During my many interactions with grad students and postdocs, I have learned that a large number of early career scientists train on campuses where important career development services are not widely available. While some schools may provide a diverse array of such services, at many other institutions the only opportunity to enhance early career training outside the lab is through attendance at conferences and local symposia. Here at the GSA, we recognize the importance of offering career development training in a variety of different forums. To increase accessibility of these programs, we provide graduate students and postdocs the opportunity to apply for Career Development Symposia grants. These awards allow students and postdocs to organize local symposia that provide career and professional development opportunities for early career scientists.

As with any competitive application, it can be a bit intimidating knowing where and how to begin. Here, I’ll provide you with a few tips for a successful Career Development Symposia grant application.

Know the requirements and formatting

We’ve all heard stories about grant applications being triaged for minor errors in formatting. With all of the effort that goes into creating a well-crafted application, the last thing anyone wants is for a minor detail to take you out of the running. While we are not strict about margins or fonts, we do have some basic requirements. The most common mistakes we see for CDS grant applications is exceeding the 2-page proposal and CV limits. Be sure to carefully read through the application instructions.

Understand your audience

For these awards, you need to think about two audiences: the committee reviewing your application and future attendees.

In the application, tell us why the meeting is important to your attendees. Are you addressing a gap in knowledge that you identified? Are you providing networking opportunities with industry professionals that are not common in your area? Whatever the reason, make it clear and provide supporting evidence.

The committee needs to clearly understand how your meeting provides career development training. We often receive applications for scientific symposia that focus on the importance of the science. While this is important for the committee to know, the primary focus of the application should be on the career development opportunities to the organizers and attendees. Stating that graduate students and postdocs will have an opportunity to present their work is great. But that alone is not sufficient for a successful application. Think about how you can raise the bar beyond traditional presentations. Tell us about how the event provides a leadership opportunity for the organizers, add a structured networking event, or even provide a mini workshop on presentation skills at the start or end of the day.

Identifying and articulating career development opportunities is a key factor for success!

Have clear plans

Agenda – Organizing an event takes careful thought and detailed planning. In your application, provide a detailed agenda. This is the place where you can raise the bar a bit. Rather than simply listing the time and name of each session, provide a list of skills developed by attendees or highlight the numbers of early career speakers.

Budget – Many applicants ask me if including other sources of financial support is detrimental for their application. The answer is no. In fact, knowing that organizers have a plan of action for obtaining additional funding provides confidence that the event will be successful. It also demonstrates that other groups also see the event as valuable and relevant.

Advertising – In your application, be sure to not overlook adding information about your advertising and promotion plans. It seems like a minor detail but we want to know that you’ve thought about effective ways to advertise using a realistic timeline.

I hope these tips help to demystify the application process for these awards. We look forward to reading an application from you in the near future.

Guest post by Adriana Bankston and Sonia Hall

Postdocs often lack the professional development opportunities they need. Many stakeholders are working to address this critical gap, including the academic, non-profit, private, and government sectors. While postdocs benefit from the great variety of resources and providers, it is important to minimize duplication of efforts. To maximize the contributions of all invested groups, the Genetics Society of America and the Future of Research collaborated to organize a workshop for the 2017 National Postdoctoral Association Annual Meeting: “Enhancing the Connections Between Institutions and Professional Societies in Advancing Postdoctoral Training.” Our goal was to bring together the various stakeholders to map out a collaborative framework to provide the best professional development for trainees. The session included a panel discussion and five concurrent breakout sessions.

The panel discussion revealed how different groups are currently enhancing postdoctoral training. Career development professionals have carefully developed, tested, and evaluated a variety of programs. They have invested substantial time and effort in understanding the needs and interests of their local communities. At the same time, professional organizations are increasingly offering career and professional development training at regional and national conferences, as well as through online webinars.

