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to honor to be invited to present to you all and it's a pleasure to be able to talk about something that I really think is important which is Career Planning by using a structured approach I've been at UCSF for a long time like her under said and part of my job is meeting one-on-one with our graduate students and postdocs and over the years I don't have a current count but I know that I've met with more than 1,500 of our graduate students and postdocs as they've figured out how to move on from there you know biomedical PhD training programs and so I've had lots of stories I've seen lots of stories as people have set a career counseling appointment with me and then come back and let me know how things are going and sort of now following people as alumni and I think of all the workshops that I've developed and t-pin taught I think this topic which is starting early to create a useful career plan something we call an individual development plan or IDP is by far the most important thing that that I teach and so I really believe that this works for a lot of people I've seen a lot of our students at and postdocs at UCSF go through this process and say now I get it why this why people are wanting me to do an IDP and you'll hear me say several times during the workshop that that an IDP should be more than just your research plan it should be you should have a long-term goal towards it so what are you doing this year in order to reach your long-term goals is really what an IDP should be about so we're going to talk about we're actually sort of take you through the process of using a structured stepwise approach to making rational career decisions about your career options I'm sure you all know that there are a lot of different career paths you can follow we'll talk about some of those in the next couple hours and I think avoiding the default postdoc for those of you who are students is a really important thing we'll talk about more about that later also but I'm always disappointed when a student comes in our office and like I'm graduating next month and I haven't thought about what I'm gonna do so I guess I'm going to do a postdoc and sometimes that turns out great sometimes they look back at the end of the post-doctoral and say that I ended up going into didn't actually require a postdoc and so was that a really useful use of my three to five years as a postdoc so part of this whole process is if you can think about what you want to do as a career path when you finish your training and then and you can plan for it in a structured way you're going to be better off and then we'll also work through the individual development plan process and you'll begin your own IDP and as her ender said this is a two-part workshop so you'll leave the second part of the workshop with a pretty solid IDP created and we'll learn about using features of the my IDP model there's lots of different ways you can do an IDP I think the my IDP tool which is at science magazines careers site is probably the most structured format I know it doesn't work for everybody and so at the end of today or the beginning of the next time I come we'll talk about some different formats you can use as well so I'd like for everybody just start out the workshop by answering this question what's your current career goal and don't make it like my current career goal is to finish that next set of experiments or to get to that conference this year when you finish your training plus a few years out what do you want your job type or job title plus environment to be and I need you to write that down because for the next hour and 40 minutes you're gonna be coming back to that it's that what that career is multiple so examples might be I want to be a PI or tenure track faculty large research university teaching research faculty State College industry researcher and a drug development company policy expert a federal government and if you don't know that's kind of what this whole workshops about but in order to experience this process of career decision-making using data about yourself you need to start with something so take your best guess the second question I have for you to write down an answer to towards is how confident are you that this career path is the best fit for you a would be I'm very confident B is I'm fairly confident and C is I'm still considering a range of options so now you should have your future job and the environment you want to do that's future job in and your confidence level written down and sometimes in this workshop I've done this workshop more than 50 times at different places probably more like a hundred times sometimes we do a quick survey of competence levels all the time it comes out somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the people say I'm still considering a range of options and this is across training levels if I have a whole group of only postdocs only graduate students I've worked with clinical fellows and who have MDS and are trying to figure out what research type career they want to go into it seems like regardless of the type or level of training people don't report a great deal of career of confidence in their future careers and that's really why we started this workshop we started doing looking at the outcomes of our graduate students and postdocs so what happens to them after they finish and what their career interests were so what do they actually do and what did they want to do and as we started reporting that data you can find this at our postdoc website at UCSF these are approximate numbers because it's we report them year by year but it's pretty consistent across the years about 10 about 30% of our postdocs wind up being tenure-track faculty about 20% wind up doing other research or teaching jobs in academia they may combine research and teaching in a non tenure-track position maybe maybe staff scientist etc about 20% wind up doing research in industry about 5% are still postdocs five years after separation so that's good at least they're not doing multiple multiple postdocs and then 15% across a wide variety of types of careers a small number are unknown almost no one is is unemployed so PhD level unemployment super low even by given our current United States low unemployment standards so everyone gets a job but everyone that might not get the job they thought they were going to get for those people who are international postdocs another thing that we found that when we started looking at our postdoc outcomes or those of you who are international students also for postdocs more than half of them stay in the in the u.s. after their you get after the UCSF training and an interesting thing was you know students are postdocs and our international students come in our office all the time and like I've heard it's almost impossible to get an industry job in in the u.s. if I need visa support and that seems not to be true about half of those who stay in the u.s. wind up getting industry jobs so happy to talk to you all about that later but it's we've gotten some really interesting data by just looking at what our postdocs and students do after they leave we also have been asking them about their career interest so what do you want to do and when the question was if you had