The recent movement underscoring the importance of career taxonomies has helped usher in a new era of transparency in PhD career outcomes. The convergence of discipline-specific organizational movements, interdisciplinary collaborations, and federal initiatives has helped to increase PhD career outcomes tracking and reporting. Transparent and publicly available PhD career outcomes are being used by institutions to attract top applicants, as prospective graduate students are factoring in these outcomes when deciding on the program and institution in which to enroll for their PhD studies. Given the increasing trend to track PhD career outcomes, the number of institutional efforts and supporting offices for these studies have increased, as has the variety of methods being used to classify and report/visualize outcomes. This report comprehensively synthesizes existing PhD career taxonomy tools, resources, and visualization options to help catalyze and empower institutions to develop and publish their own PhD career outcomes. Similar fields between taxonomies were mapped to create a new crosswalk tool, thereby serving as an empirical review of the career outcome tracking systems available. Moreover, this work spotlights organizations, consortia, and funding agencies that are steering policy changes toward greater transparency in PhD career outcomes reporting. Such transparency not only attracts top talent to universities, but also propels research progress and technological innovation forward. Therefore, university administrators must be well-versed in government policies that may impact their PhD students. Engaging with government relations offices and establishing dialogues with policymakers are crucial steps toward staying informed about relevant legislation and advocating for more resources. For instance, much of the recent science legislation in the U.S. Congress, including the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, significantly impacts federal agency programs influencing universities. To ensure sustained development, it is imperative to support initiatives that enhance transparency, both in terms of legislation and resources. Increased funding for programs supporting transparency will aid legislatures and institutions in staying informed and responsive. Many efforts presented in this publication have received support from federal and state governments or philantrophic sources, underscoring the need for multifaceted support to initiate and perpetuate this level of systemic change.

The recent movement underscoring the importance of career taxonomies has helped usher in a new era of transparency in PhD career outcomes. The convergence of discipline-specific organizational movements, interdisciplinary collaborations, and federal initiatives have all helped to increase PhD career outcomes tracking and reporting. Transparent and publicly available PhD career outcomes are being used by institutions to attract top applicants, as prospective graduate students are factoring these in when deciding on the program and institution in which to enroll for their PhD studies. Given the increasing trend to track PhD career outcomes, the number of institutional efforts and supporting offices for these studies have increased, as has the variety of methods being used to classify and report/visualize outcomes. This report identifies and summarizes currently available PhD career taxonomy tools, resources, and visualization options to help catalyze and empower institutions to develop and publish their own PhD career outcomes. Similar fields between taxonomies were mapped to create a new crosswalk tool. This work serves as an empirical review of the career outcome tracking systems available and highlights organizations, consortia, and funding agencies that are impacting policy change toward greater transparency in PhD career outcomes reporting.

The PhD Career Outcomes Committee has collated STEM and humanities/social sciences taxonomies from GCC member institutions and other interested groups (universities, consortia, research institutions and professional societies)--totaling more than 25 taxonomies investigated. We have identified equivalencies among these different taxonomies at the national level in order to provide institutions with tools to easily compare their career outcomes to others while simultaneously choosing a taxonomy that works best for them. Here, we present an analysis of the equivalencies identified, and we show examples of how outcomes generated using different taxonomies can be “unpacked” and “rolled-up” in order to be directly compared to one another. Beyond taxonomy parallels, there is also a need to visualize and present data in a parallel manner that facilitates ease of cross-comparison. We thus compare career outcome visualizations from a variety of sources--from platforms that were developed in-house to platforms that utilize Tableau or SAS. We hope that the data and resources presented here will provide institutions with additional tools to make sense of their own PhD career outcomes while also being able to easily compare their outcomes with others.

This poster aims to summarize recent national trends in career outcomes tracking and taxonomies from various groups. Our committee collated information on STEM and humanities career taxonomies from 22 groups (universities, consortia, research institutions and professional societies) out of which 8 clear employment sectors emerged. A key challenge in unifying taxonomies occurs due to the different nature of employment sectors between countries. We plan to summarize these data into a comprehensive report at a later date. In addition, recognizing the need to make data on trainee outcomes in the life sciences publicly available, 9 research universities and a major cancer institute formed the Coalition for Next Generation Life Science (CNGLS) in 2017. Here, we describe the data that will be collected by CNGLS members, as well as list multiple groups in the career outcomes space. We also show the latest visualizations of biomedical research employment trends from two independent sources, including an interactive platform (NIEHS) and outcomes data using the Rescuing Biomedical Research (RBR) taxonomy (Wayne State University of the NIH BEST Consortium). Finally, GCC member institutions participated in the 2017 GCC Annual Benchmarking Survey. We present responses from selected survey questions pertaining to the collection of career outcomes data. We hope the information presented in this poster will be of value to GCC member institutions and other groups involved in collecting career outcomes and taxonomy data to benefit the community.

Incorporating career development into PhD course offerings can help biomedical students better understand themselves, as well as the job market, and to adopt a 'can-do' attitude in developing their own paths.