The overlap between these groups provides an opportunity to begin working together to maximize the investment that career development professionals have made in developing quality programming. Because professional societies work at the intersection of the academic, private, government, and non-profit sectors, they are uniquely poised to support national and international dissemination of programming developed within institutional offices. Partnerships between professional societies and career development groups to broadly disseminate career development content will provide better opportunities to postdocs who do not have access to professional development on their campus. Professional organizations can have a particularly significant impact on this underserved population of scholars.

Attendees worked together to develop a roadmap outlining how the various stakeholders can best complement each other’s activities to:

•  Identify roles for enhancing postdoctoral training
•  Test a partnership model for collaboration
•  Define & measure career preparedness
•  Develop methods for assessment and dissemination
•  Identify challenges to dissemination of programming and training data

Identify roles for enhancing postdoctoral training

The participants in this breakout session worked to identify what various stakeholders can do to improve training for postdocs. They recommended:

• Institutions host multi-institution training events and increase connectivity among trainees and alumni;
• Professional organizations  advertise resources and opportunities available to trainees, visit local campuses, and develop webinars for topics of interest to multiple disciplines;
• Postdocs join professional organizations, volunteer for committees, and use available resources.

Testing a partnership model for collaboration

The group was primarily composed of professionals working in academia. They identified a number of services that professional organizations could provide, including: field-specific resources; data on common needs and resources; services and memberships for postdoc offices in addition to individuals; subscription-based access to a portal that contains career development content.

Together, the participants identified a number of resources that could be further developed through collaboration: negotiation training, a career development speakers bureau, a faculty training bootcamp, and resources to support international scholars.

Define & measure career preparedness

Considering the variety of career outcomes for postdocs, it becomes difficult to find consensus on the definition of career preparedness. Discipline and department specific requirements for graduation typically define the academic training experience. But, as many of us are aware, these requirements often do not include the development of professional skills that are critical for success outside of a research-intensive role in academia. To begin defining career preparedness, the attendees suggested using existing resources, such as the National Postdoctoral Association’s core competencies. Because the research experience is of critical importance, they reinforced the need to use the scholar’s research project, publications, and presentations to evaluate discipline-specific career preparation. Collecting data on the competencies of graduating PhD students and postdocs transitioning into various careers will be very important in shaping our understanding of their current level of expertise. Six months from each scholar’s transition from training into their new career path, additional data should be collected to understand the challenges that were encountered by the scholar and the skills they lacked to efficiently overcome the challenges.

Develop methods for assessment & dissemination

In this session, participants discussed assessment in general, as well as specific methods of data collection, particularly for longitudinal data. One example was collecting behavioral outcomes data (for example whether people make significant changes to their CVs shortly after taking a CV workshop, with a follow-up 3-6 months later). They also discussed what was meant by “dissemination” and how to do it effectively, as summarized below.

Some very interesting ideas were put forth in terms of data collection:  

1) Have attendees swipe ID cards. This method would allow the linking of data of participation in career development sessions to the university’s online systems, and would also allow the downloading of a list of professional development sessions. The latter could then be used to track attendance but would require IRB approval.

2) Using a unique identifier. This method would not allow data collection of the participants in the session but would allow tracking if people fill out the session surveys without being linked to an email address. This method would allow the collection of data without requiring IRB approval.

3) Use sign-in list email addresses followed by an anonymous survey. This method does not require IRB approval and would make it difficult to link pre- and post-session data for specific individuals.

In addition to the above solutions, another important recurring theme during the entire workshop was the need for establishing a central web portal by universities and societies.

Identify challenges to dissemination of programming and training data

This group identified the challenges postdocs encounter that prevent them from participating in career development programming. Often, postdocs do not attend workshops or utilize existing professional development tools. Not surprisingly, many postdocs do not read the emails that advertise these opportunities. Additionally, many postdocs report that they do not see enough value in the programs to participate. Taken together, this suggests that we need to reach our audience using other mechanisms and better communicate the utility of the programming. The group suggested using social media, online forums, email list-servs, newsletters, and posters to communicate success stories from previous participants.

