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      U.S. postdoctoral careers in life sciences, physical sciences and engineering: Government, industry, and academia

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      PLoS ONE
      Public Library of Science

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          Abstract

          Discussions about science and engineering postdoctoral researchers focus almost exclusively on academic postdocs and their chances of eventually securing tenure-track faculty positions. Further, biological sciences dominate policy research and published advice for new PhDs regarding postdoctoral employment. Our analysis uses the Survey of Earned Doctorates and Survey of Doctorate Recipients to understand employment implications for physical sciences and engineering (PSE) and life sciences (LS) graduates who took postdoctoral positions in government, industry, and academic sectors. We examine postdoc duration, reasons for staying in a postdoc, movement between sectors, and salary implications. There is considerable movement between employment sectors within the first six years post-PhD. Additionally, postdocs in PSE are shorter, better paid, and more often in nonacademic sectors than postdocs in LS. These results can help science and engineering faculty discuss a broader range of career pathways with doctoral students and help new PhDs make better informed early career decisions.

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          Most cited references33

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          Academic careers, patents, and productivity: industry experience as scientific and technical human capital

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            The missing piece to changing the university culture.

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              Career Development among American Biomedical Postdocs

              This study reports results from a national survey examining the career development of biomedical postdocs. Findings point to the need for enhanced career development programs earlier in the training process and interventions that are sensitive to distinctive patterns of interest development across social identity groups.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Funding acquisitionRole: MethodologyRole: Project administrationRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Funding acquisitionRole: MethodologyRole: Project administrationRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS One
                plos
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                2 February 2022
                2022
                : 17
                : 2
                : e0263185
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Center for Engineering Education, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States of America
                [2 ] Department of Engineering Education, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, United States of America
                Iowa State University, UNITED STATES
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7131-4611
                Article
                PONE-D-21-29929
                10.1371/journal.pone.0263185
                8809557
                35108316
                f532ea09-df6e-40a2-874c-f0f2606b6214
                © 2022 Denton et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 15 September 2021
                : 13 January 2022
                Page count
                Figures: 4, Tables: 6, Pages: 18
                Funding
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100008982, National Science Foundation;
                Award ID: 1535226
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100008982, National Science Foundation;
                Award ID: 1535462
                Award Recipient :
                This research was funded via two grants from the National Science Foundation, Division of Graduate Education: (DBK;#1535226 & MB; #1535462). More information on the funding source can be found at https://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div=DGE. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Social Sciences
                Economics
                Labor Economics
                Employment
                Social Sciences
                Economics
                Labor Economics
                Salaries
                Social Sciences
                Economics
                Labor Economics
                Employment
                Careers
                Physical Sciences
                Social Sciences
                Economics
                Labor Economics
                Employment
                Jobs
                Engineering and Technology
                Social Sciences
                Political Science
                Governments
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Bioengineering
                Engineering and Technology
                Bioengineering
                Custom metadata
                Analyses were conducted on Restricted Use data housed by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. Data were accessed from the NSF/NCES Restricted-Use Data request process. Other researchers can visit this site to go through the process of gaining access: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/license/. Once approved, researchers will be given access to a remote served that is managed by NORC at the University of Chicago. As we note in our paper, we accessed the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Survey of Doctorate Recipients through this portal. Variable names are listed in the paper's tables. The current authors had no special privileges in accessing the data set.

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