Postdoc Career Success
researcher development program
Postdoc Career Success is a comprehensive package of support for the professional and personal development of researchers. The program combines online training content with personal mentoring and career advice, all designed for early career researchers working full-time.
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Interested to find out how Postdoc Career Success could help you and your researchers? Use the link below to arrange a conversation.
Benefits for you and your institution
Provide effective training without adding to your workload. Postdoc Career Success is a fully outsourced service. Institutions can choose their preferred level of involvement. This ranges from choosing a branded program access portal to ensure a local 'flavour', to becoming directly involved in webinars and connecting with local mentoring opportunities.
A competitive edge for attracting and retaining early career research talent. The program can be a strong point of difference for an institution competing to recruit and retain high quality research staff. Its structure means institutions can even enrol new staff to start the training before their arrival, as part of their induction.
Strengthening your local mentoring arrangements. Postdoc Career Success is a useful complement to regular supervision arrangements and to any mentoring relationshis already in place. The program gives participants a thorough knowledge of their career options and development priorities, so discussions with mentors are more structured and focused.
We work with you to optimise overall support. Our discussions with participants often uncover issues common to researchers across an institution that might be dealt with quite easily through centrally-driven solutions, like support for overseas arrivals or preparing funding applications. Our course facilitation role allows us to identify and communicate these, so you can consider whether and how they might be addressed.
Current examples of Postdoc Career Success programs
Client 1 - University-wide
Target group: Postdoc Career Success offered to early career researchers of all disciplines across the university.
Component options: Include branded portal, live webinars and 'Mastermind' peer-mentor matching.
Cohort size: 2 cohorts per year of 20-50 early career researchers per cohort.
Local integration: Researcher development staff join in at the beginning of first webinar to meet participants and share other training options at the university.
Client 2 – Science Faculty
Target group: Postdoc Career Success offered to all postdocs within the Faculty.
Component options: Include live webinars, tutorials and 'Mastermind' group matching.
Cohort size: 1 cohort per year of 20-40 postdocs.
Local integration: Faculty staff host monthly face-to-face meetings with participants through the 7-month program, providing local networking opportunities. Events are timed to coincide with live tutorials provided by PostdocTraining throughout the program.
Benefits for your researchers
Flexible delivery for busy research staff. The program's core of 15 online eclasses offers more flexibility than a workshop series or residential course.
Reaching researchers on and off campus. The online format allows for delivery to groups of any size. It ensures consistency of quality and accessibility of training, irrespective of researchers' locations and work schedules.
Built for busy early career researchers. One new eclass is presented each fortnight, a pace designed to suit researchers working full time. The on-demand format helps participants stay engaged and gives them ample opportunity to explore and apply all the course material and resources. The average time commitment to complete all the program's elements is no more than 2 hours per fortnight.
Engagement where it works best. Postdoc Career Success retains the advantages of interactive training by combining online components with live group webinar sessions and one-to-one mentoring. Participants benefit from the flexibility of learning in their own time while engaging directly with us and fellow participants.
Reduce isolation and increase cohesion among your research staff. The program helps address the isolation often felt by early career researchers. The shared training promotes greater cohesion amongst researchers across institutions, as do the webinars and Mastermind mentoring groups if these options are selected.
What our participants say
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"Opened up my thinking to the range of opportunities that a PhD may bring, not just academia. It has also given me skills in being able to better mentor junior staff on career options."
"The course addresses all relevant issues that people at the beginning of their career in academia encounter, such as how to manage a project or seek for funding.
"Most importantly, the course addresses those issues by providing concrete, readily available advices on how to tackle them, and by providing a plenty of real-world examples to even better illustrate implementation of the advices. In my opinion, this is what really distinguishes this course."
"This course was really impressive and fulfilling for me as an early career researcher. Not only was it satisfying to upgrade my professional level, but also it helped me in the personal aspect to live a more balanced life."
"My goals have not changed nor has the difficulty in obtaining funding for research. Yet I do feel like I have more support and am able to better direct my own choices!"
"Useful tools, reasonable workload, useful to start thinking about how you do things and the small things that could be changed - feels like a friendly companion in a sometimes hostile world."
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Interested to find out how Postdoc Career Success could help you and your researchers?
Use the button below to arrange a conversation.
Program components and options for institutions
Component | Description | Core and options |
|---|---|---|
Eclasses  | 15 eclasses delivered fortnightly online over 7 months, in text and audio versions to suit researchers' preferences | CORE INCLUSION - unlimited access for all participants to program material |
Personal mentoring  | Participants have access to one-on-one mentoring on matters of their choice with an experienced PostdocTraining mentor via Zoom or phone, providing personalised career coaching and professional development advice. | CORE INCLUSION - with options for institutions to increase, reduce or pool mentor hours |
Email career advice  | Individual postdocs can seek advice on career-related matters and issues throughout the program, via PostdocTraining's email support service. | CORE INCLUSION |
Careers database  | Ongoing access to the Career Options Masterlist, PostdocTraining's database covering dozens of career paths in academia and beyond for research-active staff, including case studies. | CORE INCLUSION - unlimited ongoing access for all participants |
News service  | A monthly news service distilled from international journals, print media and the internet to give participants the most current material on research-related career issues and pathways. | CORE INCLUSION - ongoing subscription for all participants |
Live webinars  | Live online discussions facilitated by PostdocTraining on issues of shared interest to an institution's participants (such as grant application processes and local grant-winning models, building research teams, dealing with autonomy, transferrable skills, etc.). An institution's own staff can be involved in these webinars, at its discretion. | OPTION - with the number, frequency and topics for these webinars decided by agreement with the host institution |
Mastermind groups  | PostdocTraining can support a host institution's participants in setting up self-guided, self-sustaining peer-mentoring groups, including matching of members as required, and guidance on establishing and operating these groups. | OPTION |
Branded portal  | PostdocTraining can create a dedicated access portal carrying a host institution's branding, messages and information links, if required, to ensure a familiar local 'feel' for participants. | OPTION |
A note on pricing for this researcher development training
The cost of Postdoc Career Success for institutions depends on factors including the number of participants in a single course group and options chosen, such as the number of webinars and mentoring hours selected for each group.
By way of a guide, we guarantee that any program drawn from the components described here and involving no more than one hour of mentoring time per participant, will cost substantially less per capita than the regular price for researchers signing up independently (US$697). In addition, webinars and peer-mentoring are options offered only to institutions.
Next steps - a conversation about your needs and circumstances
We will be happy to discuss directly your institution's specific needs and potential training options drawn from the Postdoc Career Success menu of components. Our sole focus is researcher development - we have worked exclusively in this area since 2011 and we are always delighted to help.
Please take a minute to introduce yourself using the contact form below, including your location and your preferred timing and contact method in the comments section. We will reply as soon as possible in line with your preferences.