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pd|hub Mentorship Action Collaborative

Empowering mentorship to advance PhD careers

What is the Mentorship Action Collaborative?

Funded by NIH, we are bringing together faculty, practitioners, leaders, scholars, and learners to empower career-related mentorship in research training environments. Learn more...

Contribute ideas or join us!

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A project led by:

Our Goals

Develop, test, and disseminate curricula and resources to support mentors and mentees in productive mentoring conversations that foster graduate students’ and postdocs’:

Current career development
Career resilience
Long-term skills for navigating career transitions

Why this is important

The context

Career development is a complex, individualized process
Research advisors are a major source of career-related support

The reality

Most students/postdocs will pursue careers different from their faculty mentors
Research advisors have low self-efficacy for career advising outside of academic research
Mentees express discomfort and avoidance of discussing career interests with research advisors

The gap

Local centralized career development programs are often siloed and rarely coordinated with mentorship practices
The disparate nature of individual mentoring makes widespread change challenging

The opportunity

Mentorship practices can be fostered through evidence-based curricula and resources
We can build a research training ecosystem that synergizes programming and mentorship to maximize access, efficiencies, and impact
By coming together as a research training community, we can catalyze change on a broader scale

WHAT WE WILL CREATE

Curricula and resources that are relevant, timely, easy to use, adaptable, and scalable for empowering mentors and mentees with evidence-based strategies for career-related mentorship.

OUR APPROACH

Lay the foundation

Landscape analysis of needs and challenges, mapping current resources and ideas for new ones.

Develop resources

Develop curricula and quick-use resources via development teams.

Beta-test resources

Test at sites around the country to maximize usefulness and effectiveness.

Scale adoption

Disseminate in partnership with the community to increase adoption and catalyze change.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

There are multiple ways to contribute:

Share your perspectives on needs, challenges, and resources you’d like to see developed
Contribute materials from resources, curricula, or case studies you have used at your institution – what worked well?
Join a development team to refine or develop new resources, case studies, student/postdoc workshops, additions to pd|hub models and CIMER modules
Serve as a beta test site once resources and curricula are developed
Help us develop strategies for motivating use by mentors and mentees