Advance your career
With an Individual Development Plan
An Individual Development Plan (IDP) gives you the ability to objectively look at your current career path and plan out your future. This isn’t just fluff, it’s a concrete action plan with individual steps you can take to reach the level of professional development that you desire.
An Individual Development Plan is a simple document that helps you identify and outline your knowledge, skills, and abilities while also providing you with a well-thought-out path for professional development. Think of it as an annual review of your existing talents that you can then use to prepare for your future. When well-written, an Individual Development Plan can help you improve your performance, sharpen your professional competencies, and strengthen your weaknesses. Created to help you reach both your short- and long-term career goals, it is an organized approach to getting what you want.
CGPS has created an IDP specifically for postdoctoral scholars and in Fall 2022, will launch a 3-part workshop series to help postdocs develop, implement, and revise their IDP.
IDP resources:
- For STEM Researchers: myIDP
- For Humanities and Social Science Researchers: ImaginePhD
Beyond the Professoriate
In an innovative approach to preparing graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to adapt to a post-pandemic job market, the College of Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies has partnered with Beyond the Professoriate and is offering free access to the Aurora career-exploration platform.
The Aurora job market and professional careers online exploration and planning tool offer 2 programs of study to help students learn successful job search strategies:
- the Academic Careers Pathway program
- the Professional Careers Pathway program
All USask Aurora users have access to a one-of-a-kind video library where students can watch interviews with PhDs working in all sectors: academia, government, higher education administration, industry, and non-profits as well as all access to Beyond the Professoriate events and platform support.
Build your skills toolkit
The Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL) offers a variety of professional development workshops and career-related courses. Courses available to postdocs are non-credit and free of charge. Professional Development opportunities will be posted to your PAWS feed and can be found in the Hub Community.
The following are just a few of the courses available to you.
- GPS 989: Philosophy and Practice of University Teaching - For graduate students preparing to teach. Students are introduced to instructional approaches and ways to build the classroom environment that may be applied beyond the university classroom. This is a pass/fail one-term course, and completion appears on the university transcript. Students taking this course are eligible to apply for Instructional Preparation Certification.
- GPS 974: Gradual Professional Skills Certificate -This innovative, non-credit program focusing on strengths-based professional skills development will support you in a multi-disciplinary cohort while you set and work to achieve goals, compose your mission statement, and build a professional portfolio that documents your growth.
- GPS 984: Thinking Critically - This multi-disciplinary course will help you develop and practice critical and reflective thinking skills (must complete prior to or at the same time as GPS 974).
- For information on how to register contact postdoctoral.studies@usask.ca.
USask's Career Services aims to create meaningful partnerships, offer guidance and expertise, and serve as leaders to help advance career education at the University of Saskatchewan. They have various opportunities available to postdocs, such as Career Coaching, Career assessments, and guides and resources on resumes, networking, job search and interviewing.
Attend and reflect on your experiences with peers in MITACS and other professional skills workshops around campus.
EDGE by Mitacs Training provides advanced degree graduates and Mitacs program participants with access to courses that supplement their education and research experience with skills that are in demand from today’s workforce.
Self-directed online learning on LinkedIn Learning is offered free of charge to University of Saskatchewan PDFs who sign up with their USask email address.
3MP
Launched in 2019, the USask 3MP is an annual friendly competition where competitors will have 1 static slide and 3 minutes to explain the breadth and significance of their postdoctoral research to a non-specialist audience to showcase their research to the USask community.
Career Development Days
Career days is a series of speaker events, workshops and panel discussions aimed at providing postdocs with career focused information. Held annually in the early spring, the CGPS works directly with the Postdoctoral Studies Advisory Committee to provide and urate relevant content for postdocs.