Career Guidance for Trainees
Forecasted
Career Guidance for Trainees supports early-career academic administrators in developing and evaluating affordable career-development interventions to prepare graduate students and postdocs for fulfilling careers.
Funder: Burroughs Wellcome Fund
Due Dates (Anticipated): March 2027 (Application deadline)
Funding Amounts: $15,000 per participant for a project in the year following the workshop; eight workshop seats
Summary: Supports early-career administrators in developing and evaluating affordable career-development interventions for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
Key Information: Applicants need 3–7 years in a qualifying role and at least 80% effort devoted to graduate or postdoctoral career development.
Description
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s Career Guidance for Trainees program supports institutional demonstration projects that model affordable ways to prepare trainees for stable, fulfilling careers. Its Project Development and Evaluation Workshop helps early-career academic administrators strengthen research evaluation skills while designing new career-focused resources, interventions, or activities for their home institutions. The program supports career development rather than biomedical research projects proposed by individual investigators.
In the year following the workshop, participants build research and evaluation networks and implement their projects with grant support. They also submit results for presentation at a national meeting and prepare a rigorous manuscript for publication. The program emphasizes how interventions change trainees’ career readiness, how activities are delivered, how impact is evaluated, and whether successful approaches can affordably reach more trainees or be adopted elsewhere.
