Professional Development

Under construction.

Currently only showing resources for "Plan your future" and "Apply for jobs" under GROW and "Publish" under COMMUNICATE.

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.

Professional development opportunities on and off campus, organized by skill

A variety of competency frameworks for scientists exist (for example, here, here, here). We have narrowed these down to a subset for which we provide training and resources in the following categories: 

  • DISCOVER: skills related to the research process
  • CONNECT: skills related to working with others
  • COMMUNICATE: skills related to sharing scientific knowledge with others
  • GROW: skills related to self-development and preparation for the next career phase

Within each category, we focus on 3-4 professional skills that are common, in some combination or other, across many professional scientists' careers. 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 “not free.”

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

SHARE

Gaining mentored experience in scientific writing and publishing is inherent to doing a PhD student or postdoc. In addition to your supervisor, here are structures that support your training in writing and publishing (the latter covering topics of journal selection, responding to reviewers, writing peer reviews, and open publishing). For fellowship writing, see “Propose” under DISCOVER. For outreach to non-scientists, see “Teach” under SHARE.

GROW

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.

Once you have identified the next career step that makes sense for you (GROW: Plan your future), there is another set of skills involved in applying for jobs. Stages include finding open positions, submitting written applications (CV, cover letter, etc), interviews, and managing job offers. Many resources overlap with “Plan your future." See also “DISCOVER: Propose” regarding fellowship writing. See also “CONNECT: Network," as your professional network can connect you to open positions.

  • Individualized support: All of the coaching and mentoring options discussed in “Plan your future” can also provide feedback on job applications
  • Group trainings on campus (see calendar for specifics):
    • Peer groups for those on the job market to work on job search and application materials together
    • Workshop on job interviews and negotiating offers Spring 2026
    • Career highlight talks or Q&A sometimes include job search and application tips (see “Plan your future”)
  • Group trainings and events through partner organizations:
    • ÖGMBT (Austrian Association of Molecular Life Sciences and Biotechnology) annual Life Sciences
      Career Fair in May: recruiters, CV feedback, job boards
    • Check for relevant University of Vienna u:rise courses (available for all PhD students and Max Perutz Lab postdocs)
  • Other resources:
    • Scientific society job boards and list-servs are valuable for positions in your subfield both within and beyond academia
    • Databases: Nature Careers, Life Science Network, LinkedIn
    • EMBL Fellows' Career Service has pages on job searching, applications, and interviews specifically for life sciences
    • Vitae career pathways in research have CV and cover letter tips
    • Career path resources in “GROW: Plan your future” sometimes provide insights on job applications as well
    • Not free, only in German: Pharmaakademie (for example, a course on good manufacturing practice and good pharmacovigilance practice)