What Is PDP?
About PDP
Personal Development Planning (PDP) is a process that enhances and supports your experience as a student. By engaging in PDP you will be reviewing, building and reflecting on your personal and educational development. The process encourages you to take a step back and reflect on what you have achieved in a structured way. It also involves clearly identifying your goals and planning the steps you need to take to accomplish them.
Being a student is much more than simply studying for your degree or postgraduate qualification. University provides opportunities to mix with a wide range of people, get involved in positions of responsibility, develop work-experience, volunteer work, and broaden your outlook. By planning, developing and reviewing your personal and academic goals, the PDP process will:
- Enable you to be clear about what you have learnt and what you can do and enable you to communicate this effectively to others
- Help you identify areas for development (anything from academic referencing to giving a presentation)
- Provide resources and support to help you develop specific skills
- Increase your effectiveness and confidence as a student and graduate
- Improve your general skills for study and career management
- Bring together your academic and non academic experience and achievements (jobs, sport, leisure, volunteering, representative roles etc)
- Give you a head start with CVs and application
- Enable you to get more from your university course
PDP tracks both prior and current achievements and assists in the development of transferable skills. This means you make full use of your study and maximize the benefit derived from education and other experience as a student.
A key element in PDP is identifying areas you want to improve. At Chichester we have tried to provide user-friendly resources and support to enable you to tackle particular skill areas. Take a look at the contents of the Key Skills Online software to get a flavour of some of the resources you can use. PDP will also help you to be aware of, and encourage you to use, the full range of student services and sources of help at the University.
The process aims to enhance the general relevance and application of the skills, knowledge and achievements gained at University. By recognising your personal development and through consciously setting out specific targets and goals, you will enhance your educational and career prospects.
Not convinced you need PDP? Try this exercise from Stella Cottrell.
The context (National PDP)
Personal development planning connects with other programmes developed in schools and colleges over recent years e.g. Records of Achievement and Profiles. It also mirrors the professional development processes used in many areas of employment - you can find examples of some of these in the pdp materials used by employers page. The process aims to equip you for a lifelong engagement with learning and personal development.
The PDP process is a part of the Progress File initiative and has been promoted by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) for Higher Education. All UK universities are introducing and encouraging students to take up this initiative with structured opportunities throughout their courses.
How PDP works at Chichester
The PDP process is built around the student tutorial system. Prior to each semester review with your tutor you work through several short exercises (see examples of ones at the start of your course). You can then either email these to your tutor or print them out and take them along to the tutorial. For more on this see how to use this site.
There are a couple of extra exercises covering qualifications and experience when you start your course. These form the grounding for your PDP work at Chichester. After this you need only to work on three short exercises for each review: a semester review, a skills review and an action plan.
PDP touches on just about everything that's interesting about being in Higher Education. With every module you undertake there are accompanying outcomes - these will inject new skills and accomplishments into your PDP. In some areas you will be asked to engage in reflective logs or learning journals. Employment, voluntary and representative roles, sport, interests and other activities all count as well. In this sense the personal development process is implicit in your entire university life. What the PDP strives to do is make it all explicit.
Ownership / Privacy
The PDP process requires you to reflect on some quite personal issues. With certain subjects and issues you may prefer to retain privacy. A fundamental principle with personal development planning is that it is personal. The ownership is always with you, the student.
If there are particular issues that you feel are too personal for the tutorial process it's important that you still engage with them. You can either exclude them from the semester reviews you discuss with your tutor or present the issues in an abbreviated / safe version.
Alternative approaches to PDP
The materials and resources on this site are designed to support the PDP process. There are many other ways to approach PDP. For example, you may already have effective techniques for reviewing your progress and setting goals - the main element we want to promote is engagement in the process.
Skills for Success
One (good) way of doing PDP is to go flat out. The book pictured left - Skills for Success, by Stella Cottrell - is hard to beat. At around £11 from Amazon it constitutes a fine investment. Written for university students it comes with many brilliant exercises and activities.
It's also designed as a work book and is completely self-contained. If you brought this at the start of your course and used it to support your time as a student you would be well rewarded.
Stella Cottrell also has a personal development planning website.
Journal or diary
Another approach is simply to get hold of a suitable note book or sketch book and assign it as your journal. Use it regularly to reflect on progress, problems, observations and goals etc. A little more subtle than the direct approach used with our materials.
If you try this approach and experience the blank canvass effect (no idea where to start) try working from some of the prompts and prods in the semester review, skills review and action plans in the home page essential materials.