Adding postdocs to your proposal: Developing a Postdoctoral Mentoring Plan

Federal sponsors often require documents included in your proposals that detail how you will train postdoctoral researchers, often referred to as Postdoctoral Mentoring Plans. The plans should document what, how, and when. Typical plans have the following components:

• Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) Standards of professional practice (applicable to the discipline and science in general) and Ethics
• Writing for journals and proposals
• Mentoring skills Interdisciplinary research
• Engagement with peers, the department, the university, their discipline, and the public Leadership development
• Maintaining a work/life balance
• Career development with goals and milestones

The mentoring plan should be as specific as possible and include such details as who will provide mentoring for which skills, when and at what frequency the mentoring will occur, and importantly, how the outcomes will be assessed. Departmental and institutional resources should be mentioned.

Recommended Resources:

• National Postdoc Association toolkit. (Note: ASU is a member of the NPA. Memberships provides access to this resource and institutional membership should be noted in the mentoring plan): https://www.nationalpostdoc.org/page/MentoringPlans
• myIDP tool is an excellent career development tool for graduate students, postdocs, and early career faculty: http://myidp.sciencecareers.org/
• Some examples/templates:
  • https://research.unc.edu/files/2017/08/Sample_Postdoc_Mentoring_Plan.pdf
  • NSF Postdoctoral Mentoring Plan Template Word doc template from this page: https://research.fas.harvard.edu/links/resources/templates
  • https://www.marquette.edu/orsp/documents/sample_postdoc_mentoring_plan_for_an_nsf_proposal.pdf