individual development plan 70 20 10

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70-20-10 development plan: how to create one (free templates + examples).

Who would’ve thought a study from the 1980s would inspire one of the most popular L&D models we know today?

The 70-20-10 framework is a collective brainchild of authors and researchers McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison, they asked about 200 executives to recall pivotal career events and their learnings. 

The results culminated in what we now know as the 70-20-10 development plan.

🌱 What does the 70-20-10 rule mean ?

The rule suggests that individuals learn via 3 main ways - on the job, via constructive feedback, and formal learning - each method carrying a different weightage.

• On the job learning : 70% of their knowledge comes from job-related experiences
• Learning through feedback : 20% absorbed from interactions with peers and mentors ‍
• Formal learning : 10% from formal courses and events

There is a strong connection between an employee’s career growth and their experiential learnings (70%). There are many potential reasons for this. For one, it enables them to gain pivotal skills like communication, and self-reliance—that open doors for new opportunities. 

While, courses and events have minimal significance (10%) on an employee’s development.

❓ What is a 70-20-10 development plan ?

Think of the 70-20-10 rule as a general guideline to use the right resources to facilitate on-the-job learning, formal learning, and learning through feedback.

It is an L&D model commonly used by organizations to maximize their employees’ effectiveness of their learning, and development programs through external inputs.

This model appeals to so many L&D pros because it’s easy to understand and get buy-in from internal stakeholders. 

And a 70-20-10 development plan does work. It’s been widely tested and backed by research. Center for Creative Leadership’s Lessons of Experience research explored how executives learn, grow and change over 30 years. 

Creating a 70-20-10 plan for your employees

All successful L&D initiatives have one thing in common—an actionable plan that can be implemented easily. 

Here’s how you can create your plan - 

Assess current learning sources

Use the following questions to assess current learning sources:

• How does learning happen at your organization right now? 
• If you already have formal learning sources in place, how much time and budget is put into that? 
• Do you have leaders and managers eager to spend time developing their team?
• What roadblocks do employees currently face?

When you have all the answers, map learning outcomes to your organization’s goals and get started on the draft.

Create an actionable strategy

Once you know what employees need to accelerate their career growth, tie this to your company’s goals as well. This actionable strategy should reflect how you will implement the 70-20-10 rule. For example, if a goal for people on the marketing team is to get better at Project Management, then it might (highly simplified) look something like this:

• Goal : Improve project management skills
• Timeline : 6-months

Creating an employee development template can be of great help here—one that is easily replicated for individual needs. Because some employees may need to put in more time per week or prefer on-demand learning over instructor-led training to, for example, earn associate certification in project management .

Choose the right tech stack

You need to choose tech that works for you, not against you. Unfortunately, LMS (learning management systems) are often under-utilized because they aren’t conducive to engaging learning experiences and aren’t integrated into existing workflows.

Remember, more tools do not equal more productivity. Switching between platforms causes cognitive drain and context switching—a far cry from meaningful work. 

That said, here are the most common tools L&D pros use:

Learning Management System  

Your LMS allows you to deliver, track and manage learning experiences. Choose one like Zavvy that integrates with Slack or Teams, sends reminders over email, and allows you to automate repetitive tasks. 

Project Management Tool

Notion, Trello, Asana, or Monday—whichever project management tool you end up using should be easy to use and offer transparency for everyone involved in the learning experience. 

Messaging/Comms tool

Informal learning has a growing demand in the workplace. Messaging or communication apps that facilitate real-time conversations allow those organic moments to occur spontaneously.

Content creation tool

Niche subjects may require internal leaders to create engaging courses. Invest in a tool that allows you to create courses at scale.

📝 Templates : What does a sample 70-20-10 plan look like?

Pdf version of the sample 70-20-10 plan.

Here’s a quick pdf format of the sample plan that you can modify for your organization, and individual needs.

Note: To use the PDF you'll have to download it to your device

>> Download it here <<

Excel version of the sample 70-20-10 plan

If you prefer using an excel format, you can easily download and edit the file here! We’ve also included a progress tracker in the sample plan. 

Looking for more general examples? Find out multiple employee development plan examples in our complimentary article.

💾 Is the 70-20-10 plan outdated ? 

The 70-20-10 model isn’t a crowd favorite. Some L&D professionals don’t find it credible. 

It underplays the importance of formal training and doesn’t account for new-age learning mechanisms.

