Continuing my series about self-assessments, the one I’m reviewing here is for academics:
the myIDP.
The myIDP is an Individual Development Plan for science careers, and is mainly targeted to grad students and postdocs, with the goal of helping them define and pursue their career goals.
It includes a self-assessment part covering skills, interests, and values. Aside from the online questionnaires that show your scores right away, can also download blank skills assessment forms to share with a mentor or colleague. Based on the assessment, it offers a long list of career paths and shows you how well each matches with your interests and skills. As you explore those options, you get suggestions of how to consider your values in those contexts.
After this assessment and exploration part, the website includes a personal planning system for setting your own goals and implementing next steps. For example, you can set skill improvement goals and plan specific activities to reach those. To help define your own skill improvement goals, you get all the information from the skills assessment, but you choose where you want to improve. In my own case, my lowest skill score was in animal research – not an area in which I need to improve given that I have no plans of working with animals in the foreseeable future. However my semi-low scores in “how to negotiate” might be relevant for my life and worth improving.
As is fitting for a target audience of scientists, this tool does not give you easy answers, let alone ONE easy answer. It asks a lot of questions, gives you many answers and a lot of homework, including suggestions of further research to do (not in those exact words…). All the assessments are very transparent, no hidden magic.
The website can be used free of charge. You just need to set up an account, so that your data can be saved, but you don’t need to provide any information other than an email address. It looks like this is really just a service (funded by several educational institutions), not part of a research project or a business.
If you try it, let me know what you think!
by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR
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