Career Development & Conference Group

Career Development subgroup

Certain professional skills, such as leadership, communication, teamwork and project management are valued by future employers. While many universities and graduate schools offer soft skill courses to enhance these transferable skills, many doctoral researchers (DRs) feel unsecure about how to plan their next career move after their graduate work. The PhDnet survey 2019 has indicated that 56% of PhDs are not satisfied with the career development during their PhD. Furthermore, 85% of DRs in the MPS wish for improvements in career development!

Hence, the mission of the Career Development subgroup is to organize career events and provide resources to DRs to help their decision on the next career step. Lastly, we also provide resources for online learning and workshops upon request.

Previous events:

• Career fair at the N² Event 2019, Umweltforum, Berlin
• 4th Max Planck Career Fair, Harnack Haus, Berlin
• 3rd Max Planck Career Fair, Harnack Haus, Berlin

Conference subgroup

The Conference branch of the Career & Conference Group organizes an annual interdisciplinary conference, where doctoral researchers from the full variety of Max Planck Institutes can meet and study off-field topics in order to encourage exchange and collaboration. Notwithstanding challenging situations, the Conference subgroup's main responsibility rests on the organization of a three days long conference taking place in fall. The event consists of talks by inspiring and leading scientists as well as workshops where their “visions” are discussed between DRs and speakers. The Conference subgroup is also responsible to help in the organization of the N² conference.

Previous events:

• N² Event 2019, Umweltforum, Berlin
• Visions in Science 2018: Science and Society, Harnack Haus, Berlin
• Visions in Science 2017: Discover new perspectives, Harnack Haus, Berlin

Joint effort in 2020: Career Evolution Web Series

Due to the COVID-19 situtaion, the Career development and Conference subgroups have joined their efforts to organize the Career Evolution: Science2Industry Webinar Series in collaboration with the PhDnet Steering Group, PostDocNet and Planck Academy in 2020. We invite alumni of the MPS, industry speakers and coaches to talk about different paths to non-academic jobs.

More information and the schedule of upcoming talks is available here.