Creating and sustaining collaborative multi-institutional industry site visit programs: a toolkit

Abstract

Background: As more early career scientists enter into diverse career pathways, visiting local companies or organizations can support their exploration of these paths. As an efficient way to facilitate this, we developed a collaborative regional site visit program: the Enhancing Local Industry Transitions through Exploration (ELITE) Consortium. Consortium members arrange half-day visits to local industry sites, thus providing companies and trainees the opportunity to meet and identify potential professional and career opportunities. Three different training institutions worked cooperatively in the development and maintenance of the program. The ELITE Consortium was developed with eight phased steps; guidelines and operating procedures were created for each of these steps and are provided along with sample materials for institutions interested in building similar programs. Methods: Prior to fully developing the program, trainee interests were evaluated via questionnaire. During program implementation and thereafter, program directors tracked attendance and collected career outcome data from publicly available sources to identify first job positions after training. Regression analyses and chi-squared analyses were used to examine site visit matches and career outcome data. Results: Analyses suggest a positive impact of site visits on postdoctoral and graduate trainees’ career outcomes at companies or institutions that match a similar sector (e.g., for-profit) and type (e.g., biotech, pharmaceutical, contract research organization). Despite a small sample size, evidence suggests an especially positive impact on trainees who organize site visits to companies compared with those who simply participate. Conclusions: The ELITE Consortium was successful in helping trainees explore and identify a multitude of career paths. Trainees attained employment either directly or in related companies and institutions visited by ELITE participants. The joint, three-institution, flexible nature of the ELITE Consortium positively impacts the program’s sustainability and reach. The toolkit provided here will help other institutions to replicate and adapt the program with minimal effort.

From goal to outcome: Analyzing the progression of biomedical sciences PhD careers in a longitudinal study using an expanded taxonomy

“…These concerns were debunked by a robust cross‐institutional analysis from 10 NIH BEST institutions, who pooled their data on student participation in career development activities to demonstrate conclusively that engaging in such activities did not extend time‐to‐degree in graduate school or decrease the number of first‐author or total publications of graduate students 25 . Furthermore, the NIH BEST experiment demonstrated that there are a variety of ways for PhD students and postdocs to engage in meaningful experiential career learning opportunities in non‐academic laboratory work environments, many of which do not require extended time away from the laboratory 37–43 …”

“… 25 Furthermore, the NIH BEST experiment demonstrated that there are a variety of ways for PhD students and postdocs to engage in meaningful experiential career learning opportunities in non‐academic laboratory work environments, many of which do not require extended time away from the laboratory. 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 …”

Developing evidence-based resources for evaluating postgraduate trainees in the biomedical sciences

“…Targeted career-development programming and professional-development training can assist in career placement [ 32 ] without hindering productivity or efficiency [ 12 ]. In addition to NIGMS funding requirements for career outcomes reporting, recent efforts to increase career outcomes reporting have enabled more rigorous evaluation of such outcomes [ 4 , 10 , 33 – 36 ].…”