On-demand learning through formal courses is on the rise. Take LinkedIn Learning, for example. Gen Zers watched 50% more hours of content in 2020 vs. 2019.

Critics are also skeptical of the data and how it was gathered in the original study. It only looked at executives, and it was a small sample size at that.

So does the 70-20-10 rule still have a place in the modern workplace?

Does the changing landscape of work demand we revisit the plan?

Training Industry seems to think so. They suggest that instead of taking the rule at face value, organizations should alter the ratio to make it work for them.

For instance, instead of a 70-20-10 rule, a 60-30-10 or 50-30-20 might work better. This has led to a new concept—the OSF ratio . The OSF ratio represents the ratio of learning from different sources - on the job, social, formal. This is a far more flexible way to use the 70-20-10 plan.

As with any other L&D plan, rapid iteration and feedback is crucial to making these initiatives stick.  Want to know what’s the right mix for your company? Call our in-house expert to discuss your L&D program. ‍

Alex is a marketer at Zavvy. On this blog, he mainly shares insights gained from discussions with selected experts and from helping our customers set up and improve their onboarding or learning programs.

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• LEADING EFFECTIVELY ARTICLE

The 70-20-10 Rule for Leadership Development

Learn how challenging experiences, developmental relationships, and formal coursework form a foundation for learning and growth.

What’s the 70-20-10 Framework?

A research-based, time-tested, classic guideline for developing managers, the 70-20-10 rule emerged from over 30 years of our Lessons of Experience research, which explores how executives learn, grow, and change over the course of their careers.

According to the 70-20-10 rule, leaders learn and grow from 3 types of experience, following a ratio of:

• 70% challenging experiences and assignments
• 20% developmental relationships
• 10% coursework and training

The underlying assumption of the 70-20-10 rule is that leadership can be learned  — that leaders are made, not born .

We believe that today, more than ever, a manager’s ability and willingness to learn from experience is the foundation for leading with impact.

Go Beyond the 70-20-10 Rule With Experience-Driven Development

The 70-20-10 framework seems simple, but you need to take it a step further. All experiences aren’t created equal.

Which experiences contribute the most to learning and growth? And what specific leadership lessons can be learned from each experience?

To help you (and your boss or direct reports) match your learning needs to the experiences most likely to provide that learning, we’ve researched and mapped out the links between experiences and lessons learned.

We’ve studied on-the-job learning and experience-driven talent development extensively, and we even extended our long-standing findings (rooted in U.S.-based corporations) to a global audience. Our researchers collaborated with organizations in India, China, and Singapore to extend what we know about how leadership is learned.

Sources of Leadership Learning From Experiences

Our research across China, India, Singapore, and the U.S. has found that there are important similarities and differences in the way leadership is learned from experiences. But, from our studies of these 4 countries, 5 universally important sources of leadership learning stand out:

• Bosses and superiors
• Turnarounds
• Increases in job scope
• Horizontal moves
• New initiatives

Additionally, each respective country draws from 2 unique primary sources of leadership:

• China: personal experiences and mistakes
• India: personal experiences and crossing cultures
• Singapore: stakeholder engagements and crises
• United States: mistakes and ethical dilemmas

Among the leadership lessons learned from experiences, all 4 countries rank these 3 as universally important: managing direct reports, self-awareness, and executing effectively .

To adapt and grow, leaders need to be constantly involved in new experiences and challenges that foster learning. Some of these new opportunities will come their way through new jobs, crises, or significant challenges.

But it isn’t necessary to change jobs to find powerful learning experiences in the workplace. And in any job situation, leaders need to seek out or strengthen relationships with bosses, mentors, and peers that will contribute to their own growth in leadership.

At CCL, our work with the 70-20-10 framework rule reveals the power of putting experience at the center of talent management . It’s an approach that emphasizes the pivotal role of challenging assignments in attracting, developing, and retaining talent — and at the same time, highlights how the power of on-the-job experience is enhanced when surrounded by developmental relationships and formal learning opportunities.

In fact, our research on the 70-20-10 rule shows that challenging assignments are the primary source of key learning experiences in managerial careers.

The Amplifier Effect of the 10% for Coursework & Training in the Classic 70-20-10 Framework

What about coursework and training? Although it’s seen as contributing just 10% to a leader’s development, well-designed coursework and leadership training programs have an amplifier effect — clarifying, supporting, and boosting the other 90% of your learning. A program module that incorporates tools and experiential practice sessions can help managers become more effective learners and leaders.

