Career Preparation

This section provides guidelines and recommendations for physics programs seeking to (1) educate students about and prepare students for a wide variety of careers, through curricular and co-curricular activities, (2) explicitly teach skills and knowledge relevant to future careers, and (3) connect students with opportunities that align with their career goals. The sections on High School Physics Teacher Preparation and provide more detailed guidance on preparing students for these specific careers.

Benefits

Recognition within your program of the diverse careers within and outside of academia that physics bachelor’s degree recipients pursue enables your program to better prepare students for these careers. Promoting and preparing students for diverse careers makes graduates more employable and better prepared for further education; it also aids recruiting and retention, particularly of students from marginalized groups. Increasing employment rates of graduates benefits your institution in both recruiting and accreditation.

Effective Practices

Thematic grouping (1, 2, 3, ...)

Actionable practice (A, B, C, ...)

Implementation strategy (i, ii, iii, ...)

1. Discuss and celebrate the variety of career paths that alumni have taken, e.g., in science, engineering, business, management, entrepreneurship, teaching, and policy.
  Create or update a portion of your department’s website to describe different degree trajectories (e.g., BA, BS, business concentration, engineering physics, and biomedical) and the careers they can lead to. Provide examples such as quotes and photographs that show how your alumni’s physics educations helped them achieve their professional goals.
  Promote diverse careers in materials posted around the department, in advising sessions, and in recruiting materials.
  Publicize salaries for various career options using data reported by government agencies, industry groups, and professional societies.
  Showcase profiles of people with physics backgrounds who have created important beneficial technologies or made a positive societal impact, e.g., in medical physics, journalism, and/or energy research. Select profiles that represent the diversity of your student’s backgrounds and interests.
  Educate students and faculty about the personal and societal implications of working in various careers.
  Educate students about career options at local companies that hire people with physics degrees.
2. Educate students about a wide variety of career paths, both within and outside of academia, e.g., in science, engineering, business, management, entrepreneurship, teaching, and policy.
  Ensure that faculty routinely highlight in classes the variety of physics careers, especially those that require only a bachelor’s degree.
  Talk to students about the advantages and disadvantages of various careers and help each student find a path that is a good fit.
  Educate students about how physics skills and knowledge are transferable beyond physics and work with students to promote the skills they are learning to potential employers, e.g., on resumes and in interviews.
  Provide students with realistic pictures of job opportunities and of the skills and knowledge needed in various careers, possibly in collaboration with campus career services or in consultation with alumni.
  Regularly provide career guidance to students throughout their time in the program, not just near graduation.
3. See the sections on and for guidance on creating an environment that supports all students.
  Recognize that faculty and mentors may have implicit bias with regard to which kinds of careers they recommend to which students. Actively work to overcome such bias.
  Recognize that students may not be aware of and/or may have trouble imagining themselves in certain careers, based on whether they know people in those careers and/or whether people in those careers typically look like them. Actively work to change the narratives around who belongs in particular careers.
  Support students in understanding, navigating, and appropriately challenging cultural norms of certain jobs, e.g., hostile work environments; expectations to travel and/or move regularly, work long hours, and/or be constantly available.
4. Promote and encourage faculty buy-in on the value of preparing students for diverse careers.
  Promote a departmental culture that celebrates collaborative achievement on applied problems, not just individual achievement on abstract problems.
  Proactively address disparaging comments about interests in, or pursuits of, applied areas of physics, teaching, or careers outside of academia.
  Train advisors to support students in exploring, choosing, and preparing for a wide variety of careers.
  Ensure that advisors establish, review, and revise students’ degree plans on a regular schedule to ensure that they remain aligned with students’ desired career paths. See the section on Advising and Mentoring of Students for more details.
  Identify faculty and staff who can serve as champions of career mentoring and awareness by understanding and educating students about the employment landscape for physics graduates and about available career resources. Ensure that the work of career preparation champions is recognized and rewarded.
  Ensure that advisors and career champions have good working relationships with campus career services staff.
  Promote faculty involvement with the private sector, e.g., via consulting, sabbaticals, tours, and hiring faculty members with private-sector experience.
5. Locate prospective speakers who have a physics background or training and who work in the private sector through your department’s alumni, your campus alumni office, professional society resources, and social media.
  Prioritize speakers whose work has had a positive impact on human lives.
  Select speakers who represent the diversity of your students’ identities, e.g., culture, race, gender identity, and sexual orientation.
  Select speakers who represent the diversity of your students’ career interests.
  Select speakers at a variety of career stages, to enable students to imagine themselves at various stages along a career trajectory.
  Ensure time in visitors’ schedules to speak with students privately about their career interests and questions.
6. Create and promote opportunities for physics majors that go beyond traditional research experiences, such as internships, policy fellowships, teaching experiences, career fairs, interdisciplinary research experiences, and professional development workshops.