to pick only if you could only pick one career path right now what would you like what what do you think it should be about 45 percent of our students 53% of our postdocs said they would want to be that P I in an academic setting but about thirty percent of those folks got that job a smaller number wound up said they wanted to do other research like non P I research in an academic setting about the same number that want to do industry research get those jobs so that's encouraging and then you can see how these are arrayed across a variety of other different types of careers one thing that I think is relevant to the topic of this workshop today is that when we ask students this question and postdocs this question they said I don't want to report one outcome or one interest only I'm thinking about many things at once and this is not clear to but the point of this slide is 72% of them said they are thinking about being a PI in industry but there so thinking about other things and when we made them choose one for our students anyhow they said 45% said if I could only choose one it would be a pie there's a lot of uncertainty about what they want to do a lot of our students said I don't want to do a postdoc if I don't have to in order to get that next role in other words if my next job doesn't require that I've done a postdoc why would I go do that job but I don't know how to decide about any one career option and I'm not sure which one is best for me and that's really what started this whole IDP process for the four people who worked on this is we saw some of this data like we need to help students figure out where they're headed and how they're going to get there because there's a lot of uncertainty and and the next career decision point is really an important one for you all so they're all this to show that it's important to think about your careers and feel more confident we also have some data that I won't show today that said when students do pick a career and report more confidence and start moving towards that you know the in the direction of their dreams their training goes better they find themselves more satisfied with their with their with their graduate programs and their whole overall UCSF experience and so I think there's a lot of reasons to take a careful structured approach to deciding what you're going to do next and and making a plan for how you're going to get there so this is a list of careers which I know you can't read but it's at my IDP to my ATP website when we started looking at career outcomes and started categorizing them we found generally 20 categories of career paths that PhD level biomedical sciences typically go into and then if you break them down to job titles there was like 58 different job titles and so when we started showing this to our students they were like this is awesome it's so encouraging to see that I can there are so many things I could do and at the same time it's kind of daunting because how do I pick from so many different options when a lot of a lot of our students said you know sort of came in to graduate school thinking there's only one outcome which is being a P I like Mike Mike Mike so they recognized a need to make a career decision and move toward it and prepare for that at the same time they're like I'm not sure how to work through all this information and when we did these surveys of our students some themes came out they said my research training you know does a good job of teaching me to be a researcher but it doesn't necessarily teach me about careers and you know it shouldn't really be your PI's job to tell you about what it's like to be a intellectual property attorney but if I want to find more information about career options I don't know where to find it I don't know how to select from among the different career paths and I want to gain confidence that one option is better than the other but I don't have a way to even think about making those decisions I know that in my research training is built around mentoring relationships and sort of the apprentice model where my role models are my pis and my advisors but if I'm going to go be a medical science liaison how do I find new role models and new people who will help me move through my career how do I build that Network and then I think there's a misperception sometimes that it's really hard to be a PI and every other job is easy and I think that's what our students and postdocs also have found is not true is that if I can get the skills and experience I need to move quickly into a career path that I've decided on while I'm still in training that's gonna be beneficial if not it might be really hard to get that job as a medical science liaison because I haven't prepared myself for that career path while I was still in training so I think the best solution that we could come up with for you know answering all of these problems is to take a structured approach to your career planning and your goal-setting and that's called an IDP or an individual development plan and IDP creation is a both a process and it should wind up being a product and I think regardless of the model you end up using to create your IDP and we'll talk about several models generally they sort of fall into some self-assessment or reflection what you've done what are your what are the things that you want - the values the sorry considering your skills values an inner soul so if you think about your future career what tasks do you want that career to involve that you're gonna be good at that you like to do we talked about values meaning the rewards or outcomes that you want from your work so what is it that you want to do and on a daily basis and what do you want to give for you to produce for you and then taking a finite set of careers and learning about those careers with this information you have in mind based on my skills my values and my interests what careers might be the best fit for me and this learning the processes can take a long time but is really rewarding and then once I've made a decision for where I'm gonna head let me set some goals for how I'm going to get there some action items for what I will do in the next year to do this and then I'm gonna implement my plan hopefully with the help of mentors and and and do this on an annual basis so that you can move toward move in the direction you need to go into it really I think this is the this is the part that I think is missing in a lot of IDP concepts so I saw number of you raised your hands that you've been doing IDPs the NIH which funds a lot of your research kind of requires IDP IDPs to be done if you're being funded by NIH money but I think what a lot of individual development plans turn out to be is a set of tasks that you're going to do in the lab during the next year and what I think a good IDE should be it should answer is two different questions one is where am I going with my career and the other one is how will I get there and we have some preliminary data that shows students perceptions of the IDP process with having sort of some instruction about what it is are very negative and once they go through some of some kind of workshop we're like oh now I understand where I'm supposed to what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to do it in order to create this