Abstract
The individual development plan (IDP) is a career planning tool that aims to assist 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 widely 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, trainees' 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 order to determine how to execute the use of the tool to maximize trainees' career development.
Highlights
The Individual Development Plan (IDP) 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)
The IDP is widely touted as a gold standard career development tool even though we know relatively little about its use and effectiveness
Summary
The Individual Development Plan (IDP) 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]. In 2014, a survey of over 200 postdoctoral researchers found that 19% of respondents used the IDP with 71% of those users finding it valuable[4]. That more research is needed to further characterize the use and effectiveness of IDPs in maximizing trainees’ career development. Within this report, we present data on the use and effectiveness of the IDP among a group of 183 postdoctoral researchers
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