Various stakeholders working together to improve postdoc training will benefit the scientific enterprise, both for academics and non-academics. This session highlighted many similarities between the needs of various stakeholders, while showing how they can work together and complement each other to improve training. Future studies should examine practical aspects of how these groups can effectively work together (for example through an online centralized platform) to foster change in postdoctoral training for a variety of career paths.  

Adriana Bankston is a Policy Activist at Future of Research (FoR), a nonprofit organization representing junior scientists, through grassroots advocacy, to promote positive systemic change to the way we do science. Her goals are to promote science policy and advocacy for junior scientists and to gather and present data on various issues in the current scientific system.

Adriana Bankston

Sonia Hall is Program Director for Early Career Scientist Engagement at the Genetics Society of America. She is committed to supporting career and professional development of graduate students and postdocs as they navigate careers in the scientific enterprise.

Sonia Hall. Photo by Earl Richardson.

]]> https://genestogenomes.org/enhancing-the-connections-between-institutions-and-professional-societies-in-advancing-postdoctoral-training/feed/ 1 https://genestogenomes.org/crafting-your-resume-for-a-non-academic-position/ Thu, 16 Mar 2017 16:00:32 +0000 https://genestogenomes.org/?p=8543 Searching for a job can be overwhelming and it is often difficult to know where or how to begin. To get you over the activation energy threshold for starting your job search, here are a few general tips for designing a non-academic resume.   Format Let’s start with the basics – how a resume should…]]>

Searching for a job can be overwhelming and it is often difficult to know where or how to begin. To get you over the activation energy threshold for starting your job search, here are a few general tips for designing a non-academic resume.

Format

Let’s start with the basics – how a resume should look. In contrast to lengthy academic CVs, most resumes are 1-2 pages in length. In general, the length of the resume is dependent upon the amount of relevant work experience you have. That being said, it is still important to check the job posting or electronic application system for specific limitations in length. If you are unable to find anything specific about the length and still feel uncertain, you can consult with professionals working within the field or even check with the Human Resources representative managing the application process. If you find yourself concerned with the space constraints, remember a good place to elaborate further on your relevant skills or experience is LinkedIn. Individuals involved in the hiring process will most likely check your LinkedIn profile.

It is important to make your resume clear and easy to read. Don’t try to squeeze more text in by using a small font. Unless you’re a typography expert, stick to 10 to 12-point size of a standard typeface like Times New Roman or Arial. It is also important to leave some white space so your resume does not appear overwhelmingly dense. Some of that white space will be in the margins, which should be no less than half an inch.

Use a structured layout with bold headings to keep the reader focused. Be careful to not embed images, logos, or blocks of color – many companies and organizations use software to pre-screen resumes and these visual elements can lead to your application being eliminated by the screening system.

Key Content

In 2012, Ladders, a career resource company, conducted a study where they tracked the eye movement of recruiters as they were reviewing resumes. The results showed they focus on three main areas: the applicant summary, experience and education. The remaining sections depend on the information listed in the job posting. You should tailor the sections to emphasize the required and preferred experiences listed by the employer. Other sections might include:

• leadership
• teaching & mentoring
• licensure & certifications
• service
• publications & presentations
• awards & recognition

The summary is located at the top of your resume and is 3-4 sentences in length. It should be thought of as your professional elevator pitch. This area is an ideal place to customize your resume for the position. For each position that you apply, you should create a new summary that frames the resume with the employer’s interests in mind. Before you begin writing, and using the job posting as a guide, identify accomplishments you could use to highlight your fit for the position. Also identify the skills you have learned in your research setting that are transferable to this particular position. Once you have done that, you can begin drafting the summary.

The first sentence will describe what defines you as a professional.

“Demonstrated leader in academic and industry settings with extensive experience in scientific modeling”

Sentence two is a good place to highlight your transferable skills.