plan the perception of the value of the IDP process really goes up so today we're going to talk mostly about this first piece and talk and we're to take a look at the career path that you wrote down a few minutes ago and and you're going to make as an assessment about your skills values and interests in light of that code in the context of that career path and we'll talk about how to learn more about that career path or others and then the next time we're going to work more on this how will I get there and how do I talk to my mentors or my pis about career planning and what I want to do next so I mentioned this IDP creating an IP IEP is a process a sort of four phase process it should also be a product in the end and it should be a written list of goals mapped onto a timeline and those goals should lead to a desired career outcome and the major goal areas should be reached through some sort of set of action plans so you can see you know in this person was a real IDP of someone who was wanted to go into industry research you can see that she had some month-by-month action items in order to help her collect data and analyze her x-ray structure and then she so so so your IDP should be a mix of goals about your research that is true but you can see that a lot of the other items here are about developing skills learning about industry so she's like I think I want to go to industry but I don't know that much about it so I'm going to do some reading and meet with other people in order to do that I'm gonna develop some of my research skills and I'm gonna make progress towards the product of my research which should be papers and conferences so that she kind of divided up that way and then had sort of month by month goal or month by month action items in order to reach those a sheet like this you should be able to do in a couple hours a year but this this deciding where you want ahead and your the desired career outcome part can be a lot more time consuming so a couple hours a year seems like it should be worth it kind of makes sense but there's actually some data that shows that it could make a big difference for you if you do some career planning and and make it make a plan there was a postdoc survey now 14 years ago in 2005 by a scientific society called Sigma zai and they did a really robust look at postdocs across disciplines 7600 postdocs responded and they were looking at you know what variables are correlated with the satisfaction of the postdoctoral experience how postdocs rated their advisors who reported the least lab conflicts and the most productivity and after they did all the controls they found out that the thing the single thing that had the greatest impact on success and satisfaction was did the postdoc have a written plan that was just a question they didn't say was it a research plan or career plan but if you did some sort of planning process you tended to be more productive more 30% more authored papers 25% more grant proposals higher satisfaction and they rated their advisors higher so if you can get all that from a couple hours a year it seems like it should be worth it to to go through this process so we're going to jump into this first part the where am I going with my career and we'll start with this idea of self-assessment where you will have you consider your skills and values and interests and the definition of these three things are skills and interests are both about the tasks that are involved in a job skills or tasks that you're good at doing or not good at doing interest would be the tasks involved in a job that you like to do or you find engaging or things that you find total drudgery and you hate so some jobs are gonna have both of those and then importantly values are the rewards or outcomes that result from your work or the career path that you've chosen and the idea of career satisfaction is that if you can find a job where the tasks that you go to work at everyday our tasks that you are pretty good at and there's not too many tasks that you're not good at the tasks that comprise that job that you go to every day are tasks that you like to do and there's not too many things that you find distasteful or drudgery and that all those tasks that you do every day at work produce the rewards or outcomes you most want you're gonna be happy with your job makes a lot of sense but most the people I talk to report that they've never actually sat down and made a list of these things and ranked their skills values and interests in a way that they could then use as data to make a decision about the career options that are being presented to them so we're going to spend a little bit of time doing that today and then talking about what makes it how these make a difference in your career planning and we'll start with values and I have a worksheet for you if you've done to my IDP tool this is the same list that's on the my IDP website so I'll ask you to go through this list and circle the number from 1 to 5 ing to how important that outcome a reward is in your future career so in my future career if you must have that thing then it's a 5 like you would not pick that career without a 5 try to go for a relatively even distribution and we suggest it's hard to make career decisions when you have like more than six or eight five I'm gonna move on to some instructions for the next step by telling you a quick sort of case study or story about a postdoc that I worked with who was experiencing what we called a disconnect in her value so so if if a career path that you're thinking about is a career path that you'd be good at and you would like it so it's a skills and interest alignment but it doesn't produce the rewards or outcomes you want then I would call that like it's that that career path is like a disconnect for you in terms of values and so the story was it was a one of our postdocs who was close to finishing her spouse was also a postdoc at UCSF but he was a couple years behind her they were sort of feeling the money crunch because they wanted to start a family and San Francisco was ridiculously expensive even with two postdoc salaries and so they decided that Teresa was going to hurry up and finish and get a job that pays a lot more than a postdoc and then they could you know start having a having kids and being able to afford it and so she did what you should do when you're job hunting and she started telling everybody hang would be looking for a job and you know networking and pretty soon somebody that was a tech salesperson for the microscopes they were using in her lab told her that you know hey our firms gonna be hiring you're really skilled with this microscope kind of microscope you should come work for us and she applied for the job and did great in the interviews and got an offer and there was something kind of bothering her and she had done this values worksheet and she looked back at her top three values and it was help others help Society and family friendly and she was like I'm sure selling microscopes helps others and help society in some way but I need a little more direct connection and if I'm going to be happy in my career but mostly this was a job that represented like the whole western United States or like west of the Rockies and she's like I'm gonna be on the road 40% I don't know how I can