Training and Resources

Individual Development Plans

An Individual Development Plan (IDP) is a resource generated by graduate students and post docs to help guide their career development. When creating your IDP, take into account your interests and strengths, while considering what skills and qualifications are necessary for your chosen career.

An IDP provides a shared point of reference for conversations with your UO advisor (and other mentors) about how to achieve your goals and/or evolve them. A dynamic document, your IDP reflects ongoing consideration of short- and long-term goals. Ideally, it should provide you with a guideline that can measure progress towards your goals and be revised as your plans evolve.

Development and Training Platforms

Amplify your learning experience with trainings and development platforms: 

National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD)

Free for UO users, NCFDD provides professional development, training and a mentoring community. NCFDD training teaches concrete, empirically tested strategies for increasing productivity and pays special attention to the challenges of underrepresented faculty. Dedicated to supporting academics in making successful transitions throughout their careers, NCFDD membership provides access to a series of mentoring services, including workshops focused on research and writing strategies, networking opportunities, and other forms of professional support, including faculty and postdoc development.

Membership resources include:

To complete your registration, please use your UO email and check your account for verification procedures.

Create Your Account

LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning is an extremely user-friendly online video training platform led by industry experts from around the world, available to UO students for free. With over 16,000 courses organized into bite-sized classes or workshops in an extremely broad range of topics, you will be able to build the skills you need for the job market, especially those you cannot learn in your academic program.

LinkedIn Learning provides video-based, on-demand, expert-led instructional videos covering a wide range of topics from software training to professional certifications, leadership to organizational and business skills. Flexible and accessible learning is a top priority for this resources – you can watch instructional videos on any device, on- and offline at your convenience, on a user-friendly interface. Plus, you will be enabled to curate your experience with trending skills in your field based on your educational and personal interests.

You can activate your account via the UO Human Resources.

Check out the new UO Learning Pathways with content curated with graduate students in mind:

Access portal

Big Interview

This free resource for UO students is an online interviewing system that combines training and practice to help improve your interview technique and build your confidence. Go through virtual practice interviews for all experience levels and dozens of industries and access a database of thousands of interview questions with tips on how to answer them. Big Interview also features powerful video tutorials, and allows you to video record your answers.

Use your UO email on Big Interview to complete your registration.

Career Discovery Resources

Imagine PhD

Free to all users, ImaginePhD is an online career exploration and planning tool for PhD students and postdoctoral scholars in the humanities and social sciences. The ImaginePhD tool helps span the knowledge gap between doctoral education and the realm of career possibilities. It includes:

  • Three online assessments which allow PhD students to self-assess their career-related skills, interests, and values.
  • 16 job families relevant to the humanities and social sciences are contained on this page. Each job family contains detailed information about types of careers and resources to help PhD students explore, connect, build skills, and apply for positions
  • My Plan: provides PhD students and postdoctoral scholars with the opportunity to create an individual development plan (IDP) and set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based goals that will help them advance in their graduate programs and careers.

Create Your Account

The Versatile PhD

PhDs go many places. Let The Versatile PhD help you get there!

The Versatile PhD is the oldest, largest online community dedicated to non-academic and non-faculty career paths for PhDs in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields.

Resources to help PhDs and ABDs diversify their career planning include:

  • Options 4 Success: a 6-module career exploration program designed to help graduate students and postdoctoral scholars identify viable career paths, understand the link between their degrees and the professional world, and confidently manage the transition from university to high-quality professional placement.
  • PhD Pathway Series: webinars with an “outside the academy” perspective on career preparation and job opportunities across a range of skills, trends and industries.
  • Opportunities to network with 85,000+ VPhD members across the US and Canada.
  • VPhD Smart Jobs job listings.

Clicking below will bring you to a The Versatile PhD login page. Logging in will establish your credential as affiliated with the University of Oregon. If you already have a VPhD member account, please use it. If not, click "Register Here" once on the login to set up an account:

Login to Your Account

Once you have successfully logged in to the Versatile PhD site, an onscreen message will confirm your affiliation with the University of Oregon.

VitaNavis

Uncertain about your current student or research status? Torn between too many choices and interests that are different from what your program is asking you to focus on? Have you chosen an academic direction but don’t know what career path to take? VitaNavis, a short career assessment tool, is available to help you identify where your interests and talents meet, leading toward a fulfilling future. Using the Strong Interest Inventory, an assessment based on the Myers-Briggs personality tool, you can get guidance and information about potential careers and research pathways that align with your results. 

To access Vita Navis for the first time, click on Log In (not Sign Up) and then click at the top "Sign in with University of Oregon". Log in with Duck ID and click Yes to connect to the UO.

Create Your Account

Meaningful Work Kit

This career assessment tool, developed by Stanford Career Education, is designed to help you understand and prioritize what makes you thrive in a work environment. The Meaningful Work Kit offers a structured self-reflection and career exploration approach. It guides users through questions and exercises that help them identify their interests, values, and strengths. By using this tool, you can gain a deeper understanding of what you enjoy, what you are good at, and what you value in a career. This self-knowledge is crucial in guiding your research into potential career paths in- and out- of academia, and setting meaningful career goals.

Free Access