Professional Development

Under construction (last updated 31 Oct 2025). Currently only showing resources for “Career planning.” We welcome your suggestions of external resources and programs! Email Carina Baskett, Training and Career Development Manager.

The Vienna BioCenter Training Team aims to ensure that each PhD student and postdoc at VBC makes significant progress in their professional growth as a well-rounded scientist. A variety of program offerings (see calendar) allow you to tailor your training according to your own needs and career plans.

The materials below are organized into three categories of skills important for professional scientists: researcher development, research skills, and research community-building. Within these categories, we focus on 20 professional skills that are common, in some combination or other, across many professional scientists' careers. Our framework is adapted from the Vitae Researcher Development Framework. We present training opportunities at various scales, roughly corresponding to how specific the training is to you as an individual: individualized support → group trainings on campus (see also: training calendar) → group trainings and events through partner organizations → open resources. All trainings and resources are free of charge unless specified otherwise.

Contact Carina Baskett, Training and Career Development Manager, if you have any questions or suggestions.

Researcher Development

Career planning is an iterative, gradual process of building self-awareness and opportunity awareness in order to predict our fit to future roles--similar to the scientific process of considering a wide range of hypotheses and gathering and analyzing data in order to refine our predictions.

Building self-awareness is analogous to gathering and analyzing data. We learn through experience what working environments fits our personal traits: our interests, skills, values, and working style. Many tools out there can help you learn to evaluate fit by identifying your traits and the components of your environment that have been a good/poor fit for those traits. This is an iterative process for two reasons: 1) each new experience (project, role, and team, both in and outside the lab) can teach us something new about fit, and 2) our traits, and how we prioritize aspects of fit, change over time. 

Building opportunity awareness is analogous to considering a wide range of hypotheses. Predicting your future career fit is difficult if you have a limited understanding of opportunities. Thus, you should learn about the many roles available to professional scientists. While doing a PhD and postdoc, we learn naturally about research-focused roles in academia such as group leader, lab manager, or staff scientist. There are also many opportunities at VBC to learn about the myriad other career paths available to professional scientists, from pharma researcher to medical writer; from data scientist to grants officer; from program or project manager to journal editor; from science journalist to patent lawyer; and on and on.

Through combining self-awareness and opportunity awareness, you can identify roles that fit your interests, skills, values, and working style. Below are resources available to support VBC researchers in building both self- and opportunity awareness.