be the kind of parent I want I want to be and be on the road that much and so it was a hard decision because the job was going to pay a lot and that was the reason that started her on this path in the first place but she ended up turning down the job and staying another few months on the job market before she found a job at an East Coast pharmaceutical company where her work was sort of downstream in the in the drug development process and she could actually see patients who were going through trials and seeing how the product that she was working on was helping people you know find cures and so this was nine-to-five job she could clearly see the helping others and help Society component of what she was doing and so this is a way that she recognized values disconnect with her future job that she was thinking about and made a course correction so that she could find a job that was more suitable for her values and something that she was good at and liked to do so what I'd like for you to do is take a moment and look at your values list that you just filled out and think about your values list in the context of that career path that you wrote down at the workshop at the beginning of the workshop so I want to be and try to answer these questions you know given the values you thought about and the stated career path that you wrote at the beginnig workshop what's a values disconnect that you might experience because you hold that value to be you know important for you and then what's a potential solution to that disconnect or challenge so for me it might be you know if I was going to say I want to be a high school science teacher in the future after I finished my PhD but my top related value was I think it's called high earnings potential and unfortunately in the u.s. science teachers don't make a ton of money and so that would be a values disconnect and maybe I think well once the potential solution would be you know it could be a principal someday and administrators make more money than teachers so maybe that's a solution you can think of more a little more deeply than that maybe but try to answer these questions for yourself really quickly and then we'll move on use this connect idea is process that a little bit with a partner you all probably maybe know each other if not do introductions and then tell your partner what career path you're considering it's a value that you ranked is more most important disconnect that might you might face because you have that value you're the solution that you came up with but then importantly ask your partner what's another potential solution to that challenge so I tell my partner I might be a principal in the future and my partner says well you know then you wouldn't be teaching anymore so that's the whole thing you wanted to do that's kind of an issue maybe you could keep your teaching job and find a summer job that pays a ton of money and you'll make lots of money because teachers don't have to teach during the summer if you're a high school teacher so maybe try to think a little more deeply than that with your partners but as I said I've done this workshop lots of times and this is the part that everybody says they find surprising that they had such useful discussions with partners and that they wanted more time to do this so I'll try to give you a few minutes to process that it works best if you can get into come back to some more activities like that shortly but what I'd like for you to do next is take a look at the skills assessment that we just passed out and this is ranking yourself from one to five on a large number of tasks that are typical of science of careers and try to answer these first two questions with this survey which is what which of these tasks you're good at doing which you're not not a good good at doing some of them you can leave blank there's one about like how the good is your skill at working with animals and if you don't work with animals users to the point but try to use for a comparison group try to use your peers so someone's thinking that there's one about you know how presenting your scientists science and other scientists if you're comparing yourself to your world-famous Pio those flying around the globe presenting every week lab meeting pretty good compared to my peers then maybe that's a force so I know everybody's still working on the skills list but I'm passing out the interests assessment as well and just remember when you do this one so when you're done with the skills one jump to the interest one and try to complete that one as well remember the interests and skills differ because interests are tasks that you like to do or don't like to do skills or tasks that you are good at or not good at I think most people are back so we'll sort of move on I think almost everyone's done with their interest in skills inventories like have you think a little about what this means in terms of career decision-making so if you remember skills and interests are both about the tasks that are like a job is composed of skills or things you're good at doing or not interests of things you like doing or not it's possible that those don't fit together right sometimes we're good at tasks that we don't like to do and that can be kind of a problem if that task is like a big chunk of the job you're good at it but it becomes the whole job becomes drudgery pretty quickly sometimes we like doing tasks or we think we'll like them in the future but we're not good at it and you all are really smart people you can probably fix that problem by you know by becoming better at a skill and a lot of what we'll talk about maybe at the end of the day or the next time is setting goals to become better at different tasks at skills but if there's a job that you're thinking about doing in the future and you're like a big chunk of this job is stuff that I don't like to do and I'm terrible at it why would you pick that job right and yet sometimes if you don't make a thoughtful career decision you can fall into something like that and so that's why I think it's useful to just start thinking about breaking down jobs into specific tasks and and knowing what you like and don't like and what you're good at and not good at doing so you can plan around that but what I'd like for you to do now is think and write again what common tasks involve skills you need to improve in order to be successful in that future job so go back to the job you wrote down at the beginning and look for skills disconnect so what am I going to have to be better at if I want to actually be good at this job so I wrote down that I want to be a you know a pi2 big research University but I'm not very good at writing grants because I've actually never done that yet that's gonna be an issue I'm gonna have to improve that what might I do around around that and what common tasks are you're good at doing but you don't enjoy so I have written some grants and I really hate it I know that being a pi2 big research university is going to be a lot of grant writing is that the best career path for me so that would be about an interest disconnect around grant writing in the context of being a pie even if you're not completely done with this try to jump back into your pairs and discuss these issues with a partner for the skills disconnect share