EuroTech Postdocs' Workshop is resounding success

The workshop began life in response to a survey conducted among postdocs at EPFL’s School of Life Sciences. The survey revealed a great desire to better prepare for future positions, for help with career advancement, and the need to develop soft skills.

Invited at the “Postdoc Days” of the Technische Universität München (TUM), two former members of the SV postdoc association (SVPA) pitched the idea of a summer workshop. Their partners at TUM were interested, and the SVPA obtained funding from the EuroTech Alliance Universities, a strategic European partnership between EPFL, TUM, the Technical University of Denmark, and the Eindhoven University of Technology.

The workshop ran between 8-10 July 2015 at the EPFL campus. It proved immensely popular, as it became oversubscribed early on. Eventually, 45 postdocs from all four partner universities attended the course, which aimed at preparing them for their next career step and complementing their technical and scientific abilities with essential soft skills.

The structure of the workshop included three one-day long sessions of 15 participants each:

1. “Selling your Science (and yourself)!” by Jen Rolfe (UK): A practical approach to presenting science to a non-specialist audience.
2. “Leadership for global leaders!” by Anne-Marie Turcotte (Switzerland): An overview of some of the key skills necessary to be an effective leader in a global context.
3. “Successful collaborations and negotiations!” by Fernanda Salina (Switzerland): A practical and theoretical approach to negotiation in order to promote successful collaborations.

“The Postdoc Workshop provided an intensive, highly interactive, and fun crash-course in the soft skills underlying professional success in academic and non-academic careers,” says SVPA president Petra Schwalie who played a big role in organizing the event. “At the same time, the workshop was a great opportunity for participants to network and establish collaborations.”

Feedback for the workshop was encouraging, with all participants giving it positive scores in a follow-up survey. "The topics were absolutely fabulously chosen," wrote participants. “The advice was extremely practical, the exercises were fantastic, and the atmosphere around the workshop was really positive, much better than most workshops.”

“We would like this to only be the beginning,” says Petra Schwalie. “We would like to build on this year's success and run the workshop on a yearly basis.” The idea would be to rotate the workshop across the four partnering universities. “Given the positive feedback we received, we’re thinking about running it for longer, e.g. a week.”

This year’s participants also seemed keen to have a follow-up workshop and have also suggested more topics that could be covered. One of the trainers also offered to run postdoc-tailored sessions on career development and leadership at EPFL, based on the interaction that she got with the participants. Indeed, the SVPA has already been organizing one-day courses such as “Debiopharm Clinical Trials Workshop”, “Job search outside academia” and “Networking workshop” and now plans to expand this offer, building on the feedback and success of the EuroTech Postdoc Workshop.

See photos from the event here