The 70-20-10 rule reveals that individuals tend to learn 70% of their knowledge from challenging experiences and assignments, 20% from developmental relationships, and 10% from coursework and training. Skilled training specialists can help an organization establish a shared knowledge base and align its members with respect to a common leadership vision and the 70-20-10 rule.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Build the most effective 10% possible for the coursework and training in your team’s 70-20-10. Partner with us to build critical leadership skills needed in your organization. Learn more about our Talent Development solutions .

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A Simple Way to Map Out Your Career Ambitions

• Marc Effron

Identify where you are and where you want to go.

It’s easy to be confused about how to grow in your career. Even the most successful global companies are vague about the most effective development options. So it’s up to you to take charge of your own growth. Start by writing your “from/to” statements. These are two brief statements — one describing where you are today and one describing your next big (not your ultimate) destination. Then create a personal experience map. A personal experience map shows which experiences you want to acquire in the next two to five years. Growing yourself faster isn’t easy but it’s made far simpler when you’re clear about your origin, your destination, and the fastest, experience-driven route between the two.

It’s easy to be confused about how to grow in your career. My experience with even the most successful global companies is that they’re between average and poor at developing future talent. They’re often not transparent about your real needs and vague about the most effective development options.

The challenge is that you’re competing against every individual in your industry who wants to be a high performer. If you grow more capabilities more quickly than they do, you’ll perform better today, earn opportunities to perform better in the future, and a virtuous cycle will take hold. Development matters. So how can you chart the shortest, surest path to success?

Grow Yourself Faster The research is clear about how we grow most successfully: it’s a combination of on-the-job, social, and formal learning, also known as the 70-20-10 model . This research-derived mantra says that roughly 70% of your professional growth will come from the work experiences you have, 20% will come from your interactions with others, and 10% will come from formal education.

Think of growth as a cycle — successfully perform, get feedback, and perform again even better. Experiences power that growth cycle, so you’ll want to understand which experiences matter most and gain as many of them as quickly as possible. To begin, you want to be very clear about your starting point and desired destination on that development journey — an obvious item that’s often missing from a development plan.

Two key steps to grow faster are:

• Determine your from/to.
• Get the experiences and create a personal experience map.

Determine Your From/To If you want driving directions from Google Maps, your app asks you for two pieces of information: your current location and your desired location. The more precisely you enter each coordinate, the more likely you’ll get where you want to go using the fastest possible route. Your growth process should follow the exact same path, clearly specifying where you are today and your preferred destination.

Further Reading

8 Steps to High Performance: Focus On What You Can Change (Ignore the Rest)

The challenge for many of us is that we’re delusional about our actual origin and destination. We often think we’re starting far ahead of where we objectively are and that we’ve arrived when we’re still hundreds of miles from our goal. You can get to a more accurate assessment with a framework that my colleague Jim Shanley calls the “from/to.” The from/to is two brief statements — one describing where you are today and one describing your next big (not your ultimate) destination.

Examples of great from/to statements include:

• From  an individual contributor who adds value through technical expertise and closely follows others’ directions, to  a people leader who creates a clear strategy and delivers results through a small team.
• From  a business strategist who can appear aloof and dismissive of those with less intellectual horsepower, to  a general manager who aligns and inspires her region through personal connections and demonstrates genuine care for people.

The directness of those statements may surprise you. These from/to statements are real examples from successful executives who made tremendous progress once their needs were made this clear. Both of those leaders are now CEOs — one of a $10 billion retail chain and another of a specialty eyewear company.

To get an accurate from/to, you’ll need to check your ego at the door and ask some trusted superiors and colleagues for their extremely candid view of your origin and destination. Introduce the from/to concept to them, send them the from/to examples I gave earlier, and ask them to think about your from/to. Tell them to be brutally honest because their transparency will allow you to grow faster.

Use their input to create your final from/to. Which of their statements seem most direct and make you most uncomfortable? Is the “to” far enough away so that it will be a meaningful challenge to achieve? Whose opinion do you trust the most? With a clear from/to, you can now focus on accelerating your growth.

Create Your Personal Experience Map Since the 70-20-10 ratio says that experiences best accelerate your development, you’ll want to understand which experiences will build your career and, more importantly, the few, most powerful experiences that can close your from/to gap. A regularly updated personal experience map will help you chart your path.

