pd|hub announces launch of new Mentorship Action Collaborative, a partnership with CIMER

We are excited to share that Professional Development Hub (pd|hub), in partnership with the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER), has been awarded a 5-year Innovative Programs to Enhance Research Training (IPERT) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to advance evidence-based strategies for career-related mentorship in research environments. We welcome your engagement in this project!

Graduate and postdoctoral education is critical in developing early-career scientists with the skills and knowledge to advance the scientific enterprise. Research advisors play a key role in helping early-career scientists identify their strengths and navigate to their next career step, but career-related mentorship can be challenging. How can mentors and mentees have more effective career-related conversations? How can departments, graduate schools, training programs, career centers, and other institutional structures facilitate effective mentoring relationships to enhance mentee career development? Through this project, we will curate, develop, test, and disseminate a collection of new evidence-based resources to support productive career conversations in mentoring relationships, such as quick-guides for navigating challenging career conversations and new modules for the widely used CIMER curricula and the pd|hub Collection: Foundations of Career Exploration for PhD Scientists. This is an exciting opportunity to connect individual mentorship strategies and central career development programming, breaking down silos to foster a synergistic, holistic training ecosystem.

Join us! We are inviting members of the graduate and postdoctoral research training communities to join us in this initiative, forming a Mentorship Action Collaborative. Our goal is to leverage the diverse perspectives and expertise of a Collaborative to develop resources--sourced from across the community and developed de novo--that will be easy to use, adaptable across contexts, and tailored to the needs of mentors and mentees in research environments. Resources and curricula will be grounded by decades of vocational psychology research as well as the realities of PhD training, and will be developed to synergize with mentorship education and complementary career development supports available to students and postdocs both locally and nationally.

What comes next?  As a first step, we welcome individuals--graduate students, postdocs, faculty, training program directors, department chairs, PhD alumni, researchers, change makers, and others--to join this effort. There are multiple ways to participate over the next few years:

Stage 1: Laying the foundation

• Share your perspectives and ideas through a survey 
• Engage in a focus group
• Attend a summit 
• Contribute a resource (workshop, case study, quick-tips guide, video, etc.) about career-related mentorship or attaining such mentorship
• Contribute ideas for motivating enhanced career-related mentorship

Stage 2: Developing resources

• Join a resource or curriculum development team 
• Advise or help build a new resource or curriculum
• Provide early feedback on developed resources/curricula

Stage 3: Beta-testing resources

• Be an individual beta tester of modules or new resources
• Host your department, program, or organization as a beta test site for new resources/curricula that are developed
• Serve as a beta testing facilitator 

Stage 4: Scaled adoption

• Connect others at your organization or across your networks to the developed resources
• Become a trained facilitator
• Facilitate workshops at your own institution or nationally 

To participate: Please fill out this brief questionnaire to indicate your areas of interest and help us get to know you. We will then be in touch with next steps as the project moves forward.

This project is supported by the National Institute Of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R25GM160996. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.