one disconnect that you have because I want to be a P I in the future and I'm not good at grant writing I'm gonna have to improve that skill and then talk about how you might do that maybe I'll take a grant writing course and and then ask your partner for another idea like maybe the partner says next time you write a grant in your lab maybe you could offer to do a section of it or do a fellowship when you weren't thinking about it next year interest disconnect same thing a potential solution to that challenge and ask your partner for another solution we'll move on to the next step of this process but first I'd like everybody think a little bit about why we did this some students have asked why do we look at all these negative things about how a career might not be a good fit or might not make me happier by it might not be good at I think there's actually some useful lessons to learn from this process which is pretty probably pretty easy to see no career option is going to be perfect there's gonna be tasks that you need to improve and improve at and in order to be good at that career there's gonna be some tasks that you don't like doing no career is gonna give you every reward or outcome that you want and the process of career decision-making really in picking out which career is best for you and figuring out which you know having confidence about your future path is to you know take a look at these options and figure out how you're going to deal with those challenges if you stay in that career path or move on to another career option you know and how awesome it is to do that now while you're still in training rather than ten years from now where you've you know gone down a certain path you're like I wish I had thought about how this might not be good for me in the past so good for you for thinking about this now I think another takeaway lesson hopefully and I think this happened in this room because guys were really engaged was you know realizing how helpful your colleagues can be in this process and it seems like in science training we don't talk a lot about career options and what we're going to do in the future it's all about like getting the next research project done but hopefully you'll find it useful in the future and maybe over time we can kind of change the culture of how we do science training and and think about long term things as well as short term things so what you've done right now is begun the process of career decision-making by taking a look at your skills values and interest and you know generating this data about yourself and then taking a look at one career option and thinking about how it might or might not be a good fit for you and the process of career decision-making in general then would be to develop other career options and maybe you could use the list at my IDP which we'll talk about in a minute or or just start out with the careers that you can think of and then learn enough about those careers we call it Career Exploration learn enough about each of those so that you can put a focus on your skills values and interests and and think about whether that career path is going to be a good fit for you or not and if it's not eliminate that career path and move on to another one and what I find is that when I went working with people one-on-one or in groups as they iterate through this process they start to the answers start to fall out like here's a career path that I think is not going to be perfect but is the best path for me to shoot for next and this becomes a skill it seems my probably difficult to do right now or a little fuzzy but the more you'll do it the more the more you go through this process the more you'll you'll find it useful and easier so one of the things that kind of hangs people up at this point though is how do I learn enough about these careers so that I can actually make a intelligent assessment based on my skills and values and interest because I actually don't know what it's like to be a medical science liaison or a science policy expert and so we'll talk about in the next thirty minutes here we'll talk about the career exploration process and then I actually have an assignment for you that our students in postdocs seem to find really enjoyable and to dig out some information about some careers that had that are on your potential list so the first step is self-assessment the second step career exploration which is learning about the different career options that are available to you and start eliminating the options that are not a good path for you and then once you make a decision move on to the goal-setting part for how you're going to get there like I said students asked us I you know I'm supposed to do career exploration I don't even know where to start I don't know what process to go through to learn about my options and so we'll take you through that and I think if you go to the my IDP website which I have a link at the end it's just that the science magazines careers site and you can actually go through this whole process we've been doing today online and you can fill out the skills interests and values assessment and then the tool will actually give you a career list based on your your unique skills and interest responses and that list is ordered ing to what the order that the tool is suggesting that you start exploring careers in and so for this person you know science policy was an 85-percent skills match in a 79 percent interest match I'm you can see that there's not a lot of difference between some of these and so for someone to say my IDP says I'm supposed to be a science policy person and not a science education person that's not what it's saying because like 1% difference on a skills match right so a couple things come up when people see this list and if you've done my IDP maybe you have these questions already one question that often comes up is where we got this data and where we were how we do the match and the process was when we wrote this tool in 2012 we gathered information from science career experts there were 20 people that we surveyed who were like career advisors for scientists and we asked them to fill out the same sheets that you filled out only instead of just saying how good they were at skills or interests or how much they liked that's that's good we asked them for the skills list for each of the 20 career paths represented in these lists how good do you have to be at each of those 45 tasks in order to be successful at that career so there were whatever 20 times 45 is 900 there was a lot of data points and then we gave them the interest list and we asked them how frequently is that tasks performed in that career and likewise I think there's 40 some interest on the list so they had another 900 matches or ratings to do and so we didn't ask how much they liked those tasks we said how often is that task done because you can assume that if a task is required a lot in that in that career that you should like doing it and then we hired a statistician several statisticians to put together an algorithm that would sort of produce this prediction it is not a perfect tool it's not intended to say this is a career you should should look at and this is a career you shouldn't look at it's intended to just be a place for you to start your cover exploration