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By: Jacqueline Robinson-Hamm
Wednesday, July 14, 2021

bioRχiv Releases PhD Career Outcomes Landscape Report

On July 14, the preprint, “Making Strides in Doctoral-Level Career Outcomes Reporting: Surveying the Landscape of Classification and Visualization Methodologies and Creating a Crosswalk Tool,” was published on bioRχiv. This report emphasizes the importance of PhD career outcomes tracking and summarizes career taxonomies and visualization options for this data. Furthermore, similar fields between taxonomies were mapped to create a new crosswalk tool. This empirical review of currently utilized career outcomes tracking systems highlights organizations promoting greater transparency in PhD career outcomes reporting and serves as a wealth of knowledge for organizations aiming to engage in doctoral career outcomes reporting for the first time or updating their current system.

In biological and biomedical sciences, the most prominent systems for classifying career outcomes are National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates and Survey of Doctorate Recipients. Other prominent tools for PhD scientists include the three-tier career taxonomy that resulted from National Institutes of Health’s Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training Consortium and Council of Graduate School’s PhD Career Pathways survey.

Transparency of career outcomes data is critical and is most easily achieved with quality visualization tools. The report highlights several platforms and software widely used to display career outcomes data such as Tableau, Microsoft Excel, Symplicity, Handshake, Microsoft Power BI, Prism, SPSS, and more. Data can be displayed in a variety of chart types, which are also described in the report.

Further details on a multitude of career taxonomies, visualization tools, and data displays are provided in the publication. This paper was a collaborative effort by members of the Graduate Career Consortium, including work contributed by FASEB staff, to provide a useful resource for exploring PhD career outcomes reporting at your organization.