Diversity Exiting the Academy: Influential Factors for the Career Choice of Well-Represented and Underrepresented Minority Scientists

A national sample of PhD-trained scientists completed training, accepted subsequent employment in academic and nonacademic positions, and were queried about their previous graduate training and current employment. Respondents indicated factors contributing to their employment decision (e.g., working conditions, salary, job security). The data indicate the relative importance of deciding factors influencing career choice, controlling for gender, initial interest in faculty careers, and number of postgraduate publications. Among both well-represented (WR; n = 3444) and underrepresented minority (URM; n = 225) respondents, faculty career choice was positively associated with desire for autonomy and partner opportunity and negatively associated with desire for leadership opportunity. Differences between groups in reasons endorsed included: variety, prestige, salary, family influence, and faculty advisor influence. Furthermore, endorsement of faculty advisor or other mentor influence and family or peer influence were surprisingly rare across groups, suggesting that formal and informal support networks could provide a missed opportunity to provide support for trainees who want to stay in faculty career paths. Reasons requiring alteration of misperceptions (e.g., limited leadership opportunity for faculty) must be distinguished from reasons requiring removal of actual barriers. Further investigation into factors that affect PhDs’ career decisions can help elucidate why URM candidates are disproportionately exiting the academy

Next gen PhD: a guide to career paths in science

For decades, top scientists in colleges and universities pursued a clear path to success: enroll in a prestigious graduate program, conduct research, publish papers, complete the PhD, pursue postdoctoral work. With perseverance and a bit of luck, a tenure-track professorship awaited at the end. In today s academic job market, this scenario represents the exception. As the number of newly conferred science PhDs keeps rising, the number of tenured professorships remains stubbornly stagnant. Only 14 percent of those with PhDs in science occupy tenure-track positions five years after completing their degree. Next Gen PhD provides a frank and up-to-date assessment of the current career landscape facing science PhDs. Nonfaculty careers once considered Plan B are now preferred by the majority of degree holders, says Melanie Sinche. An upper-level science degree is a prized asset in the eyes of many employers, and a majority of science PhDs build rewarding careers both inside and outside the university. A certified career counselor with extensive experience working with graduate students and postdocs, Sinche offers step-by-step guidance through the career development process: identifying personal strengths and interests, building work experience and effective networks, assembling job applications, and learning tactics for interviewing and negotiating all the essentials for making a successful career transition. Sinche profiles science PhDs across a wide range of disciplines who share proven strategies for landing the right occupation. Current graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, mentors, and students considering doctoral and postdoctoral training in the sciences will find Next Gen PhD an empowering resource

Diversity Exiting the Academy: Influential Factors for the Career Choice of Well-Represented and Underrepresented Minority Scientists.

A national sample of PhD-trained scientists completed training, accepted subsequent employment in academic and nonacademic positions, and were queried about their previous graduate training and current employment. Respondents indicated factors contributing to their employment decision (e.g., working conditions, salary, job security). The data indicate the relative importance of deciding factors influencing career choice, controlling for gender, initial interest in faculty careers, and number of postgraduate publications. Among both well-represented (WR; n = 3444) and underrepresented minority (URM; n = 225) respondents, faculty career choice was positively associated with desire for autonomy and partner opportunity and negatively associated with desire for leadership opportunity. Differences between groups in reasons endorsed included: variety, prestige, salary, family influence, and faculty advisor influence. Furthermore, endorsement of faculty advisor or other mentor influence and family or peer influence were surprisingly rare across groups, suggesting that formal and informal support networks could provide a missed opportunity to provide support for trainees who want to stay in faculty career paths. Reasons requiring alteration of misperceptions (e.g., limited leadership opportunity for faculty) must be distinguished from reasons requiring removal of actual barriers. Further investigation into factors that affect PhDs\u27 career decisions can help elucidate why URM candidates are disproportionately exiting the academy. CBE Life Sci Educ 2016 Fall; 15(3):ar41

An evidence-based evaluation of transferrable skills and job satisfaction for science PhDs

<div><p>PhD recipients acquire discipline-specific knowledge and a range of relevant skills during their training in the life sciences, physical sciences, computational sciences, social sciences, and engineering. Empirically testing the applicability of these skills to various careers held by graduates will help assess the value of current training models. This report details results of an Internet survey of science PhDs (<i>n</i> = 8099) who provided ratings for fifteen transferrable skills. Indeed, analyses indicated that doctoral training develops these transferrable skills, crucial to success in a wide range of careers including research-intensive (RI) and non-research-intensive (NRI) careers. Notably, the vast majority of skills were transferrable across both RI and NRI careers, with the exception of three skills that favored RI careers (creativity/innovative thinking, career planning and awareness skills, and ability to work with people outside the organization) and three skills that favored NRI careers (time management, ability to learn quickly, ability to manage a project). High overall rankings suggested that graduate training imparted transferrable skills broadly. Nonetheless, we identified gaps between career skills needed and skills developed in PhD training that suggest potential areas for improvement in graduate training. Therefore, we suggest that a two-pronged approach is crucial to maximizing existing career opportunities for PhDs and developing a career-conscious training model: 1) encouraging trainees to recognize their existing individual skill sets, and 2) increasing resources and programmatic interventions at the institutional level to address skill gaps. Lastly, comparison of job satisfaction ratings between PhD-trained employees in both career categories indicated that those in NRI career paths were just as satisfied in their work as their RI counterparts. We conclude that PhD training prepares graduates for a broad range of satisfying careers, potentially more than trainees and program leaders currently appreciate.</p></div

Trainee status by academic program.

<p>Trainee status by academic program.</p

Means of transferrable skills during training and employment.

<p>Means of transferrable skills during training and employment.</p

Logistic regression of transferrable skills acquired during doctoral training on research-intensive or non-research-intensive career, controlling for postdoctoral training.

<p>Logistic regression of transferrable skills acquired during doctoral training on research-intensive or non-research-intensive career, controlling for postdoctoral training.</p

Frequency count by primary employment categories (n = 3803).

<p>Frequency count by primary employment categories (n = 3803).</p

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 &amp; 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