A personal experience map shows which experiences you want to acquire in the next two to five years to grow your career. It’s a practical planning document that describes how you will produce the highest-performing you.

There are two types of experiences that will accelerate your development — functional experiences and management experiences. Functional experiences help make you great at something, i.e. marketing, supply chain, R&D. They allow you to prove that you’re highly competent at what you do. Management experiences will help you prove that you can perform or manage in a variety of challenging situations. You’ve not only been a great marketer in one region, but proven that you can lead marketing when you have a new team, in a turnaround situation and in a different geography.

When you successfully achieve these challenging experiences, you prove to your company that you’re a versatile leader who deserves a chance for larger, more important roles. You can create your personal experience map after you:

Interview experts in your field. The best and brightest in your field can help you understand which experiences will get you into the top 10% and become an expert. Interview those leaders to learn which experiences will build your functional excellence. The interviews will provide you with the raw material to create your personal experience map.

• Identify experts inside and outside your company. Interview the best in your field, not just the best in your company. If you want to be a chief financial officer (CFO), identify five CFOs who you admire or who are well regarded in your industry. If your goal is to be great at early-stage pharma R&D, it’s the same process. Find the leaders on the industry “best” lists (best chief marketing officer, chief information officer, etc.), from their articles in trade magazines, on lists of speakers at relevant conferences, or from referrals of leaders in your company.
• Request an interview.  Email each leader , asking for an informal conversation in which they can help someone in their field develop.
• Ask for insights.  During your call, ask them, “What are the key functional experiences [not necessarily jobs] that you believe will produce the highest-quality [general manager, IT architect, finance director]? Or, “Describe what you would see on the résumé of someone who is outstanding at _______.” If you’re having trouble getting quality information, ask them about the most valuable experiences they’ve had in their own careers.

Build your map. Review your interview notes and list the experiences that your interviewees described. Not everything you heard will be useful; some information will overlap or contradict what another interviewee said. Your goal is to sort through this information to find the few experiences that will most accelerate your career.

An experience should describe a meaningful business outcome — open a new production facility, lead a large team through a business turnaround, or close books for a business unit. It should be a significant building block of your functional or leadership capability; your accomplishment of it should mean something to others in your field.

The functional experiences you need to be a high performer will be unique to your profession, but the management experiences will be very similar across professions. Management experiences grow generic capabilities that are valuable to all managers, no matter their function. For simplicity, you can use these experiences when you create your map:

• Life-cycle experiences:  Lead in different parts of your company or product evolution: a turnaround situation, a startup, a steady-state environment, a developing market or a fully mature one.
• Managing experiences:  Upgrade a poor-quality team, lead a large team, manage a team where you have influence but not authority, lead in a matrixed environment, lead in a highly political environment.
• Geographic experiences:  Have experiences outside your home geography where the local language is not your native language.

Select four to seven functional experiences and three to four management experiences you believe will benefit you most and list them on your personal experience map. The map should be focused and realistic — a reference sheet that you’ll use regularly to plan your growth and assess your progress.

The personal experience map is now your guide to continuously grow your high-performing self. Creating it will be one of your best investments of time. Review the content of your map any time you switch jobs or companies and at least every six months to ensure that it remains a current, helpful guide.

Growing yourself faster isn’t easy but it’s made far simpler when you’re clear about your origin, your destination, and the fastest, experience-driven route between the two.

• ME Marc Effron is the founder and President of the Talent Strategy Group where he leads the firm’s global consulting, education, executive search, and publishing businesses. He advises the world’s premier organizations on how to build high performing talent. Marc founded and publishes Talent Quarterly magazine and is the author of the book 8 Steps to High Performance and the best-selling One Page Talent Management . Follow him on Twitter at  @the8steps. 

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How to Create a 70 20 10 Development Plan for Your Employees

4 min reading time

Caroline Lawless , Senior Content Marketing Manager at LearnUpon

Does your organization want to encourage employees to take an active part in their own learning and development? Do you aim to foster collaboration within your teams? A 70 20 10 development plan can help you to achieve both of these objectives.

A 70 20 10 development plan prioritizes on-the-job learning as it accounts for 70% of learning and development. Then mentoring with colleagues and superiors , which accounts for 20%, and finally, formal learning making up the last 10%.

