The Career Development Centre at UCD is seeking to promote the development of Personal Development Planning for students at UCD. 

It may be stated that academic, personal and career development requires students to reflect upon their own learning, achievement and performance in order to plan their own personal, educational and career development.  Successful PDP initiatives offer students a structured and supportive process based upon a cyclical model: Doing-Reviewing-Reflecting-Planning.

PDP may be delivered in a variety of ways, for example, as a credit bearing module within the academic curriculum or as an academic process which is embedded into the academic curriculum but not credit bearing. 

There are three main goals associated with this project:

To organize an introduction to Personal Development Planning for academic and academic-related administrative staff at UCD.

To disseminate the learning and experiences of staff at Queen’s University Belfast where PDP has been embedded across 21 academic Schools.

To subsequently engage in a pilot initiative with 1 or 2 Schools at UCD

Through the process students develop and, importantly, recognise transferable skills developed through their academic, extra-curricular and work related activities. By reflecting upon their experiences and recording learning, students create a database of evidence to support the presentation of transferable skills to potential graduate employer in their CV’s.

Funding for the project will help to develop a Personal Development Planning system at UCD and hopefully pump-prime a pilot initiative at a school within UCD.

Increased personal development and career awareness amongst the student body may help students recognize the value of their education and its applicability to graduate careers. Therefore, a structured and supported PDP system introduced at an early stage in the university career may positively impact on retention rates and upon student achievement and progression.

The 2010-11 pilot initiatives will be evaluated on completion.

To extend pilot PDP initiatives to other schools in UCD.