“Provides expertise in computational analysis and data visualization to communicate complex data sets”

The final sentences should highlight your accomplishments.

“Known for effective project management and diverse assay development”

In the summary, be sure to connect the dots for the reader. Be specific and make your case for why they should continue reading your resume. Use evidence to back your major claims. For example, if you say in the summary you are “known for effective management” you should support this later in the resume – for example describing an award or an achievement that illustrates your management skills.

The experience section should highlight your experience that is relevant to the specific position for which you are applying. When reading through the job posting, look for words like “required” and “preferred”. These words will indicate the relative importance of that particular qualification for the employer. You should first list experience relevant to the employer’s “required” qualifications, followed by the preferred, as space permits. This can be surprisingly difficult because we all have achievements we are really proud of that don’t necessarily speak to the needs of the position. It is difficult to deprioritize these accomplishments in place of something we may perceive as being less meaningful. Use only 3-5 bullets under each position and ensure that each is one complete sentence. These sentences should begin with an action verb and describe what you have achieved, focusing on the results of your work.

“Provided science communication training and research mentoring to 3 undergraduate researchers; resulting in 4 poster awards, 1 undergraduate research award, and a publication in GENETICS”

You do not want to simply list a bunch of job duties. Take the time to make these sentences specific and meaningful. When possible, quantify any outcomes.

The education section can either come before or after the experience section, this depends on the importance of education for the specific position. If your degree is required for the position, you may want to put it before the experience section. More and more, applicants are placing their education further towards the end of their resume. Doing this allows you to place the most relevant information for the position first, speaking to the interests of the reader.

Crucial last steps

Finally, don’t forget to proofread your resume. Envision your reader making their way through a huge stack of qualified applicants. You don’t want to give them a trivial reason to set your application aside. Share your resume with a trusted colleague or mentor working in the field. Ask for their feedback and use their comments to guide your revisions. If you are working at an institution that has a career office, schedule an appointment to have your resume reviewed. The professionals working in these offices have dedicated their careers to guiding others through the career process and can often provide great insight and guidance.

Most importantly, be proud of what you have accomplished. There are always gaps in our skills and experience that can be filled with just a little more training. But, chances are you can learn much of this once you are working in the position. Afterall, your scientific training demonstrates that you are able to problem solve and learn quickly!

Josh Hall, Director of Science Outreach and UNC PREP at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Director of North Carolina DNA Day, and creator/co-host of “Hello PhD: a podcast for scientists and the people who love them.”

Most grad students and postdocs struggle with where their training will take them as they complete each phase of their career development. After discussions with individuals in the scientific community, I’ve learned that many successful scientists followed a career path that allows them to work in areas they are truly passionate about. Questioning where we fit best and recognizing our personal strengths is critical to our career development. For Dr. Joshua Hall of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, this self-awareness was the key in recognizing that a career away from the bench was the best fit for him.

Josh began assessing his career options while in graduate school, but still pursued a traditional postdoctoral position where he applied his research skills to a new set of questions. At the same time, he received an Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Awards (IRACDA) Fellowship, allowing him to gain valuable experience in teaching. During his postdoc, he became decreasingly motivated by bench work and realized that what he really enjoyed was mentoring students and helping them chart out their own careers. He identified that his strength was his ability to guide others toward achieving their goals, be that through one-on-one guidance or larger communication forums.

But how does someone build a career centered on mentoring? And perhaps equally important, what’s the best way step off of the research career track gracefully?

Well, Josh acknowledges that it is a challenge to make the decision to move away from the bench. “The sense that you are setting your long held career goals aside is scary,” said Josh. He also encountered little support from his mentors. In many conversations, when he asked for support he instead got comments trying to persuade him to stay in academia. He often heard, “you’ve got what it takes to be a faculty member, so you should pursue that.”