There are many benefits to this approach; it’s flexible, cost-effective, and doesn’t require too much oversight from senior management. But it can be difficult to implement if it’s a brand new approach for your company. However, by making a plan, developing a strategy and investing in the right tools, the process will run a lot smoother.

Create your 70 20 10 development plan

1. make a plan.

All successful learning and development initiatives start with a plan. Begin by assessing where your organization is at the moment. For example, is on-the-job learning already happening on an informal basis ? How much of your time and budget do you put into formal learning? Do you have team leaders and managers who are ready and willing to play a bigger part in developing their teams? Ask both your managers and employees where they feel there are training gaps at the moment.

When you’ve collated all this information, consider how it all fits with your organization’s broader goals. The ultimate goal of your training program will be to support these. With all this research to hand, you’ll know exactly where to start with creating a new learning and development plan.

2. Create and implement your strategy

Your strategy is a more detailed version of the plan above. It should show exactly how you’re going to achieve the organization’s goals through the 70 20 10 method.

For example, if your organization’s goal is to grow its digital footprint, the Marketing team might be assigned an online course about social media, email marketing and growing web traffic. Senior members of the team could then demonstrate some of the principles explored in the course step-by-step so that the rest of the team fully understands it. Finally, the team is allowed time to develop their own ideas and put them into action – with oversight from their managers.

The three elements of 70 20 10 work together to give employees a thorough and well-rounded understanding of the topic. Your strategy should document each goal and how the three elements of the 70 20 10 plan will combine to achieve it.

3. Invest in the right tools

Now that you know exactly what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it, it’s time to think about the practicalities of implementing the plan – what tools are you going to need to achieve your goals? Find out what you already have in place, and identify the gaps that you need to fill. You don’t need to rush off immediately to purchase a suite of new software; invest in what you need most first.

The most common tools used for corporate learning are:

• A learning management system (LMS)

An LMS helps you to effectively deliver, manage, and track employee training. Purpose-built LMSs allow you to create engaging courses, set exams and assignments, collate resources, host a forum, automate the day-to-day management training, and much more.

One of the benefits of investing in a powerful LMS is that it may have a number of the features you need already built into one system. Your learners will have everything they need to collaborate and learn from each other, as well as independently. Formal learning will maintain an important place in your learning and development program, but it will be supplemented by a system that gives your employees autonomy to learn for themselves.

• A project management tool

A project management tool is essential in a collaborative environment; it helps keep teams on task. With them, you can use automated features to ensure the most important jobs are always assigned to teammates on time, and deadlines are met.

• A messaging app

Messaging tools, like Slack, help avoid messy, clogged inboxes by allowing conversations and learning to happen in real-time. Conversations can be one-on-one or involve whole teams.

• Content creation software

High-quality content creation software is crucial. You want your learners to stay actively engaged with your content throughout their training, so high production values are key. Investing in an authoring tool is a smart move to helping you produce engaging training courses.

While the right tools are important, creating a culture of learning is also paramount to the success of the 70 20 10 model. All employees, from senior executives down to new hires need to be involved. If possible, make sure your employees know that actively participating in creating this culture can lead to positive performance reviews and opportunities for career growth.

Putting a 70 20 10 learning and development program in place will take time, but there are considerable rewards when it’s successful. Your team will be better equipped to meet their goals, communication will be more open, and individuals will be empowered to take control of their learning and their careers.

Does your organization use the 70 20 10 model? How did you create the right learning culture and put it in place? Leave a comment below and let us know.

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5 min reading time

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Training Industry

The 70-20-10 model for learning and development.

The 70-20-10 Model for Learning and Development is a commonly used formula within the training profession to describe the optimal sources of learning by successful managers. It holds that individuals obtain 70% of their knowledge from job-related experiences, 20% from interactions with others, and 10% from formal educational events.

The model was created in the 1980s by three researchers and authors working with the Center for Creative Leadership, a nonprofit educational institution in Greensboro, North Carolina. The three, Morgan McCall, Michael M. Lombardo and Robert A. Eichinger, were researching the key developmental experiences of successful managers.

The 70-20-10 learning model is considered to be of greatest value as a general guideline for organizations seeking to maximize the effectiveness of their learning, and development programs through other activities and inputs. The model continues to be widely employed by organizations throughout the world.

The model’s creators hold that hands-on experience (the 70%) is the most beneficial for employees because it enables them to discover and refine their job-related skills, make decisions, address challenges and interact with influential people such as bosses and mentors within work settings. They also learn from their mistakes and receive immediate feedback on their performance.

