Recently all universities in the UK were obliged to introduce Personal Development Planning (PDP). This involves establishing a system to enable students to maintain a record of their personal development, along with personal plans to remedy any deficiencies. The literature indicates that universities and individual schools and departments have responded in different ways, and the systems introduced have varied significantly in terms of their objectives and effectiveness. As a CDIO collaborator, the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast made use of the CDIO Syllabus in the design of its PDP system. The system is described in the paper and it is demonstrated that PDP can help address a number of the CDIO Standards. The compatibility between PDP and CDIO is such that it is recommended that the CDIO collaborators consider adopting PDP in order to support their implementation of the CDIO approach.