  Share information about career-related events at professional meetings that your students attend with you; encourage students to participate in these events.
  Teach students how to use scientific and private-sector job boards to learn about job and research opportunities.
  Encourage students to take advantage of campus career services, e.g., to learn to present their skills and knowledge to employers not specifically advertising for physicists or to find prospective employers.
  Provide students with career information from professional societies such as APS and AIP. See Resources below for examples.
1. Review the learning goals for skills and knowledge included in the Phys21 report, Chapter 4. See Resources below.
  Establish program-level student learning outcomes using input from alumni, students, and local employers, and learning outcomes developed by other institutions.
  Inform students about how your program-level student learning outcomes for technical skills and knowledge around career preparation prepare them for diverse careers and how departmental curriculum and activities support those learning outcomes.
2. Establish career-relevant tracks or suggested concentrations (groups of elective courses or course substitutions) within the major. See the section on for more details.
  Make your physics degree more flexible to enable students to pursue extra-curricular opportunities that align with their career goals, e.g., a part time job related to their interests, an internship, or research with a professor.
  Educate advisors about how to support students in selecting and switching between degree tracks and in aligning their course selections with their career goals.
  Provide flexible pathways and mentoring to enable students to obtain a degree after transferring from a community college or returning from industry, military service, raising children, or other pursuits.
  Include options and support for students choosing to pursue graduate school. See the section on for more details.
  Include options and support for students choosing to pursue a career in secondary education. See the section on High School Physics Teacher Preparation for more details.
  Consider forming an institutional partnership to offer a dual-degree program to help students expand their career opportunities. See the section on for more details.
3. Recontextualize physics courses to meet program-level student learning outcomes for career preparation, e.g., see Phys21 report, Chapter 4 in Resources below.
  Infuse applications of physics into courses, including examples of how physics concepts are integrated into product engineering and how their applications have an impact on society.
  Modify courses to include collaborative activities on applied problems, rather than only individual work on abstract problems.
  Create, modify, or remove existing physics courses to ensure that your curriculum addresses program-level student learning outcomes, career paths of recent graduates, and new and emerging technologies.
  Provide students with opportunities to collaborate and communicate in different ways and to different audiences, e.g., communicating to technical or non-technical colleagues or to public audiences about scientific concepts or modern technologies. See the section on for more details.
  Provide opportunities for students to obtain career-relevant skills in modern laboratory techniques and equipment; electronics; programming; software packages; data acquisition, automation, and analysis; and modeling and simulations. See the sections on and Computational Skills.
  Implement open-ended, student-driven investigations such as a capstone, research, or senior thesis projects. See the sections on , Undergraduate Research, or for details.
  Engage undergraduate students in research that includes opportunities in applied physics projects, engineering projects, and projects of interest to the private sector or surrounding community, e.g., collaborating with businesses on problems of mutual interest.
  Provide opportunities for students to learn about issues that come up in various careers, including safety, ethics, harassment, and gender/racial bias and discrimination.
  Explore ways to formally integrate career preparation into the curriculum through required seminars, senior portfolios, resume preparation, etc.
4. Offer a seminar course focused on professional skills (e.g., communication, employment opportunities, informational interviewing, resume writing, and interview skills) or incorporate these skills into other parts of the curriculum.
  Support professional development activities such as resume/interviewing workshops or industry/government lab site visits organized by student groups, e.g., SPS chapters, student chapters of national organizations for students of color, local clubs for women or students of color in physics, study groups, and other student social networks.
1. Connect local physics and technology professionals with faculty to provide opportunities for student internships.
  Pair students with mentors in private-sector careers, e.g., see the IMPact program under Resources.
  Provide students and faculty with opportunities to take tours of local companies and other places of employment.
  Support students applying for jobs, especially students from marginalized groups, in finding workplaces where they will be supported.
  Invite alumni to interact with current students as informal or formal mentors, e.g., by serving as colloquium speakers, attending departmental events, inviting students to visit the alumni’s workplace, or judging student posters or presentations.
  Educate members of the private sector about things physics students can do, technical skills and knowledge students gain from a physics degree, and ways students’ problem-solving abilities can benefit companies, e.g., by visiting their businesses, hosting department open houses, or creating industry advisory boards.
2. Work with local businesses and career centers to establish internships or co-op opportunities. See the section on for more details.
  Coordinate with existing co-op programs on campus to include physics students.
  Involve industry mentors in suggesting and co-mentoring senior capstone research projects for students. See the section on for more details.
  Encourage all students to take summer internships at companies or organizations, and ensure that your structures and policies promote and enable participation by students who might otherwise be excluded.

