How to develop a personal career development plan

1. Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA
Society of Physician Entrepreneurs

2. Why career planning?
 Only around 3.5% of PhD graduates realise a permanent, tenured
academic position, Consequently, bioscience graduate students and
post docs need to have a career development plan that might include:
Academic Research (universities, research institutes, government)
Research in industry/business (technology companies, bioindustry,
food technology, policy think tanks, media) Teaching (university,
colleges, schools) Scientific services (advisory, sales, data management,
technical specialist) Associated commercial careers (technology
transfer, patent examiner, patent attorney, regulatory affairs, marketing)
Communication (publishing – editorial, commissioning, production –
press officer, outreach, medical writer)
Administration/management (conference organisation, science
administration, policy) Self-employment/consultancy (spin-out
company, freelance) General professional careers (finance, project
management)

3. Steps
 1. Where am I now?
 2. Where do I want to go or who do I want to become?
 3. How do I want to get there?
 4. How will I measure my progress and change if
necessary ?

4. 1. Where am I now?
 Knowledge, skills and abilities
 Soft skills
 Market based requirements and demand
 Networks and mentors
 Experience
 Resources

5. 2. Where do I want to go?
 Primary and secondary research on career alternatives
 Mentors and networks
 Individual development plan

6. Individual development plan
Elements of an effective individual development plan
Dr. Amir Moghadam
President/CEO MaxKnowledge, Inc
http://www.maxknowledge.com/downloads/CCC/eleme
nts_of_an_effective_individual_development_plan.pdf

7. IDP parts
 Goals: Students list the performance goals that they
have identified in consultation with their coach. Each
identified goal includes a brief description on how
accomplishing the goal will benefit the student and
the institution.

8. IDP parts
 Activities: In collaboration with their coach,
instructors identify and plan the developmental
activities that will help them achieve their established
goals. Each entered activity must be linked to one or
more goals and the document should allow for
categorization (and sub-categorization) of the
activities in the areas of instructional skills, content
knowledge and personal growth.

9. IDP parts
 Barriers: Instructors identify the potential barriers
that may get in the way of completing their planned
activities and accomplishing their goals. They note
down what they can do to manage or overcome the
impact of each barrier.

10. IDP parts
 Action Plan: The entered goals, activities, barriers, and
sources of support are used to create a personalized
action plan for the instructor. The action plan should
not only include the planned completion date for each
activity, but allow the instructor to enter the actual
completion date as well.

11. IDP parts
 Sources of Support: Instructors identify the support
resources they need to accomplish their goals and note
down how each support will be provided.

12. IDP parts
 Progress: Throughout the year, instructors note the
benchmarks that demonstrate progress toward their
specific goals. A benchmark is an interim milestone
and/or checkpoint such as the completion of a step or
task. For each benchmark, instructors note what is
working well and what is not.

13. IDP parts
 Activity Report: An up-to-date record of an instructor’s
completed activities must be available to the instructor
and his/her coach at any time during the development
period.

14. IDP parts
 Accomplished Goals: Once all activities linked to a
particular goal are completed, relevant information
and data must be entered to assess whether or not the
goal has actually been accomplished. The assessment
process could include self-evaluation, evaluation from
the instructor’s coach, and a summary of relevant
student evaluations. In each evaluation, the outcomes
should reflect the performance improvement achieved
over the period of the development plan

15. 3. How do I get there?
 Education
 Resources
 Networks
 Mentors
 Experiential learning

16. 4. Metrics
 Tangible and intangible

17. Our panel