Empowering Early-Career Scientists via Individual Development Plans

I began developing expertise in Individual Development Plans in 2006 in partnership with colleague Bill Lindstaedt, developing a 30+ page workbook and co-teaching IDP workshops at UCSF and nationally. In 2009, Bill and I joined Philip Clifford (at the time, at Medical College of Wisconsin) and Jennifer Hobin (at the time, at FASEB) to convert materials from our collective workshops into an interactive online career planning tool: myIDP.

Hosted by AAAS and ScienceCareers, myIDP is used by scientists across the country and world, with more than 200,000 users. It served as a model for ChemIDP (developed by the American Chemical Society for chemists) and ImaginePhD (developed by the Graduate Career Consortium for humanities and social sciences PhDs). myIDP’s classification of PhD career options, to our knowledge the first such classification for biomedical PhDs, has been used by universities, NIH, and other organizations as a starting point for career outcomes tracking.

> Visit UMass Chan Medical School’s Scholarly Projects page

> Explore the American Chemical Society’s Career Planning Tool ChemIDP 

> Explore Graduate Career Consortium’s ImaginePhD

> Explore myIDP