Institutional Graduate Career Outcomes Database 2022

The Graduate Career Consortium’s (GCC) Career Outcomes Program updated its database of publicly available graduate career outcomes of each of its member institutions. The compiled graduate institutional career outcomes are listed in this database, containing hyperlinks to reports or interactive dashboards displaying the outcomes. Master’s-level, graduate-level, and postdoctoral-level career outcomes were included. Inclusion criteria consisted of institutional reports or dashboards containing quantitative career outcomes (in contrast to institutions that solely included anecdotes and alumni profile stories). Institutions listing program summary statistics alone were not included. In all, we found that 66% of GCC member institutions reported their alumni career outcomes publicly. Data was collected and checked by Committee members in 2022 using a current GCC member institution list at that time; this database was last updated in June, 2022. Publicly available data was collected using standard search engines (e.g., Google, institutional website search bars). Collected data was then presented to and screened by GCC membership for accuracy and completeness. The final draft was reviewed by the Committee and approved for distribution; the Committee aims to update this annually. Authors listed alphabetically by last name

Early Career Representative Engagement Task Force: Final Report and Recommendations

In 2022, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) convened the Early Career Representative Engagement Task Force, charged with identifying • needs of early-career scientists that can be addressed by scientific societies and • ways to keep early-career scientist members and representatives on volunteer bodies as active, engaged members throughout their career. Through Task Force deliberation, an online survey of hundreds of early-career scientists, virtual focus group sessions, and consultation of existing data rich resources, clear themes were identified where scientific and professional societies can make a positive impact. Overall, there is a perception among early-career scientists that societies can act as important spaces to find community and support. The Task Force has developed the following best practices for scientific and professional societies to implement in order to support early-career scientists and encourage active membership contributing to the mission of the society throughout their career. A subset of recommendations is directed specifically to FASEB. Theme 1: Networks and Mentors • Recommendation 1.1: Connect scientists beyond local geography and home institution or organization to expand networks and mentors of early-career scientist members. Theme 2: Career Exploration and Career Transition Readiness • Recommendation 2.1: Actively combat negative stereotypes associated with pursuing careers other than academic tenure track research positions through programming and awards. • Recommendation 2.2: Support members preparing for career transition, especially current PhD students and academic postdocs. Theme 3: Safe and Inclusive Environments • Recommendation 3.1: Create programming and awards to promote inclusivity of environments in the scientific ecosystem. • Recommendation 3.2: Strive to diversify leadership, committees, task forces, and similar bodies, as well as staff. Be transparent about the diversity of leadership and track changes over time. • Recommendation 3.3: Create and support affinity-based interest groups to combat isolation. • Recommendation 3.4: If not already in place, establish a harassment policy. Additionally, for all events, enforce a code of conduct. Theme 4: Support for International Scientists in the U.S. • Recommendation 4.1: Despite not being able to change the complexities of the visa process, target programming and awards to support international scientists. Societies may be successful in supporting early-career scientists’ development and increased engagement in the society mission in a variety of ways. However, the Task Force resoundingly concluded that early-career scientist representation in society governance is a key catalyst to ensuring needs of early-career scientists are reflected in society programming, awards, and overall vision. Theme 5: Society Structure and Governance • Recommendation 5.1: Have at least one designated early-career representative on the highest body of governance with voting rights, codified in bylaws. • Recommendation 5.2: Thoughtfully examine limitations placed on certain membership categories and consider revision to promote active participation from all members. • Recommendation 5.3: Maintain an early-career membership category with reduced dues. • Recommendation 5.4: Retain membership for individuals in a variety of career pathways, not only in research. • Recommendation 5.5: Utilize inclusive language in membership category nomenclature as to not diminish other member categories. Ample opportunity exists for societies to engage early-career scientists through programming and awards, aimed to elevate scientists on a national scale and provide opportunities for career growth. Volunteer service for individual projects may result in a larger leadership role over time. Accounting for needs of early-career scientists can help keep early-career scientists involved in the mission of the society as lifelong champions

Making Strides in Doctoral-Level Career Outcomes Reporting: Surveying the Landscape of Classification and Visualization Methodologies and Creating a Crosswalk Tool

Manuscript Abstract: The recent movement underscoring the importance of career taxonomies has helped usher in a new era of transparency in PhD career outcomes. The convergence of discipline-specific organizational movements, interdisciplinary collaborations, and federal initiatives have all helped to increase PhD career outcomes tracking and reporting. Transparent and publicly available PhD career outcomes are being used by institutions to attract top applicants, as prospective graduate students are factoring these in when deciding on the program and institution in which to enroll for their PhD studies. Given the increasing trend to track PhD career outcomes, the number of institutional efforts and supporting offices for these studies have increased, as has the variety of methods being used to classify and report/visualize outcomes. This report, therefore, aims to identify and summarize currently available PhD career taxonomy tools, resources, and visualization options to help catalyze and empower institutions to develop and publish their own PhD career outcomes. This work serves as an empirical review of the career outcome tracking systems available and highlights organizations, consortia, and funding agencies that are impacting policy change toward greater transparency in PhD career outcomes reporting. Project Description: We collated STEM and humanities career outcome taxonomies from 30 groups (universities, consortia, research institutions & professional societies) and mapped fields that were similar between these taxonomies. In mapping these fields, a number of challenges occurred. For example, some taxonomies were too comprehensive to fully map (e.g., there were nearly 1500 categories to choose from), and these omissions are noted within the headings. Some categories had a tally higher than the total number of taxonomies examined because they were present in multiple ways within a single taxonomy (e.g., tenure-track faculty may have appeared as a variety of different professor job titles). Additionally, some categories were repeated for the purposes of alignment; an asterisk (*) was used to depict when this "one-to-many" mapping occurred. Another key challenge is that no two taxonomies have categories that are 100% equivalent. This was especially apparent when examining employment categorization between different countries. Nevertheless, efforts were made to ascertain the fundamental meaning of each data field in order to best highlight approximate equivalencies between taxonomies. Furthermore, in order to prevent the loss of granularity when aligning taxonomies that are more complex, multiple rows are depicted back-to-back with the same color to highlight categories that are related. Some text is shown in a color other than black to indicate either multiple categories that align together, or to indicate that a category is out of place with respect to the parent taxonomy stratification. Not all of these occurrences are indicated for ease of illustration; one may refer to the original taxonomies to ascertain their structure