because this is there's so much information to learn that you know our career experts are saying that this person might want to start reading and learning about science policy careers first because it's likely that they're going to you know like that career better than something that's down farther in the list pretty commonly students come in the office and they'll say I actually do want to be a PI and you know being a P I is like 19th out of the 20 categories on the list is the tool wrong or am I in the wrong career and we're like maybe neither of those let's take a look at one thing that is kind of easy to miss these these are actually links and if you click on the skills match or interest match it'll pop up so in this case if this were this person who came in and said you know it says science policy or science education and I actually thought I wanted to be a PI you can see you can click on the skills and interest match for being a PI and for this person and you can see how the students rating was different from the experts rating and so this person rated themselves on experimental design and the experts were like if you're gonna be a pie you should be a close to a 5 out of 5 on experimental design statistical analysis you're gonna need to do some improvement there it doesn't mean you should be a pie but it gives you some ideas of where you might want to start improving the interest list likewise would would show some disconnects between what the experts said were common tasks in that career and what the person said they'd like to do does that make sense so definitely not it's not supposed to say don't be a pie or whatever it's just to say here here are some differences from where our expert said you might want to be so what to do with this information if you're trying to learn about careers the point of showing this information just like this is a place where you might start to think about career paths that might be a good fit for you and then start learning about those in you know in the order that they are presented perhaps and I think one fast way to start learning about careers is to use the my IDP list about of articles and books and professional organizations so if you go to the next step in the navigation bar and click on the read about careers button you'll get a list the same list of careers in the same order that was on the career fit page only instead of these percent matches thing you'll get a little link that says read more you know for example if you're like well science writings up there that sounds kind of cool but I actually don't know the difference between science writing and medical writing and technical writing you could click on the read more button and there are some you know articles of you know first-person articles of people who are in those different fields so in a half hour you could answer that question about what are those differences because people have written in and said what they do in those different fields likewise there are some book chapters that you might want to track down and a lot of fields you know the professional societies have career information on them so Medical Writers Association has a whole bunch of career information for how you get into these careers and what they're like in medical writing so link to the career to the professional association for that career path and see what you can learn I think a really really useful thing for finding out about careers is LinkedIn and people think about LinkedIn as the place where you post information about yourself and the you know employment world comes to see you how many people have a LinkedIn profile are awesome great and that there's a LinkedIn workshop on November 6 where you can learn to improve your profile this is sort of what I'm suggesting is sort of backwards way to use LinkedIn and actually you could do this without a LinkedIn profile which is and start answering questions that you have about these careers so suppose a question I get a lot is how I want to be in leadership in a biotech company or an industry how long do I have to actually do research before I can become a leader you know find 10 people who have you know director titles at biotech companies and look what their career histories are and find out for yourself what are the trends that you see so in this person Gayathri she's now a director at Biogen but if you start reading backwards through her career history you can see she did some of her training in India and then came to st. Jude's in Tennessee to do her PhD moved to the Gladstone institutes by UCSF for her postdoc and then jumped to work for Life Technologies where she was sort of a applications person to developing applications and essays and then made a logical career move to another you know tools company bio-rad and then made the kind of unusual leap to go from sort of essay development in tool development to bench science and your discovery research in a big pharmaceutical company so it'd be interesting to find out how she did that but once she was here you can see how quickly she moved up into leadership roles had to jump from company to company in order to do it but it didn't take her long to achieve a leadership position so find 10 more people like that and you'll start to see some trends about how long people stay those careers another question might be you know what transitional experience do I need to obtain a job as a medical science liaison so these are people who represent a class of drugs they're not salespeople in fact I think they're not allowed to report to the sales units but they're they're experts on how a drug you know works in the body they their clients tend to be doctors who ask questions about the drug mechanism patient groups other industry or academic researchers who help them answer questions they answer questions about adverse events when a drug hurts someone they're the ones that have to track down why that happened so very interesting job very still related to science even though they're not at the bench this is a UCI alum logan roberts he's alone from here yep and so if you click through his career history you'd see he did his PhD here then or did his bachelor's at UCLA then a PhD here and then moved to Eli Lilly in a global medical affairs position and then became an MSL I think this is a pretty common step where you jump into something that leads to MSL one thing that I noticed about Logan is he did a lot of for one thing he has a really good LinkedIn profile so if you're looking for LinkedIn profiles to emulate I like his because it's very descriptive but he did a lot of leadership activities I can't remember there's another page if you read through his history did a lot of leadership activities and those kinds of that kind of work actually makes you more attractive for this particular kind of job and so I bet if you look through a lot of people who have msl roles they did something they're postdoc leaders or graduate student leaders on their campus or taught or did something because these people do a lot of presentations so you'd be able to start seeing them some themes another question is that we get a lot is I want to move into the business of science but I don't know how to get there and here's a really interesting example of someone who yes means she did