Josh is an excellent example of why we cannot continue to have the same discouraging conversations about long term career options for trainees. There is a very large and complex scientific enterprise that requires a multitude of interests, strengths, and talents. We cannot continue guiding the bulk of trainees towards tenure track academic research positions; especially since those positions will not fit every individual’s motivation and personal drive. If the majority of students and postdocs are prepared only for tenure-track faculty jobs, it places a large burden on trainees as well as the research community. Like Josh, each trainee can make a substantial impact on the research landscape by pursuing careers that specifically fit their strengths and talents.

Josh’s decision to step away from the bench has had a positive influence on the scientific community, particularly among the trainees that have worked with him directly, myself included. Currently, Josh is the Director of Science Outreach and UNC PREP in the Office of Graduate Education at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. For the past six years, he has also served as Director of North Carolina DNA Day, an outreach program that connects scientists with high school classrooms. In this role, he and his colleagues at UNC work to facilitate opportunities for graduate students and postdocs to gain skills and sculpt careers both inside and outside of the lab. These opportunities involve improving career awareness, communication skills, opportunities for teaching and outreach, and bringing students with similar career interests together. More importantly, they work to teach early-career scientists that PhD training leads to an outstanding ability to solve problems and ask questions, something that is broadly applicable to numerous career options. Josh and his colleagues help trainees recognize that career paths are often not straight lines, and that a PhD provides the keys to unlock a wide array of doors along the career path. While careers away from the bench may not have as clear a path as the one for tenure track faculty, this also means that there are ample opportunities to carve out a unique position. The key to building a successful career away from the bench, according to Josh, is to “self-reflect and figure out where your skills and passions lie, ask for help when you need it, and don’t be afraid to try something new.”

Indeed, Josh is not afraid of new challenges. The experiences in his current position have made him realize that many of the issues graduate students and postdocs are having now are the same as those he had when he was in training. Because of this, he created and co-hosts a podcast, “Hello PhD: a podcast for scientists and the people who love them,” in order to broaden the reach of his mentoring. Here, he works with his long-time friend from graduate school, Daniel Arneman, to broaden the discussion about important issues surrounding the PhD experience. The podcast is a venue to discuss topics that are important for grad students and postdocs with an aim to form a community to talk about the shared experiences and challenges related to scientific training. “If the podcast makes the science training experience better for just one person, then we will consider that a success,” Josh says. Perhaps this serves as the best example of how to build a satisfying career: first, you recognize your strength as an individual. Then, you identify a need or something that needs to be improved. Finally, you take the leap and build your part in the future of the scientific community.

These conversations about career options, whether they take place on a podcast or in the laboratory, during a winter hike or in a blog post, are important for the continued strengthening and growth of our community. To continue to progress the research enterprise, it will take the collective creativity of a diverse group of trainees and mentors working to build a highly skilled workforce. And the skills that are needed are not going to be found only at the bench. They will be found leading initiatives to increase support for funding, communicating the importance of fundamental discoveries, and teaching the next generation of great scientists.

Connect with Josh:

Twitter: @jdhallphd

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdhall 

Hello PhD Twitter: @hellophd

Dr. Sandlin Seguin specializes in the creation of content for a visual learning platform.

As trainees navigate through their graduate training and postdoctoral independence, they are exposed to many opportunities that allow them to develop skills that are beneficial to a career at the bench and along the many paths that entwine the scientific enterprise. Dr. Sandlin Seguin is one scientist that is surprised at where she landed, within the scientific landscape, when she looks back on her career path.  Sandlin is an eLearning Specialist at Tableau Software in Seattle. Tableau makes data visualization software which provides effective solutions for business users and a growing segment of scientists to explore and share data using cutting edge creative software. She works on a team of nine individuals with backgrounds that range from software development, medicine, library sciences, to business. She expressed that “having this broad mix of skills on one team is essential to design finely tuned learning packages.” Her ability to become an integral member of this creative team stems from critical experiences she obtained during her graduate and postgraduate training.

