Career Development through an Equity Lens: pd|hub hosts workshop for Implementation Sites

In recent years, the graduate/postdoctoral education community has intensified its commitment to making its programs, resources, and services more inclusive. During this workshop—Career Development through an Equity Lens—held last month for pd|hub Implementation Sites, Dr. Angela Byars-Winston shared practical strategies for adapting teaching, facilitation, and implementation practices to be more inclusive and equitable by exploring how factors related to cultural identity impact student/postdoc experiences. Dr. Byars-Winston, an internationally renowned scholar in this space with a passion for supporting faculty and staff seeking to implement evidence-based practices for STEMM PhD career development and mentorship, highlighted evidence from studies of cultural identity in career development and discussed implications for educational interventions. She built on earlier pd|hub workshops that had focused on positionality and social cognitive career theory, layering on a discussion of identity-based influences on goal formation—including how factors such as vicarious learning, success experiences, social and verbal persuasion, and emotional associations impact self-efficacy. The group reflected on how these considerations might appear in the context of their pd|hub-related implementations, and in the context of the broader science training/mentorship ecosystem. 

Interested in diving deeper into these topics? Here are some references related to content presented during the workshop. 

• Fouad and Byars-Winston (2005): Cultural context of career choice - a meta-analysis of studies looking at cultural factors in career decision-making, with a key conclusion that environmental factors play a key role
• Byars-Winston et al., (2010): Influence of social cognitive and ethnic variables on STEM career goals - an example of research using Social Cognitive Career Theory to study factors that impact career goal commitment in science and engineering URM undergraduate students
• Byars-Winston (2010): Vocational significance of cultural identity - this article references social identity theories to introduce bonding, bridging, and buffering as 3 functions of Black identity, and discusses career counseling approaches in these contexts
• Ponterotto et al., (2000): Career-in-Culture Interview - this article describes an evidence-based approach to facilitate individual career counseling appointments in a culturally-sensitive way
• House and Byars-Winston, et al., (2023): Guiding principles for culturally-responsive facilitation - this article summarizes 6 facilitation strategies used in recent science mentorship workshops to engage frank discussions amongst faculty about race and racism
• Pfund et al., (2022): Evaluation of a culturally responsive mentorship education program - this article describes an approach to training for faculty on culturally-responsive mentorship practices, with insights into the intentionality underlying its design