The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited (2014) / Chapter Skim
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4 The Shifting Career Landscape
4 The Shifting Career Landscape
Pages 53-66
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From page 53... ...
UNDERSTANDING THE CAREER DEVELOPMENT OPTIONS Even with the promising developments of the past decade, many graduate students and postdoctoral researchers do not have sufficient information about possible career paths, job prospects, and earning potentials to make informed 53
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This program, open to all graduate students in the basic and biomedical sciences, gives students work experience and provides career development workshops for 3 months (one academic quarter) , and can be done either during or immediately following graduate school.
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From page 55... ...
These surveys provide institutions with an opportunity to gather valuable feedback from postdoctoral trainees that can be used to develop new policies and training programs, evaluate satisfaction with existing policies and programs, identify problems and areas for improvement, enable data-driven policy decisions, and track the career pathways of departing postdoctoral researchers. These surveys also provide an opportunity for postdoctoral researchers to give constructive feedback to their institutions, and are used by the institutions to establish a database of postdoctoral researchers and an alumni community.
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From page 56... ...
Survey questions tend to fall into three categories: personal and demographic information, details of the postdoctoral experience, and information on future plans. In addition to tracking the career pathways of departing trainees, the questions about the postdoctoral experience afford the postdoctoral researcher an opportunity to rank the performance of the institution and offer other feedback that may contribute to the improvement of existing programs.
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From page 57... ...
recipients Position Percentage Tenure-Track Faculty Positions 23 Non-Tenured Academic Research or Teaching 20 Industrial Research 18 Government Research 6 Science-Related Positions (Non-Research) 18 Non-Science-Related Positions 13 Unemployed 2 SOURCE: BMW 2012 25 During the writing of the Biomedical Workforce Report, the rate at which U.S.-trained doctorates with definite commitments entered into postdoctoral positions for the life sciences was closer to 70 percent.
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From page 58... ...
Indicators, 2012 14.3 16.5 16.5 15.5 • Postdoc' Estimate 14.7 15.5 13.3 17.1 Pursued a postdoc primarily to obtain a tenure-track faculty position in the 61 55 63 47 future • If yes, probability that they will hold a tenure-track faculty 55 68 42 58 position in 5 years Desired position for Ph.D.'s • Faculty-Teaching 23 20 22 9 • Faculty-Research 30 14 29 25 • Government 10 13 14 14 • Established Firm 18 34 17 29 • Start-up Firm 9 10 13 19 • Other 10 9 5 5 Desired position for Postdocs • Faculty-Teaching 18 15 15 9 • Faculty-Research 44 41 50 44 • Government 14 19 19 18 • Established Firm 13 15 6 21 • Start-up Firm 5 7 5 7 • Other 6 3 5 2 * S&E: Science and Engineering SOURCES: Sauermann and Roach 2013, and unpublished presentation by Sauremann to the Committee on Science Engineering and Public Policy on September 9, 2013, available at http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/cs/groups/pgasite/documents/webpage/pga_084 875.pdf, accessed on July 24, 2014.
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From page 59... ...
. Collecting and making available information on the subsequent career paths of postdoctoral researchers would be very helpful to Ph.D.'s deciding whether to pursue postdoctoral training or not and to the nation's research agencies, which must decide if their investment in postdoctoral training is producing the desired results (see Box 4-3)
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From page 60... ...
The supply of domestic doctorates depends on the number of Ph.D.'s who have recently been produced, and the options they have for other types of employment. In recent years, the supply, especially in engineering and the biomedical sciences, has been growing, while job opportunities outside of academia have not matched this increase.
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From page 61... ...
The demand for workers with certain types of training and the salaries offered for different types of expertise are affected by a number of factors such as the business cycle, government research funding, industrial research and development budgets, and immigration policy. As with actual markets, the lower the salary, the greater the demand will be from principal investigators to hire postdoctoral researchers if it is perceived that doing so provides greater research output than hiring either staff scientists or additional graduate students.
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From page 62... ...
, http://sestat.nsf.gov. Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 Current Salary Levels As described in Chapter 2, biomedical postdoctoral researchers are the largest segment of the postdoctoral population.
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33 Compiling data from GradPay -- a crowdsourcing website set up to collect information about graduate student stipends -- and IPEDS Institutional Characteristics Survey Tuition Data, it was determined that the average total cost for a science, engineering, or health graduate student in 2011 was approximately $50.7 thousand, ranging from around $40 thousand to an extreme of $94 thousand. Data were gathered for 73 institutions and 51 self-identified science, engineering, or health fields.
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From page 64... ...
However, this argument can be challenged on several fronts. First, there is no guarantee that the postdoctoral researcher will receive significant experience to prepare her or him for full-time independent research 35 The average nine-month salary of a newly hired assistant professor at public research universities in the biological and biomedical sciences is $74,177; in engineering it is $84,012; in math and statistics it is $67,383 (OSU 2014)
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From page 65... ...
Second, as the discussion above indicates, the number of job openings each year that require postdoctoral training is far lower than the number of people who acquire postdoctoral positions each year. Although no one can be promised a job just because he or she completes a postdoctoral appointment, those entering a training program should know how well their predecessors fared in the job market.
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