So, what exactly is an eLearning specialist? Dr. Seguin has what she refers to as a “buzzword job,” meaning it is a very popular at this point in time. Considering this, it is logical that her role in her current position has kind of morphed over time. An eLearning Specialist creates education content that is meant to be viewed asynchronously online. A key feature of what she is able to do is see data differently which provides her a great strength that aids in her ability to develop the visual aspects of content to make it more digestible to the consumer. First hearing of this specific job, it may seem like a one-of-a-kind opportunity but Sandlin states that the field is fairly large and is growing.  Due to the large amount of growth in this area, Sandlin says, “it is easier to come into the field from a non-traditional background because there isn’t a standard already in place.” As scientists we are trained to take a project from a small beginning to create a new or deeper understanding to progress the field forward. Reapplying these skills to build a new field of expertise within a slightly different career is just an extension of what graduate students and postdocs are trained to do. So what exactly does it take to become an effective eLearning Specialist?

Besides the obvious connection between science training and data, there were a few other key aspects of Dr. Seguin’s training that prepared her for her career at Tableau. Not surprisingly, these activities took place away from the bench. First, she learned a little bit about how to teach by being a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Pittsburgh, Department of Biological Sciences. While teaching opportunities take graduate students away from the bench, they are often a graduate student’s first opportunity to begin to really understand the extent to which individuals learn differently. The ability to recognize these differences is typically followed by the modification of how graduate students communicate about science to a non-specialized audience. The attainment of these skills has been a key feature of what makes Dr. Seguin successful at Tableau. Her position requires her to look at multiple data sets, interpret them, and then create content for a visual learning platform. This understanding of data, ability to interpret findings, and creating a visual interpretation that can be understood by a diverse range of consumers lies within the fundamental skill set of scientists. Training in science prepares individuals for a variety of careers, many of them away from the bench because the training encompasses a very large set of skills.

As a graduate student, Dr. Seguin had a feeling that a traditional postdoc was most likely not the best fit for her career interests. Again, reaching into the toolbox she developed as a scientist, she began taking freelance work, eventually opening her own sole proprietorship. As a freelancer, she provided editing and copyediting service to scientists. This freelance work allowed her to get the experience she needed to begin working at Edgenuity in Seattle and then Bellevue College in Washington, where she wrote and designed lesson plans and assessments for a variety of STEM based courses. These positions provided a transitional platform for Dr. Seguin into adult learning and gave her an opportunity to spend more time learning content development while also observing other roles in the educations sphere that aided in shaping the direction of her career.

Additionally, Dr. Seguin stepped out into the community doing outreach activities including volunteering as a scientist in residence at the Carnegie Science Center, developing hands on demonstrations to get young women involved in STEM activities. She followed this experience with additional volunteer work as an Executive Director of Education at HiveBio, where she focused on the development and implementation of non-traditional learning curriculum. Building this diverse range of skills as an extension of her work at the bench not only gave her tangible experience, it opened her eyes to the breadth of opportunities that are available to scientists entering the job market. Importantly, each of these experiences led to further training in science communication which has enhanced her ability to broaden and diversity the way content is delivered at Tableau. In her current position, she is at ease communicating about science with scientists. She can discuss their science and data while also communicating the benefits her company can offer to further progress their work.

One thing is clear from looking at Dr. Seguin’s career path, her training in science has provided the skill set she needed to open up a diverse range of career paths. These experiences also allowed her to identify what she did and did not like to do within a variety of interrelated career paths. However, her initiative to explore a variety of training opportunities was important in making her transition away from the bench successful. As her role in graduate school changed over time, Dr. Seguin also expects that her current role with Tableau will continue to change and shift over time as she develops her skills and strengths, providing her with many opportunities for her own personal development.

Follow Sandlin Seguin on Twitter @sandlinseguin