Excerpt from "New tool visualizes employment trends in biomedical science," posted on NIH News, January 24, 2018.
Scientists looking for jobs after completing their training may soon have a new tool that helps them evaluate various career paths. The new tool uses a method that was developed by scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health. The method differs from others in that it separates employment trends in biomedical science by sector, type, and job specifics. The creators hope this novel approach will be useful throughout NIH, as well as for academic and research institutions around the world.
Led by Tammy Collins, Ph.D., director of the NIEHS Office of Fellows’ Career Development, team members collected detailed career outcomes for more than 900 NIEHS postdoctoral fellows over the past 15 years. Postdoctoral fellows, or postdocs, are scientists who have received their doctoral degrees and are participating in a program that offers additional training.
Lead author and NIEHS computer scientist Hong Xu analyzed the data using the R Project for Statistical Computing, a free online program that displays data using graphs and charts. Shyamal Peddada, Ph.D., former NIEHS head of the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch, served as key advisor. The study appeared online in the journal Nature Biotechnology, and is the first standardized method for categorizing career outcomes of NIEHS postdocs.
"As we sought to determine how to make sense of detailed career outcomes in a standardized way, we used a bottom-up approach, rather than forcing the data into any particular naming system already being employed," Collins said. "We looked at what our postdocs were specifically doing, and asked what is the most logical way to categorize and visualize the information."
The study found distinct differences between United States and international postdocs in the kinds of jobs they landed. In an almost 2-to-1 ratio, international postdocs were going into academic positions to do basic research. However, analysis of the total number of international postdocs specifically entering academic positions showed that 70 percent of this subpopulation entered them abroad. Postdocs in the U.S. tended to enter for-profit companies to do applied research. Overall, nearly half of NIEHS postdocs went into the academic sector, which was surprising to some, since many young scientists thought that doing a government postdoc would prevent them from getting a tenure-track position in academia.
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