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@SfNtweets webinar on mentoring. Joanne Kamens: Mentoring is critical for career development, inclusion and it enhances the culture for everyone involved. Do you have a mentoring program in your institution?
Polling attendees showed that around 50% have a mentoring program available. All trainees should have one!
A good mentoring program requires a commitment from senior leadership and needs to be carefully designed and monitored. All parties have to receive training on the process and be held accountable.
"Creating a mentoring culture" by @LoisZachary is a great place to start to design a mentoring program and to understand how to mentor.
Group mentoring is also a great way to approach mentoring and can come from the grassroots. One-on-one matching can be hit or miss and group mentoring reduces the failure rate of one-on-one mentoring.
@JKamens Good mentors ask "high-gain" questions. Questions that get you to think about the right things, not yes-or-no questions.
Mentees have the responsibility to be coachable and learning how to give and receive feedback well is also critical. You have to focus on the performance, not the person.
Time management and defining your priorities by deciding what is the most important task are important skills to learn. Setting measurable goals such as smart goals can help organize your schedule. This can be done through your individual development plan myidp.sciencecareers.org
Next up is @coach4postdocs talking about career exploration. How do you know what you want to do? What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? What is worth doing even if you fail?
You can start with an IDP, but you need to add to that with mentor feedback and peer feedback to assess trainee skills.
Networking is not the dirty side of sales, you need to go into any event with the goal of building relationships and you can use a variety of social media. You never know you will meet today who will impact your future.
Mentors should help trainees to develop a pitch about themselves. The five word challenge is great! Convey your why very quickly!
What are the groups in your network? Trainees may only focus on those right next to them, but alumni, professional societies, vendors, volunteer organizations and conference attendees are all in your network.
Practical networking skills are smile, have a firm handshake, keep your badge visibile and have business cards. If you are introverted, you can set a goal to meet and follow-up with 2-3 new people at a meeting.
Mentors need to mention all possible career paths. Someone could be an amazing contributor to your research team and be great at a non-academic career.
Focus on language focused on "seeking opportunities" not just looking for a job. It changes the perception people have of you.
You have to come to identify skill gaps from a growth angle, that it's a learning opportunity. Establish SMART goals.
You need to develop a 30-60-90 day plan to prepare for job application with CV/resume, cover letter and reference letter. You should think about providing a draft for your references on what you'd like them to outline.
During a job interview, all details matter. You only have one chance at that first impression. Choice of dress, color and accessories is important. Incorporating the company colors somewhere has a psychological effect on interviewers.
Coming in with your research done on the company, will impress the interviewer and give materials for a conversation. The STAR method is great to develop answers zety.com/blog/star-meth…
Finally, negotiations and learning how to negotiate is very important. There are tons of resources from @HarvardBiz and other sources.
Next up is Caleb McKinney from @gumedcenter speaking about how to help trainees to identify transferable skills using project management as an example...As a PM enthusiast you know I love this one! thenewpi.blogspot.com/2018/03/why-yo…
Skills acquired during research training can be transferred to multiple industries. Often it's just the question of identifying them a polishing them.
Common skills desired by companies are teamwork, budgeting, writing, oral communication, project management and research.
Supervising, presenting and project management are global skill categories developed during research that are applicable across industries.
Recognizing the skills is half the battle, if you can hit the ground running you provide value to the organization. Some skills take time to develop for companies: teamwork, time management and project management. If you develop these you're ahead of the pool.
As a faculty mentor, you don't need to map the skills to specific jobs outside of academia, you need to give your trainees time and encouragement to explore different careers as soon as possible.
As a mentor, you can connect trainees with colleagues and former trainees that have transitioned to other industries and urge them to volunteer or participate in career development activities.
Project management (PM) is a skill gained in the lab, but not in the framework that industries and hiring management care about.
The five key phases of PM are Initiation, Planning, Execution, Monitoring and Closing. All are directly applicable to any academic research project. Initiation defines scope and feasibility and planning outlines all the steps needed to complete experiments.
Project execution and Monitoring go hand to hand and increase communication with the trainee as the experiments are being conducted. Closing is obtaining the final product and reviewing methodologies, such as writing a paper, a grant or trying a pilot project.
Some info on how to think about PM in scientific research from my blog thenewpi.blogspot.com/2018/03/projec…
There are multiple tools for planning and creating visuals such as officetimeline.com that can incorpirate tasks and milestones. Then you can use task managers such as @asana, @trello, @Freedcamp and others.
A communication plan with open feedback exchange is critical for the execution. Purely result-driven sessions can hinder trainees from meeting if they are having technical problems, always discuss what went well and went wrong.
