Moving from training to satisfying employment, whether within academe or in other realms, can require skills not always learned at the bench. Helping trainees understand, acquire, and demonstrate skills that make them ready for complex careers should be the goal of submitted projects.

The Career Guidance for Trainees (CGT) program provides grants of $15,000 - $25,000 to support demonstration projects that will model affordable, transferable approaches to improve trainees’ readiness for stable, fulfilling careers.

Surveys show that what employers want from potential PhD job applicants is what graduate education means to provide: deep knowledge, hands-on experience, ability to ask meaningful questions and find answers to them, experience managing projects, capacity to work independently, initiative, entrepreneurialism, and an advanced ability to communicate clearly about complex things.

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund will support pilot projects that demonstrate practical approaches to readying scientists for career transitions. Projects may be meant to enhance trainees’ understanding of jobs beyond the Academy, or career trajectories within academe, or of the flexibility of scientists’ intellectual skill sets. We aim to advance good ideas that have the potential to be deployed at larger scales.

FASEB’s Individual Development Plan, a tool that helps structure key conversations between trainee and advisor, and Preparing Future Faculty, a program that provides trainees opportunities to observe and experience faculty responsibilities, are two examples of high-impact programs that started small and expanded. By citing them as examples, we mean to encourage potential applicants to think big. In these proposals, send us ideas that could change how an organization like yours thinks about readying trainees for successful, fulfilling, happy careers that reflect the value of scientific education.