Individual development plans that stay current.
Graduate schools and postdoctoral affairs offices use Potentially to run individual development plans, connect them to the training on offer across campus, and hold the evidence of what each researcher does, including work outside the lab.
Good morning, Sofia
Year 2 · NSF-funded · 3 sessions booked
Coming up View calendar
Provision from every provider 148 open
Progress across competencies Activities
EarlierThis term
Added to your record This term
One catalog, every provider
Graduate school, departments, library, career center and postdoctoral office, all bookable in the same place.Mapped to your competencies
Activity, training and evidence mapped to the competency set you use, whether your own or a published one such as the National Postdoctoral Association core competencies.A record they take with them
Most PhDs build careers beyond the academy. What they build here goes with them.Funders now ask about the plan.
Since May 2024, NSF proposals that support graduate students or postdocs include a one-page mentoring plan. After the award, students and postdocs with substantial NSF support need an individual development plan, and the PI certifies each year that those plans are up to date. NIH encourages institutions to use IDPs and asks progress reports to describe how they are used.
A PDF filled in once and filed away makes that certification hard to stand behind. A plan that the researcher works from all year makes it easy.
Potentially does not certify compliance with any funder’s requirements; that remains the PI’s and institution’s responsibility.
A year in a graduate school, from two sides. Sofia is a second-year PhD student funded on an NSF grant. Ruth directs graduate professional development.
Meet Sofia.
Second year, funded on her PI’s NSF grant, teaching two lab sections, and fairly sure her career lies outside the academy.
My record
Sofia · Year 2
Competencies This year
September
She finds out where she actually stands.
Sofia assesses herself against her program’s competencies. It takes twenty minutes, and she gets a report straight away: where she is strong, where the gaps are, and the sessions on campus that address them.
She books two of them from the report, and sets her plan’s goals from the same results.
November
She books a workshop run by the library.
The workshop sits in the same catalog as everything the graduate school offers, and lands in her calendar with a reminder the day before.
February
Her development is not only the graduate school’s.
She presents at a conference, runs an outreach session for a local high school and teaches two lab sections. She adds each one to her record with the evidence attached, against the same competencies.
May
Her PI sees the record and signs it.
Ahead of her annual check-in, her PI looks at the record: what she has done, what it maps to, what she has written about it. Under permissions the institution sets, he comments and endorses against it.
Her industry mentor, who has no university login, does the same from outside.
After the degree
She moves on, and takes her record with her.
Sofia connects a personal email, and her record stays with her when she moves on.
Cohort engagement
PhD students and postdocs · 2025–26
Engagement by competency % of cohort
Graduate schoolPartner offices
- Graduate school32
- Departments21
- Library11
- Postdoctoral office9
- Career center Partner24
- Self-paced courses17
Meet Ruth.
She directs graduate professional development, with training coming from her own team, the departments, the library, the career center and the postdoctoral office.
The catalog
Everyone publishes into the same place.
Each office adds its own training and keeps control of it, and Ruth sees everything her students and postdocs can actually access.
The needs analysis
She plans from what they told her.
Self-assessment results come back by cohort, department and funder, so she sees the gaps before she commissions anything. Run again a year later, the results show movement.
Explore the features.
- One catalog across graduate school, departments, library, career center and postdoctoral office
- Recurring events and multi-session series, held together as one booking
- Capacity limits and waitlists that release automatically on cancellation
- Check-in that captures attendance and issues the credential
- Outlook and Google Calendar sync
- Self-assessment with immediate personalized feedback, against several frameworks in parallel
- 360 feedback from PIs, mentors and peers
- External activity capture: conferences, teaching, outreach, outside courses
- Transcripts for any date range
See Potentially for your graduate school.
Thirty minutes, with Potentially set up for the way you run IDPs and professional development.