Personal Development Planning: Guidelines for Supervisors

Many organisations have used personal development planning for providing a link between career aspirations and life goals.  The value of this tool has increasingly been recognised in ensuring effective career progression for postgraduate students and contributing to the successful completion of a thesis.

Your students will be focussed on their research and gaining knowledge from you as their supervisor.  Feedback from students indicates that they find a little bit of time spent discussing their personal development plan with their supervisor extremely useful.  If you are the first supervisor for a PhD student it would be supportive for the student if you could take ten minutes or so to ask them if they have identified any skills needs and if they are using their personal development plan.

Click here to download a copy of the personal development plan that will have been issued to all PhD students who they began their studies before October 2009. Students beginning their research in October 2009 will receive their plan electronically through the online Skills Forge system, and existing research students will be migrated onto the system throughout the coming academic year. An introduction to Skills Forge is available for download here, and training on how to use the system will by provided by the Schools.

If students have identified skills needs then there are courses available that they can take (students are given information on these sites and it is their responsibility to sign up for the courses - your role, as a supervisor, is just to check that they are aware of all that is available to them.)

Generic skills training is available from Skills for Research Excellence (formerly ASPIRE).

Information on computing courses such as using Microsoft Access, Excel, Word and PowerPoint is available at www.abdn.ac.uk/diss/training/.

Please note there are no charges for any postgraduate students or their Schools for attending these courses, but SfRE reserves the right to charge if a student fails to attend without either withdrawing from the course in advance or contacting the course presenter afterwards to explain the reason for their absence.