Award-Winning "myIDP" System Offers Printable Certificate to Help Early-Career Scientists and Engineers Chart Their Careers

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Sep 17, 2014, 08:15 ET

WASHINGTON, Sept. 17, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As competition for science jobs and funding intensifies, an award-winning online tool called "myIDP" has been further enhanced to help early-career scientists and engineers create "individual development plans" (IDPs), in keeping with U.S. federal agency recommendations.

A new, printable certificate of completion has been added to myIDP, on the Science Careers website, as a service of the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has recommended that all institutions should help graduate students and postdoctoral researchers achieve their career goals by creating IDPs and reporting on those efforts, beginning in October. The myIDP certificate of completion represents a first step by AAAS to develop tools and institutional interfaces in support of such compliance-reporting efforts.

Scientists and career advisors developed myIDP as a way to guide trainees through the challenging process of career planning. "Students and postdocs reported that having access to career and professional development resources and information would make it easier to create their own IDP," said Jennifer A. Hobin, one of the original authors of the technology, who is now at the American Association for Cancer Research. "Our hope was that we could make this type of planning easily accessible to all science trainees."

The myIDP system encourages candid responses from users about their career needs and interests, and it serves as a springboard for discussion between early-career researchers and their mentors, said AAAS Chief Technology Officer Michael Savelli. "By allowing individuals to complete their development plans independently and securely, myIDP can generate highly tailored feedback for each user," he explained.

At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Louis B. Justement works with some 60 students at various stages of a dual-degree program. "The new myIDP certificate is a great enhancement because it will help institutions track student participation without requiring students to necessarily share information that they consider to be personal," said Justement, Associate Director of the UAB's medical scientist training program. "MyIDP has been a very helpful resource for our doctoral candidates. It provides a comprehensive self-assessment tool that gets students to think about their skills and knowledge base, and how to keep improving. The system also asks about interests and values, and it provides a useful platform for writing goals and tracking progress."

The myIDP system currently serves 68,000 registrants—more than the U.S. population of 63,415 postdoctoral researchers, who increasingly must look beyond academia for rewarding career paths. For most scientists, tenure-track positions at universities are no longer the norm: The proportion of PhDs who move into tenured or tenure-track faculty positions has declined to approximately 26 percent, according to a biomedical research workforce working group report, published in 2012 by the NIH.

The use of IDPs for scientists was initially pioneered at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) by Philip Clifford, Julian Preston, Heather Rieff, and others. Following its inception at FASEB, myIDP was created by a team of researchers—two from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—Cynthia Fuhrmann, who is now at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Bill Lindstaedt; as well as Philip Clifford of the Medical College of Wisconsin, now at the University of Illinois, Chicago; and Jennifer A. Hobin of FASEB, currently with the American Association for Cancer Research. Later, the researchers contacted AAAS to further develop the site. With support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, myIDP launched at the AAAS website, Science Careers, in September 2012.

Before myIDP came along, "research mentors and their trainees just talked about career goals and very seldom developed a written plan," said Justement, a long-time member of FASEB's Training and Career Opportunities Subcommittee. "I have too often watched students fail to do the necessary self-assessments or 'soul-searching,' and they very seldom think to explore the diverse range of careers available to them until too late in their training. The IDP concept is a great one because it is designed to get trainees to begin the career exploration process early. myIDP will play a significant role in helping mentors and research institutions respond to the new NSF/NIH recommendations."

In 2013, the myIDP team won an award from the Association of American Medical Colleges for innovative partnership in support of research training. At AAAS, the myIDP site was developed by Savelli, Zdenek Becka, and Melissa Rosenthal.

About American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science (www.sciencemag.org) as well as Science Translational Medicine (www.sciencetranslationalmedicine.org) and Science Signaling (www.sciencesignaling.org). AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes some 261 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million. The non-profit AAAS (www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement, and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert!, www.eurekalert.org, the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS. See www.aaas.org.

RELATED WEBSITE — http://myidp.sciencecareers.org

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SOURCE AAAS