Developing your career and professional expertise starts with identifying what you are trying to achieve both in terms of your long-terms goals and your immediate development needs that may help with the day-to-day aspects of your current position.
A UCISA has created several templates to help with planning your professional development.
The following guide has been created to help with planning your personal and professional development.
How to Create a Personal Development Plan
Developing your career and professional expertise starts with identifying what you are trying to achieve both in terms of your long-term goals and your immediate development needs that help may with the day-to-day aspects of your current position.
Long-term career planning involves thinking more broadly about your future aspirations and the UCISA Career Mapping Toolkit is a good place to start with this.
In this guide, you are presented with some key steps to help you create some achievable goals, both personal and professional, identify learning opportunities and then bring them together into a personal development plan you can discuss with your line manager or work on independently.
- Reflect on your current skills and knowledge:
Setting out a development plan requires you to understand where you are currently in terms of your current skills and knowledge. Take the time to reflect on where you have areas that could be improved as well as your strengths. While it can sometimes be uncomfortable to hear, seeking out feedback from others about your strengths and weaknesses can also be a valuable way to understand where you have opportunities to develop.By getting a clearer picture of your own developmental needs you can then start to work on the areas you believe can help you develop. - Set clear goals or aims:
Set clear aims for how you want to develop. Creating achievable goals is really important. If a goal is too vague then it can be difficult to see how you will know when you’ve met it. Your goals should be challenging or stretching but not unrealistic. They should also be motivating. You may also want to consider how to write them in a way that aligns with your personal values – you’re much more likely to be motivated to achieve them. - Identify learning opportunities:
Think about the learning opportunities that are going to help you achieve your goals. Learning comes in a variety of formats. It could be UCISA webinars and conferences or formal training. Alternatively, it could be getting involved in specific projects, shadowing a colleague or seeking out a mentor. Think about the different ways you could achieve your goals and be realistic about how much time you can devote to them. Any learning requires putting ourselves back into a learning mindset- whatever approach you decide to take, it should be stretching and challenging but not overwhelming. - Create an action plan:
This takes some of the ideas you’ve explored in Step 3 and makes them concrete by articulating the key steps/milestones you need to undertake to achieve them. An important element here is the time taken – not only to acquire any specific knowledge you might need to learn but also the time to practice the associated skills so that you feel that you have met your goal. This will mean thinking about how you will balance the time required to develop alongside juggling your work commitments. It’s important to have a discussion with your line manager about this – there may need to be some negotiation, particularly around timescales. - Establish a support network:
People who have support networks around them are often more likely to achieve their goals. Have a think about who can help you in terms of your development. This doesn’t necessarily just have to be your line manager, it can be colleagues, a mentor or a friend/family member. They aren’t there to teach you but to support and encourage you with your goals – and to celebrate with you when you’ve achieved them. - Regularly evaluate your progress:
Check in with your plan and goals on a regular basis. This is important because it can help you see where you might need to adjust your plans or keep you motivated in terms of seeing how much you’ve achieved. It also is good to help you see what you’ve already learned and the impact it has on your work/life. You can use the UCISA CPD Log to help you capture your CPD achievements – either as individual one-off activities or collectively working towards an overall goal.
UCISA has created a PDP template if you don’t have access to one via your employer. Alternatively, there are a range of online personal development planners out there.
BCS Personal Development Planning Guide – with free PDP Planning Tool
CPD Service The CPD Cycle
Notion Personal Development Planner Template
Additional Resources:
Open University Guide on Personal Development Planning
