This is a guest post by Harry Williams (BNITM) and Regina Becker (LIfBi) who just happened to publish a comment in Nature’s career column section together with Nicholas Russell from the Max Planck Postdoc Net. Harry and Regina are currently the working group coordinators for our survey working group. See here for an earlier blog post on our first survey.
This story beings in September 2023, not only is it one of our birthday months, but it’s also when the second PostDoc Appreciation Week in Germany was held! If you haven’t engaged with PAWde before, it’s something we can really recommend you think about doing in the future.
During PAWde 2023, we participated in a 1-hour panel discussion covering the development, implementation, and impact of postdoc surveys, with a focus on their use in the German research system.
We had representation from both the Leibniz PostDoc survey (Harry Williams) and Max Planck PostDoc survey (Nicholas Russell). We were also joined by David Payne, from Nature Careers, who reflected on the impact of the Nature PostDoc survey, and some of the work they are doing as a publication to highlight trends in science and research.
From our perspective, this was a really positive event, not least because it allowed us to catch up with each other and discuss how we can improve our respective surveys going forward.
Following the event, we were invited by David to submit a column piece to the Nature careers supplement on the work we have done on postdoc surveys in Germany and, perhaps more importantly, how someone might run a postdoc survey themselves in the future – a call to action, if you will!
This took a while to put together but perseverance is the key to success and it’s finally live. We hope that you have 5-10 minutes to read the piece, especially if you are thinking of running a postdoc survey within your department, institute, or wider network.
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