There is increasing awareness of the need for pre- and post-doctoral professional development and career guidance, however many academic institutions are only beginning to build out these functional roles. As a graduate career educator, accessing vast silos and resources at a university and with industry-partners can be daunting, yet collaboration and network development are crucial to the success of any career and professional development office. To better inform and direct these efforts, forty-five stakeholders external and internal to academic institutions were identified and interviewed to gather perspectives on topics critical to career development offices. Using a stakeholder engagement visualization tool developed by the authors, strengths and weaknesses can be assessed. General themes from interviews with internal and external stakeholders are discussed to provide various stakeholder subgroup perspectives to help prepare for successful interactions. Benefits include increased engagement and opportunities to collaborate, and to build or expand graduate career development offices.

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 identifies and summarizes 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. Similar fields between taxonomies were mapped to create a new crosswalk tool. 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.

In July 2020, four months into the disruption of normal life caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, we assessed the institutional climate within the School of Medicine. Voluntary surveys were completed by 135 graduate students in 11 PhD-granting programs and by 83 members of the graduate training faculty. Several themes emerged. PhD students work hard, but the number of hours spent on research-related activities has declined during the pandemic. The students are worried about the pandemic's impact on their research productivity, consequent delays in their graduation, and diminished future job prospects. Many late stage PhD students feel they do not have adequate time or resources to plan for their future careers. Symptoms of anxiety and/or depression are prevalent in 51% of the students, based on answers to standardized questions. Most students report they have strong mentoring relationships with their faculty advisors and like their programs, but they identify to a lesser extent with the medical school as a whole. Faculty think highly of their graduate students and are also worried about the pandemic's impact upon productivity and the welfare of students. Students are interested in access to an Ombuds office, which is currently being organized by the medical school. Moving forward, the school needs to address issues of bias, faculty diversity, support for mentor training, professional development, and the imposter syndrome. We must also work to create a climate in which many more graduate students feel that they are valued members of the academic medicine community.

There is increasing awareness of the need for predoctoral and postdoctoral professional development and career guidance, however many academic institutions are only beginning to build out these functional roles. As a graduate career educator, accessing the vast silos and resources at a university and with industrial partners can be daunting, yet collaborative endeavors and network development both on and off campus are crucial to the success of any career and professional development office. To better inform and direct the efforts of graduate career offices, forty-five stakeholders external and internal to academic institutions were identified and interviewed to gather and categorize perspectives on topics critical to career and professional development offices. Using a stakeholder network visualization tool developed by this group, stakeholder engagement can be rapidly assessed to ascertain areas where offices have strong connections and other areas where additional efforts should be directed to enhance engagement. General themes from interviews with stakeholders are discussed to provide graduate career educators with various stakeholder group perspectives to help prepare for successful interactions. Benefits include increased engagement and opportunities to collaborate, as well as the opportunity to build or expand graduate career development offices.

In July 2021, sixteen months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the institutional climate for PhD training in the School of Medicine was assessed for a second time. This survey of graduate students occurred 1 year after initial surveys of graduate students and training faculty in July 2020. The 2021 survey was completed by 99 PhD students in 11 PhD-granting programs. To allow comparisons between years, most of the 2021 questions were repeated with only minor edits. A few items were added to assess impacts of school-wide town hall meetings, a new PhD career club program, and enlarged mental health services. Several themes emerged. Students remain extremely concerned about the pandemic's impact upon their training and long-term career prospects. They worry specifically about pandemic related reductions in research productivity and networking opportunities. Many students successfully adapted to laboratory research under pandemic restrictions but suffer from the continuing lack of social interaction even after in-person work hours increased. Symptoms of anxiety and/or depression persist amongst 46% of the students, as compared to 51% in 2020. Nearly 80% of students continue to report strong satisfaction with mentoring relationships with their dissertation advisors, but to lesser extents with programs (66%), departments or centers (71%), the School of Medicine (32%) and the University (49%). Students (26%) express interest in the Ombuds office that was announced in late 2021. Some students wrote that the medical school could do a better job in embracing diversity and inclusion and in mentor training, and many stated that town hall meetings do not serve them well. Coping mechanisms shared by some students demonstrate impressive resilience. These results present a mixed picture. While aspects of biomedical PhD training have begun to recover as the pandemic continues, long-term consequences of the disruption raise challenges that must be addressed by efforts to restore and improve the learning environment required for 21st century research education.