her training at Indiana University and then Yale for postdoc and then pretty typical move you know finished her postdoc in 2014 it looks like she went pretty quickly to be a probably a discovery scientist at Shire and then really interesting move after only nine months she jumped to this Guggenheim Partners confirm and that's an unusual career move for sure to move straight from the bench to a business related position that's a pretty sophisticated role and so when I first saw this I was like trying to track down her history I was like I bet he has mean you know I bet this is a tiny company and they were you know willing to hire entry-level people without much experience so I looked up Guggenheim Partners and it turns out they controlled like sixty billion dollars or something like okay not a small firm how did she do that and if you look through her history she did all these really challenging certifications for investment bankers and investment people and I'm guessing that she did those during her training or during her time at Shire and the sooner she got those she was marketable for these kinds of roles so again you could spend some time looking through other people who have this job title and all you have to do on LinkedIn is click on the people button and enter the search terms that you're looking for like a job title and you'll start being able to track down people who who do what you want to do in the future and then sort of as you go through this list of reading about careers going to events at your institution or when you go to a scientific Society meeting there's a career panel start going to those getting out and talking to people doing informational interviews or networking or actually getting experience you know doing an internship or some kind of a project or take a course in the field that you want to move into there's a simulation job simulations that you can do I'll write up a there's a website called intersect that is job simulations for PhD scientists so if you want to become an intellectual property attorney you can go to this website you can go to this website and actually spend a few hours doing a task that's typical so if you're just google intersect and Washington University st. Louis it's at that you'll be able to link to that they have a whole library of tasks that are typical of whatever that career path is so that would give you a real idea a good idea of what a typical task is as you go down this list you can see that as you want to learn about careers these take more time as you go down the list but you also learn a lot more obviously we talked to students who are like I think I want to you know go into science policy and so I'm going to do a three month internship and we're like why don't you learn a little more about it first before you invest three months in it I'm so follow this list and as you eliminate a career after spending a few minutes reading look you saved all that time from having to do other things and move on to the next career we've been studying my IDP users we've been doing some surveys and asking them what which of these activities are most useful what resources they find most useful and of a survey from 8,000 responses that we got mostly PhD level trainees we asked them what resources did you use to explore careers and which ones were most helpful or not helpful and you can see the percent who used the number one thing was we asked our peers that's pretty interesting we also asked our pis about careers and other pis we didn't we we used tended to use career counselors thank you very much our institutions didn't use career counselors who we have to pay that's probably good in that case and you can see what so you can see how they used these different things a fair number of people said we did go out and talk to professionals who are in those careers and the most interesting thing from this study is that when we ask them about what was helpful or not helpful this is a ratio of help very helpful to not helpful the thing that was super important and super useful was professionals in a career of interest so going out and find someone who did that thing that you want to do and finding out how they get there and talking to that person was like 40 times more useful than any other thing interesting P is not that this doesn't mean they weren't helpful this means they were you know multiple times it was more helpful than not to talk to them but if you look at those we broke these out by careers if somebody's going into an academic career the P is of course went way up in terms of helpfulness but what we really want to do with this data is try to encourage people to take the time and the effort and that the chance even though it's uncomfortable to get out there and do what we call informational interviews which is finding someone who's in that career path of interest making appointment with them and seeing how they got there and you'll find it that's so much more useful and often leads to a job opportunity as well so informational interviews how many people have done one before just a few of you some good so you make an appointment with someone who is doing that career that you want to go in with a list of questions don't try to get a job from it just try to get information it puts a whole different set of pressures on you and you behave differently if you're like I have to impress this person and get them to invite me to hire me no you're just trying to gather information to make that career decision but it's always a good idea to ask them if they know anybody else you can talk to make sure you send thank-you notes and there's a whole tutorial on the my IDP website for how to do this if you click on talk to people and then some helpful things there's a list of sample correspondents so how do you write that email to the person saying will you talk to me so there's some sample correspondence there's also a list of questions if you're like what I'm going to ask this person typical informational interview questions are how did you get your job what do you like about it what are your typical tasks those are good questions but try to build some questions around your values list either as well because those are the really useful things to find out from somebody who's in a career are you getting the same things out of your career that are most important to me and if you click on that link you'll get your top eight values and then suggested questions that you might ask so pretty easy to build a script for your informational interviews through my IDP sample correspondence people ask this okay this sounds cool but I don't actually know somebody who's a medical science liaison how would I find those people when we ask our students where they found them they're like actually by the time I got through my indirect contacts so I asked all the people in my lab and all the people I went to undergraduate with something like that people I know I was usually able to find someone in that career path that could connect me with that person in that career I want to talk to but also if you're in your science your disciplinary Society join a professional organization so that you can get their lists of members and start working with the professionals who are in that group just reaching out cold on LinkedIn