Vitae welcomes a new report on the Global State of Young Scientists

The Global Young Academy published this week their report The Global State of Young Scientists which is based on a survey of 650 early career researchers and 45 semi-structured interviews. The work was based in twelve countries with an emphasis on seven developing nations. Where the report refers to responses from ‘Europe' it is based on responses from Germany.

Broadly, the report highlights many themes which resonate with the long-standing work to support early career researchers in navigating the career landscape. The importance of mentoring and support from senior staff comes through strongly, along with the broad range of activities that researchers are expected to undertake and the need for professional development in areas such as supervision, people and task management. This also resonate with the Principal Investigator and Research Leader Survey run in 49 UK universities in 2013 with nearly 5000 responses which identifies staff and budget management as areas where PIs felt less confident

The challenges of work-life balance for researchers who are parents is highlighted (around one third of respondents were parents) and the lack of job security was highlighted most strongly as a career obstacle by the German respondents (83%).