To make the most of personal development planning, you need to be able to plan, and you need to develop, which is why many students find it so tricky. The being personal bit is less important. In fact, it is best avoided, especially when it comes to reflecting on relationships with tutors and work-experience bosses.
How you develop and what you plan also matter. Developing an online gambling habit and planning to spend most of your three years playing pool in the student bar are not enough. Or at least they are only enough if you learn to draw every last ounce of value from your experiences.
So, an accomplished personal development planner will use these pastimes to demonstrate "facility with numbers and IT" and "advanced social skills and a competitive spirit".
Any student who has ever been involved in a pub-crawl will be familiar with the three main elements of PDP, which are: planning to do something, doing something, and reflecting on what you have done. They will also realise how important it is at each stage to have the support of someone you trust.
At the planning stage it is imperative that you set achievable goals, and to identify what you have to do, and what help you will need if you are going to achieve them. Goals should be positive rather than negative. It is always more effective to plan to stay sober than to try not to get too drunk, for example.
PDP is an opportunity to ask yourself big questions. What do you want from life? What sort of person do you want to be? What are your chances of becoming prime minister/Keira Knightley?
Don't expect to answer these questions instantly. The process tends to work best if you think about your ambitions over time, seize every opportunity to practise the skills you need, and try out experiences to see if you like them.
It is therefore a good idea to have an action plan. Give this some kind of structure, with separate "to do" lists for academic, career, work-related and social parts of your life, and keep revising it as you progress. Make sure you have as much information as possible to help in your decision-making, and identify people you can talk to about your learning and development as you go along. Find out about the numerous electronic aids to organising your PDP that most universities offer, and use them.
Next, you need to act. Take up that work-experience opportunity, do that bit of volunteering, attend that 9am seminar on time-management.
Finally, think carefully about what exactly you've done. Keep a regular diary or blog. Reflect on specific important events or experiences and how you dealt with them. When you receive back assessed work, don't dwell on the mark, but take time to think about the feedback. Keep asking questions - how could you have done things differently? Was it wise to go on that pub-crawl the night before the essay deadline?
Be honest. You can't claim to attend a weekly language class if you're definitely going to go next week but haven't managed to make it so far. Similarly, you are not on course to become prime minister if you lost out to the university tortoise in the student union elections.
If you completely fail to achieve a single goal or complete any of your action plan, don't despair, and instead remember that absolutely all experience is worthwhile. Just put it down as: "ability to bounce back from failure".
Author ; Harriet Swain
How you develop and what you plan also matter. Developing an online gambling habit and planning to spend most of your three years playing pool in the student bar are not enough. Or at least they are only enough if you learn to draw every last ounce of value from your experiences.
So, an accomplished personal development planner will use these pastimes to demonstrate "facility with numbers and IT" and "advanced social skills and a competitive spirit".
Any student who has ever been involved in a pub-crawl will be familiar with the three main elements of PDP, which are: planning to do something, doing something, and reflecting on what you have done. They will also realise how important it is at each stage to have the support of someone you trust.
At the planning stage it is imperative that you set achievable goals, and to identify what you have to do, and what help you will need if you are going to achieve them. Goals should be positive rather than negative. It is always more effective to plan to stay sober than to try not to get too drunk, for example.
PDP is an opportunity to ask yourself big questions. What do you want from life? What sort of person do you want to be? What are your chances of becoming prime minister/Keira Knightley?
Don't expect to answer these questions instantly. The process tends to work best if you think about your ambitions over time, seize every opportunity to practise the skills you need, and try out experiences to see if you like them.
It is therefore a good idea to have an action plan. Give this some kind of structure, with separate "to do" lists for academic, career, work-related and social parts of your life, and keep revising it as you progress. Make sure you have as much information as possible to help in your decision-making, and identify people you can talk to about your learning and development as you go along. Find out about the numerous electronic aids to organising your PDP that most universities offer, and use them.
Next, you need to act. Take up that work-experience opportunity, do that bit of volunteering, attend that 9am seminar on time-management.
Finally, think carefully about what exactly you've done. Keep a regular diary or blog. Reflect on specific important events or experiences and how you dealt with them. When you receive back assessed work, don't dwell on the mark, but take time to think about the feedback. Keep asking questions - how could you have done things differently? Was it wise to go on that pub-crawl the night before the essay deadline?
Be honest. You can't claim to attend a weekly language class if you're definitely going to go next week but haven't managed to make it so far. Similarly, you are not on course to become prime minister if you lost out to the university tortoise in the student union elections.
If you completely fail to achieve a single goal or complete any of your action plan, don't despair, and instead remember that absolutely all experience is worthwhile. Just put it down as: "ability to bounce back from failure".
Author ; Harriet Swain
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