further characterize the IDP among all PhD trainees and to determine if there are ways to maximize the tool’s impact on trainees’ career development[5,6]
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