can sometimes work in fact it works quite a bit talk to her end or see if he can connect you somebody that he knows I asked them a couple questions and pretty soon I got like five people who are doing this so so I'm not gonna go through this whole list because we'll pass out this slides but the next ten slides I have are really deep tutorial on how to do informational interviews from how to send an invitation how to schedule the appointment how to write a list of questions how to behave in the interview and then some sample thank-you notes so I won't I think it's not actually useful to go through all these but there's a lot of detailed samples on how to approach these people because what we hear from our students is that it's really intimidating and daunting to try to think about doing this and then when they got on the other side of it and like that was so awesome talking to someone who's done that before so encouraging so get out there and do it you'll probably have to ask several people in order to get someone to say yes but that's okay and then we also have like scripts for how you open the conversation because you can go in with your list of questions but it's important to you know establish a professional connection with the person so you want to make sure that you have your opening statement well-crafted and so I just want to wrap up with an example of how easy it is although it's time-consuming easy and fun it is to find this kind of career information that's enough to help you make a decision and so this is a true story about someone thinking about the career field application scientist this is like you're an expert in a piece of research equipment and you're not a salesperson but you solve problems around the quest around that piece of equipment or you find new ways to use that piece of equipment for your users and someone told him in his lab hey you'd be really good at this because you have a skill in a particular piece of equipment and you know you seem like you have really good outgoing personality people would be comfortable talking to you but he don't know anything about this career and so he came in to make an appointment and and this is sort of what he did I sent him to my IDP and there's a whole career category hundred supportive science related products you can see field application specialist he went to my IDP and found an article and a book chapter about that field if you all haven't seen this book it's super useful career opportunities and biotechnology and drug development Toby Friedman it's like an encyclopedia of job information for biotech careers if that's the field you're thinking about so we found the chapter in that book on this career path and then he made another appointment and these were his notes he's like just from less than an hour of work I've been able to see these people do a lot of presentations they go to technical seminars and go to visit campuses and conferences they do a lot of training they're considered an expert in this product and he thought that would be rewarding for him they do a lot of troubleshooting they're not at the actual bench doing research but they're you know helping with a lot of setups and and advising on how to do research and he learned that it's a great stepping stone so a lot of people spend a few years in this career and they jumped to a new like business development or product management lots of jobs and the salary is good so sounds pretty good he said I want to learn a little bit more so I'm gonna go talk to someone now and he ended up shadowing someone who is a field application scientist and doing some informational x' with informational interviews with a couple of field application scientists and he found some good and bad he was afraid he was gonna have to travel a lot but the more he talked to people and the more he actually did some shadowing and practice some of the tasks involved in that job he found that if you represent pieces of equipment that are expensive enough and common milea used enough you may not have to travel at all otherwise but other times you might have to be on the road at all so he helped him really narrow down his job search handed up finding a job that was that thing that he wanted which was not a lot of travel and he's still in this role and he's really happy with it so you know he's probably spent six hours or less total doing all these tasks and was able to make a decision to pursue that career so back to this list before I give you a quick assignment this this part takes a lot of time but learning about yourself starting with a list of career options eliminating the ones that you that don't fit your skills values and interest because you've learned enough about those to make that decision and then iterating through this process until you start narrowing down on career that does fit seems to be how this process works the next time we meet I hope you all come back for the November 14th workshop we're going to move on to this other other section which is goal-setting and you may not have a career decision made but we'll we'll practice some the goals and action items that actually turn into an IDP what I'd like for you to do to think about doing before November 14th is spend some time going through the LinkedIn or the my IDP reading do some LinkedIn searches on people that you think you might want to be like based on their job titles read 20 to 30 job postings so I'm thinking about being you know science PAH international science policy person put in those three words international science policy in the people search and see what you get for job postings or LinkedIn profiles and then I have this list we call a people titles and organizations list and this is something that our trainees seem to find super useful is once they have an idea about some careers they think they're thinking about thank you come up with a list of ten people ten titles and ten organizations that are related to that career path that you think you might want to learn more about and start looking for the themes so find a list of six or ten people who are in that same general career path that you're thinking about and then describe those things and look for themes so did those people can tend to can do some sort of transitional training so they take more courses if so what were they what job types or dub titles were between what they're doing now in their PhD or their postdoc what organizations and groups are they following so if you look through someone's profile you'll see what meant what organizations or groups they're they're they're members of where they're following see if you can join those groups and then what skills or qualifications are you missing that they all seem to have and then we'll start working on IDPs next time based on some of these answers what I'll say from doing this workshop in my own campus sometimes people like I didn't do all the homework so I'm not coming to the next workshop it's okay um the next workshop will also be useful if you didn't do the homework never just be more useful if you come back with this sheet sort of filled out or have some ideas about that that makes sense okay great you guys have been awesome thank you for your time I hope to see you all on November 14th and good luck with your homework Thanks [Applause]