About pd|hub

The Professional Development Hub (pd|hub) is a multi-stakeholder initiative to advance the career and professional development of scientists. Our goals are to:

	Disseminate career and professional development approaches in ways that support adaptation, implementation, and innovation in the community.
	Build capacity for research and evaluation to enhance the evidence basis for career and professional development approaches.
	Connect stakeholders across diverse networks to leverage expertise and support coordinated action to advance graduate and postdoctoral education.
	Advocate for career and professional development to amplify the impact of ongoing efforts and accelerate change.

Why do we need to advance the career and professional development of scientists?
Today’s PhD-trained scientists are needed in a wide array of career paths essential to the scientific enterprise, economy, and society. However, successful transitions into these roles, and effectiveness once within them, is limited by insufficient training in cross-cutting professional skills. Numerous stakeholders – including those who educate, fund, employ, support, and advocate for early career scientists – are calling for the enhancement of graduate and postdoctoral training to provide quality career and professional skills development. Key challenges are limiting the evolution of career and professional development training for early-career scientists, including:

• Inefficiencies in innovation, evaluation, and dissemination of evidence-based educational practices for the professional development of scientists, due in part to silos between stakeholders and limited centralized infrastructure
  
  
• Misalignment of academic culture and incentive structures with the realities of the modern scientific ecosystem, which disincentivize efforts to address professional development needs of trainees
  

Transforming this system is essential if we are to continue to attract talented individuals to science, support and retain trainees from diverse backgrounds, and ultimately fulfill our societal responsibility in training the next generation of scientists. pd|hub is connecting the community to address these challenges and support transformation of PhD and postdoctoral training.

How are we unique?

• From the outset, pd|hub has been a community-driven initiative involving stakeholders across science, higher education, and workforce development. We believe that advancing career and professional development requires buy-in and blended expertise from all of these groups.
  
  
• pd|hub is focused on actions with potential for lasting, systemic change. Our actions will focus on supporting organizations and actors in the field, rather than developing direct resources for trainees. We believe that this approach is critical for advancing graduate and postdoctoral training, particularly for underrepresented minority students and underresourced institutions.

History
pd|hub emerged from the 2016 American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) Summit on Sustaining the Biomedical Research Enterprise. In 2017, the ASBMB and then Burroughs Wellcome Fund provided seed funding to initiate the project, led by a multi-stakeholder Steering Committee and stakeholder-led working groups. We hosted a Stakeholder Workshop at Janelia Research Campus in 2019 to define and catalyze next-step actions. We are now focused on multiple actions to support systemic change.