2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Developing an individual development plan (IDP) is often a key component in the professional development activities implemented for graduate students. A well-designed IDP supports the student through several steps of professional development planning and goal setting. First, the IDP helps the student articulate career goals. Second, the IDP guides students to identify specific strategies or activities to help make progress toward those goals, including: undertake activities that contribute to academic, professional and personal growth and pursue focused career explorations to continually refine or change career goals. Third, the IDP supports the students in defining benchmarks with timelines to assess their progress. Finally, the IDP provides a structure for ongoing evaluating and refining, encouraging students to use self-, peer- and mentor-assessments to evaluate, adapt and refine the IDP, and in the process develop into well rounded professionals that are successful in entering and navigating their desired careers.
Many graduate professional development programs require creating an IDP and periodic (yearly) updating of the IDP. Creating the IDP is a challenge for beginning graduate students and unless required, students do not evaluate and refine their IDP. We believe that IDP effectiveness is often limited by a lack of institutional support for the IDP creation process. This combines with insufficient understanding of the value of updating the IDP, lack of training in techniques or skills for planning and assessment needed in IDP, and an inability to customize the IDP to their specific needs and aspirations which hinders students’ voluntary pursuit of IDP revisions. Therefore, the IDP creation activity ends up merely as a one-and-done effort that created a product rather than forming a career-enhancing habit.
Under an NSF S-STEM grant we implemented a year-long professional development course for interdisciplinary computational science and engineering students, in which we have experimented and refined the process through which we train our students to develop, refine and update their IDP. Over the five years of the grant we have continually adapted and iteratively modified the IDP course assignments based on students’ feedback and course reflections. This paper discusses the evolution and implementation of our new updated IDP process, that includes pre-IDP activities aimed at envisioning a future self, discussions of program timelines and milestones, the hidden curricula and challenges with recent alumni, career exploration activities to inform the IDP, seminar and panel discussions on the pathways and challenges to interdisciplinary careers, developing a network of mentors, near peer advising by students a few years ahead on the IDP, and establishing a scaffolded and iterative process to create, adapt and personalize the IDP.
Based on qualitative analysis of written artifacts we find the new approach has been successful in eliminating the bottlenecks that graduate students previously faced in the initial creation of the IDP. Our data shows students adopting the IDP as a career planning tool with indications that some students have transitioned from thinking of IDP as a product to making it a habit.