Tracking Career Outcomes for Postdoctoral Scholars: A Call to Action

Silva, Elizabeth; Jarlais, Christine Des; Lindstaedt, Bill; Rotman, Erik; Watkins, Elizabeth Siegel

doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002458

Cited by 44 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Recent broad-scale efforts by the NIH Biomedical Workforce (BWF) Working Group (https://acd.od.nih.gov/documents/reports/Biomedical_research_wgreport.pdf) among others 5–7 are galvanizing individuals to collect and disseminate data at the institution-level 8 . Answering these calls, University of California, San Francisco researchers released a seminal study on the postdoctoral career outcomes at their institution 9 , contending that tracking career outcomes at the program level is more meaningful than national surveys, which collate information from individuals in a variety of fields and programs. This study came with limitations, however, given that the researchers only examined those within T32 program laboratories (NIH Institutional Training Grant Program for which career outcome data is more readily obtained from grant reports); and given that this study did not identify finely tuned information regarding job specifics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualizing detailed postdoctoral employment trends using a new career outcome taxonomy

Gilliam

Peddada

et al. 2018

Nat Biotechnol

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualizing detailed postdoctoral employment trends using a new career outcome taxonomy

Gilliam

Peddada

et al. 2018

Nat Biotechnol

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“…Outcomes data collection and curation described (Silva et al, 2016). Since this publication, we have accrued new best practices.…”

Section: Setting Up a Repositorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Where do our graduates go? A toolkit for retrospective and ongoing career outcomes data collection for biomedical PhD students and postdoctoral scholars

Silva¹,

Mejía²,

Watkins³

2019

Preprint

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Universities are at long last undertaking efforts to collect and disseminate information about student career outcomes, after decades of calls to action. Organizations such as Rescuing Biomedical Research and Future of Research brought this issue to the forefront of graduate education, and the second Future of Biomedical Graduate and Postdoctoral Training conference (FOBGAPT2) featured the collection of career outcomes data in its final recommendations, published in this journal (Hitchcock et al., 2017). More recently, 26 institutions assembled as the Coalition for Next Generation Life Science, committing to ongoing collection and dissemination of career data for both graduate and postdoc alumni. A few individual institutions have shared snapshots of the data in peer-reviewed publications (Mathur et al., 2018; Silva, des Jarlais, Lindstaedt, Rotman, Watkins, 2016) and on websites. As more and more institutions take up this call to action, they will now be looking for tools, protocols, and best practices for ongoing career outcomes data collection, management, and dissemination. Here, we describe UCSF's experiences in conducting a retrospective study, and in institutionalizing a methodology for annual data collection and dissemination. We describe and share all tools we have developed, and we provide calculations of the time and resources required to accomplish both retrospective studies and annual updates. We also include broader recommendations for implementation at your own institutions, increasing the feasibility of this endeavor.

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“…and lack of an 'adjunct' preface to their faculty title, resulting in the coding of nearly all faculty positions as "Faculty: Tenure track." Other coders concluded that a tenure-track assignment could not be made without direct confirmation from the individual, given that many institutions appoint non-tenure track assistant professors, or have eliminated the traditional tenure structure altogether [19]. This non-standardized interpretation of the categories resulted in significant discordance in the classification of faculty records.…”

Section: Tier 3: Job Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying Inter-rater Reliability to Improve Consistency in Classifying PhD Career Outcomes

Stayart¹,

Brandt

Brown

et al. 2018

Preprint

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In the past year, there has been an exciting groundswell of national efforts to integrate multiple taxonomies for the transparent dissemination and analysis of PhD career outcomes. In this study, we leveraged the unique resources of the Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training Consortium to examine the reliability of the three-tiered Unified Career Outcomes Taxonomy (UCOT v.2017) that was collaboratively developed at a meeting convened by Rescuing Biomedical Research in August 2017. Using an amended version of the UCOT v.2017 (UCOT v.2017-rev1) and a new Supplementary Guidance document, we categorized over 570 PhD alumni records from three different universities. Utilizing Krippendorff's alpha to measure the interrater reliability from nine different individuals, we determined moderate to robust reproducibility within the first two tiers of the taxonomy (Workforce Sector and Career Type); however, the reliability for the third tier (Job Function) did not meet established standards. The team identified significant sources of error, revised category definitions, improved coder training materials and processes, and tested for improved reliability through coding 219 PhD alumni records using the revised taxonomy, UCOT v.2017-rev2. Our results revealed that the changes introduced in UCOT v.2017-rev2 improved inter-rater reliability in all three tiers, and either met or exceeded the acceptable standards for reliability. A final set of clarifications were made to UCOT v.2017-rev2, resulting in UCOT v.2018 and a Finalized Guidance document. Our findings underscore the importance of carefully developing guidance documents to aid coders in the reliable and consistent categorization of alumni career outcomes. We propose periodic assessment of the UCOT v.2018 to address the natural evolution of PhD careers in the global workforce. Ultimately, we hope that UCOT v.2018 will aid in the classification and dissemination of alumni career outcomes that is essential to educating trainees, institutions, and agencies about the diversity of career options for PhDs, and therein empower all PhDs to pursue the careers of their choice.

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Tracking Career Outcomes for Postdoctoral Scholars: A Call to Action

Cited by 44 publications

References 6 publications

Visualizing detailed postdoctoral employment trends using a new career outcome taxonomy

Visualizing detailed postdoctoral employment trends using a new career outcome taxonomy

Where do our graduates go? A toolkit for retrospective and ongoing career outcomes data collection for biomedical PhD students and postdoctoral scholars

Applying Inter-rater Reliability to Improve Consistency in Classifying PhD Career Outcomes

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