PDP and Employability: Sharing Experiences

21st January 2005 in Coventry at the Techno Centre

All Higher Education Institutions in the UK are to offer a structure and guidance for Student Personal Development Planning (PDP) as of 2005/6. Although PDP introduction is gaining momentum, progress toward full implementation varies significantly across institutions and disciplines. Some institutions have complete systems in place others have just started to experiment with pilot schemes.

There is considerable freedom in how schools or disciplines can approach Student Personal Development Planning and canvassing different institutions, one can find a range of PDP strategies and models. Academics display a tremendous creativity in terms of curriculum designs devised to help prepare students for the world of work.

This CEBE sponsored Conference for Built Environment Academics featured experiences in implementing Personal, Academic and Professional Development Planning from different schools and BE disciplines including Architecture, Planning and Construction and Surveying.

The goal of the day was to share practice and lessons learned from procedures, creative approaches, and experiments in PDP implementation. Delegated compared practices across disciplines and learned about new developments to come from EU guidelines and implications from the Bologna agreement.

In her introductory remarks, Dr. Andrea Frank (CEBE), provided delegates with a model that links Personal development Planning to the UK governments directive to increase HE student's employability.

Rob Ward, Director of the Centre for Recording Achievement (CRA) (http://www.recordingachievement.org/) re-iterated basic requirements of Personal Development planning and progress files in Higher Education, legislation and key links to the world of work in his introductory talk: Personal development Planning Overview.