PDP is the process by which you reflect on your current skills, attributes and achievements and plan your future personal, academic and career development.

Your portfolio

We encourage you to develop a portfolio, either online or a hard copy, to help you with PDP. Through developing a PDP portfolio you can identify and evidence your current strengths; reflect on your potential skills gaps and consider how you might gain new skills or further develop your existing skills.

To help you with this we have created the Bristol Skills framework which highlights the skills we would expect our students to graduate with to make them stand out from the crowd. You can use the Bristol Skills framework to reflect on where you excel and what you would like to develop. You can then evidence any work you have done to develop these skills in your portfolio in a variety of ways, e.g. through documents, images, videos, etc.

Meeting your personal tutor

Your Personal Development Plan is an ideal tool to help inform your personal tutor meetings and highlight the areas you would like to discuss and ask their advice on. We’d recommend you start a PDP portfolio ahead of your first meeting and note down what you are looking forward to as well as anything you are unsure of.