Personal and Career Development Plan (PCDP)

Getting a job after your degree isn't just about handing over a CV with a degree class on it.

Employers are increasingly interested in what skills you have developed - not just in your education, but also in what you do as a part time job, or in your free time, or within your family. You need to be able to demonstrate that you have what they want, and the idea of the Personal and Career Development Plan is to help you to do this. Identifying your skills and working out where you are doing well and where you need to improve will help you to improve your degree class too. It's pretty obvious when you are learning about accounting; it is also obvious when you are learning quantitative skills.

However, sometimes you may not think about how you are practising other things as well. If you look at the aims and intended learning outcomes of your courses, you will see that all of them have a set of skills listed that you can develop through that course.

If you are looking for evidence that you have, for example, worked in a team, engaged in networking or developed analytical skills, the full course descriptions will tell you where you should have done that. You should also think about what you have done outside education: your job; your family situation; your hobbies; things you did while travelling; any positions you may have held in a society; voluntary work and so on.

The idea of personal and career development planning is to help you to reflect on what you have done, identify how you are developing and to record some good examples of skills as you go along. All of this should help you when you put together a CV or a job application.

Guide to PCDP Planning

• 1st year students taking BMAN10780 Academic and Career Development will discuss your Personal and Career Development Plan with your Academic Advisor in the Academic and Career Development seminars throughout the course of this academic year. Your completed PCDP will be submitted as part of the formal course assessment for BMAN10780 and will stand for 50% of your overall mark for this unit.
• BSc Accounting students taking BMAN10760 Auditing and Professional Accounting Practice 1 will also start looking at the Personal and Career Development Plan in your first Academic Advisor seminar within this course and will work with your Academic Advisor throughout the course of this year in completing it. The plan from this course will act as a baseline for further discussions with your Academic Advisor in years two and three of the programme.
• BSc ITMB students taking BMAN11030 Academic and Professional Practice will complete your Personal and Career Development Plan throughout the year and will have the opportunity to discuss the PCDP with your Academic Advisor during one-to-one meetings (one per semester).