Individual Development Plan
The Individual Development Plan (IDP) helps you reflect, plan, and discuss in order to achieve your academic and professional goals.
What is the IDP?
It’s a process in which you will:
- assess your skills, interests, and strengths;
- define a written plan for developing skills; and
- communicate with your mentor(s).
The product of this process will be a written, ever-evolving IDP document.
You’ll revisit your IDP at least once per year, to update and refine as goals change or come into focus, and to record progress and accomplishments.
Basic steps of the IDP
- Conduct a self-assessment.
- Write your Individual Development Plan goals.
- Discuss all or part of the IDP with your mentor.
- Mentors: Review goals and help mentee revise as needed.
- Implement the plan.
- Revise and update your IDP as needed.
- Mentors: Regularly review and provide support.
Is this required?
IDPs are required for graduate students and postdocs with NIH or NSF funding, and recommended for all graduate students and postdocs regardless of funding source.
Create Your IDP Today
Get to know Individual Development Plans and start building your own with this micro-course.
Though clear guidance and helpful resources, you’ll learn how an IDP helps you set goals, stay focused, and make steady progress throughout graduate school and beyond, using a simple approach: assess, write, discuss, implement, and revise.
Additional IDP Options
IDP for humanities and social sciences
ImaginePhD is a free online career exploration and planning tool for graduate students and postdocs in the humanities and social sciences.
IDP for biological and physical sciences
myIDP is a web-based career-planning tool, hosted by the AAAS, tailored to meet the needs of graduate students and postdocs in the sciences.
Self-assessment for UW–Madison graduate students and postdocs
Completing the DiscoverPD self-assessment is a first step toward developing an IDP with targeted, UW–Madison-specific action steps.
IDP Requirements by Funding Agency
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) requires PIs’ annual progress reports to include a section on how IDPs are being used to identify and promote the career goals of graduate students and postdocs associated with the award.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) requires funded graduate students and postdocs to have IDPs. PIs will need to certify in annual and final reports that grad students and postdocs “receiving substantial support from such award [have] developed and updated annually an individual development plan to map educational goals, career exploration, and professional development.”
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