Abstract
The postdoctoral community is an essential component of the academic and scientific workforce, but a lack of data about this community has made it difficult to develop policies to address concerns about salaries, working conditions, diversity and career development, and to evaluate the impact of existing policies. Here we present comprehensive survey results from 7,603 postdocs based at 351 US academic and non-academic (e.g. hospital, industry and government lab) institutions in 2016. In addition to demographic and salary information, we present multivariate analyses on factors influencing postdoc career plans and satisfaction with mentorship. We further analyze gender dynamics and expose wage disparities. Academic research positions remain the predominant career choice, although women and US citizens are less likely than their male and non-US citizen counterparts to choose academic research positions. Receiving mentorship training has a significant positive effect on postdoc satisfaction with mentorship. Quality of and satisfaction with postdoc mentorship also appear to heavily influence career choice.
Highlights
Postdoctoral training offers doctoral recipients a temporary period of mentored or scholarly experience, considered highly productive within scientific and academic communities
Our dataset represents the most comprehensive survey of the US postdoctoral population in over a decade. These data may provide a benchmark for legislation and institutional policy makers, inform research questions pertaining to the evolving postdoctoral population, and serve as a precedent for understanding the important dynamics of the scientific workforce
We found that a research-focused academic position remains the most common primary career goal for postdocs, in spite of increasing emphasis on other types of careers for doctorate holders (The National Academies of Sciences, 2018; Alberts et al, 2014; St Clair et al, 2017)
Summary
Postdoctoral training offers doctoral recipients a temporary period of mentored or scholarly experience, considered highly productive within scientific and academic communities. Such training is ostensibly valuable for postdocs, who gain additional experience to help pursue their chosen career paths. Tenure-track faculty positions, are estimated to represent a small percentage of postdoc career outcomes (~15%) (Larson et al, 2014; National Academy of Sciences, 2014). This has led to proposals that support training postdocs for additional roles beyond tenure-track faculty positions. Persistent concerns with increasingly long periods of postdoctoral training, lack of appropriate career guidance beyond the professoriate, and comparatively low postdoctoral salaries have led to repeated calls to reform the postdoctoral training model (National Research Council, 1969; Davis, 2005; Sauermann and Roach, 2016; Alberts et al, 2014; Gould, 2015; Schaller et al, 2017)
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