Employees learn from others (the 20%) through a variety of activities that include social learning, coaching, mentoring, collaborative learning and other methods of interaction with peers. Encouragement and feedback are prime benefits of this valuable learning approach.

The formula holds that only 10% of professional development optimally comes from formal traditional courseware instruction and other educational events, a position that typically surprises practitioners from academic backgrounds.

New Research on 70-20-10

The application of this model was the subject of recent research conducted by Training Industry. The research explored:

• The updated balance among on-the-job, social and formal training.
• Nuances that can alter the learning ratios for different types of employees, companies and countries.
• How the model relates to strategic L&D efforts.

Learn more about this research report, “Updating 70-20-10 for the 21st Century,” here.

How Relevant is the 70-20-10 Learning Model in Today’s Workplace?

The arrival of the internet, and the current proliferation of online and mobile learning technologies, has altered the training industry’s views of the 70-20-10 learning model. At the minimum, a growing chorus of training professionals contends that the aged model does not reflect the market’s fast-growing emphasis on informal learning. In fact, recent research identified a new concept for talking about sources of learning called the OSF (on-the-job, social, formal) ratio . The OSF ratio can vary depending on the industry, organization and learners.

Related Content:

• 70-20-10 and the Concept of the OSF Ratio
• 70-20-10 and the OSF Ratio, Redux
• The Business of Learning Podcast: Preconceptions of 70-20-10
• #informal learning
• #Social Learning

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The individual development plan (idp): chart your course.

Creating an Individual Development Plan (IDP) will help you prepare for your future, regardless of the career you're planning on. In an IDP you outline a vision for your career and set goals to capitalize on your strengths and address your development needs. With an IDP you're taking a deliberate approach to increase the skills, knowledge, and experience you need to advance in your chosen career. The key benefits of developing an IDP are below.

• Helps you inventory your strengths and identify any gaps in your knowledge, skill set, or experience.
• Helps you identify the short-term and long-term goals that can push you toward action.
• Serves as an indispensable communication tool between your faculty advisor and you.
• Provides a visual representation of how to allocate your time working on specific goals.
• Acknowledges milestones achieved along the way, providing a sense of accomplishment and increasing momentum.
• Documents your development through assessment and reflection

Developing Your IDP

Step 1: explicitly define your career goals..

Make a list of three or four jobs—in order of preference— that you might apply for after you complete your degree. Will your next job fulfill your career goals, or will you need intermediate positions? Keep in mind that many types of jobs are compatible within the same career path. Improving your fit for one job also makes you more qualified for many other jobs. At this stage of the process, begin identifying your transferable skills ; doing so now will help make you much more employable.

Step 2: Identify necessary skills and knowledge.

List the skills, talents, and abilities necessary for the career path(s) you specified in Step 1 . The IDP resources included here can help. If you're not exactly sure what a given job requires, conduct informational interviews with professionals in that field.

Step 3: Assess skills and knowledge.

Honestly reflect on your current skills, talents, and abilities and compare them to the requirements you identified in Step 2 . List your strengths and your development needs. Get an outside opinion from a trusted mentor or colleague, too. This is a good opportunity to have a conversation with your faculty advisor about what goals you can set for yourself during your degree program.

Step 4: Write professional development goals.

Develop a detailed plan for your individual development; that is, what can you do or learn in your current position to become even more competitive in your job search? Write down goals for the short term (next year), mid-term (next 1–2 years), and long-term (3–5 years). Identify strategies or action steps you’ll need to take to achieve your goals. It’s also a good idea to create deadlines for starting and completing work on your stated goals.

Step 5: Track your development and set new goals.

Maintaining an academic portfolio is one method for collecting evidence of your achievements. Use personal statements, feedback from others, items on your curriculum vitae, and samples of your work to document your efforts to achieve your goals. Continuous self-assessment and improvement are central to a useful, effective IDP. As you learn and develop your abilities, set new goals to challenge yourself. View your development as a life-long task; there will always be areas in your professional life to expand and enhance. You might consider keeping a journal, finding a peer with whom to share your progress, or organizing a discussion/support group where you can get helpful feedback.

Benefits and resources

An IDP requires some time and energy, but the return on your investment can be significant. The process eases future planning and introspection, and helps chart your development to ensure you can achieve the next stage in your career.

Use the tools and templates below to start planning now.