Moving from training to satisfying employment, whether within academe or in other realms, can require skills not always learned at the bench. Surveys show that what employers want from potential Ph.D. job applicants is what graduate education means to provide: deep knowledge, hands-on experience, ability to ask meaningful questions and find answers to them, experience managing projects, capacity to work independently, initiative, entrepreneurialism, and an advanced ability to communicate clearly about complex things. At the same time, students, postdocs, and mid-life career-changers describe frustrations with understanding how to articulate their skills and translate them to tasks beyond research.

Approaches that help trainees better acknowledge and acquire the skills expected of knowledge workers and efforts that help them understand career pathways will help them succeed in the workplace, whether as principal investigators, in long-term non-tenure track positions, in industrial careers, or away from the bench.

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund will support pilot projects that demonstrate practical approaches to readying scientists for career transitions. Projects may be meant to enhance trainees’ understanding of jobs beyond the Academy, or of career trajectories within academe, or of the flexibility of scientists’ intellectual skill set.

We aim to advance good ideas that have the potential to be deployed at larger scales. FASEB’s Individual Development Plan, a tool that helps structure key conversations between trainee and advisor, and Preparing Future Faculty, a program that provides trainees opportunities to observe and experience faculty responsibilities, are two established programs (not developed with Burroughs Wellcome Fund support) that we point out as examples of high-impact career preparation opportunities developed at a pilot scale and then adopted across the nation.

Application Deadline: March 13, 2020