Programmatic Assessments

Identify which of the above Effective Practices you are implementing and track the results of implementing them.
Conduct an inventory of ways in which your program addresses or could address program-level student learning outcomes for career preparation (see Resources below), both in and out of the classroom. Assess correlation between program-level student learning outcomes and departmental offerings and activities.
Evaluate your department’s culture around career preparation, e.g., by counting mentions of career preparation in faculty meeting minutes or by conducting student/faculty perception surveys (see questions 2 and 3 below).
Survey students about their attitudes toward various career paths and their perception of departmental culture, faculty support, and peer attitudes.
Survey students to ascertain their knowledge and use of available career preparation resources and their understanding of available career options, including required preparation for those careers.
Analyze the demographics and interests of your majors, likely in partnership with your office of institutional research. Correlate demographics with survey responses to determine how well your program is serving the career preparation needs of all students.
Conduct an inventory of the relevant career experiences and professional connections among your faculty (e.g., industrial employment or consulting, education research, teaching, or public communication), and evaluate how well your program is leveraging these resources to support student career preparation.
Survey faculty on their perceptions and knowledge of career preparation, using questions that parallel student surveys, and look for disconnects between faculty and student responses. Include questions on faculty perceptions of the value of preparing students for diverse careers, perceptions of career preparation practices in your program, and knowledge of available career preparation resources.
Track numbers of students participating in career preparation events, using career preparation resources on campus and in your department, and participating in career experience programs such as internships.
Assess achievement of program-level student learning outcomes for career preparation through portfolios, graded presentations in capstone courses, or peer evaluation.
Obtain and analyze data on the career paths of all graduates for the last 20 years, perhaps in partnership with your office of institutional research.
Collect contact information for all graduates before they leave, and conduct exit interviews and surveys 6 to 12 months after graduation to determine initial employment and job placement rates for different career types. Regularly survey alumni to track their career paths; ask how well they think your program prepared them for their careers and how it could be improved. Include questions about whether program-level student learning outcomes, undergraduate learning experiences, and career advice and support met alumni’s expectations.
Survey employers of your alumni about how well your program prepared graduates for their careers and how the program could be improved.

Evidence

Evidence to support these practices comes from numerous sources that are summarized in the Phys21 report and the Phys21 Supplement, as well as data collected by the AIP Statistical Research Center.

P. Heron, L. McNeil, et al. (editors) “Phys21: Preparing Physics Students for 21st-Century Careers,” American Physical Society (2016).
L. Woolf and D. Arion, “Phys21 Supplement: J-TUPP Summary of Background Reports on Careers and Professional Skills, Summary of Background Reports on Careers and Professional Skills, American Physical Society (2016).
P. Mulvey and J. Pold, “Physics Bachelor’s Initial Employment,” Focus On Report, American Institute of Physics Statistical Research Center (2017).

Resources

Reference 1 in Evidence above provides further guidance on preparing students for diverse careers, and includes career preparation learning goals on pages 19–21.
AIP Career Pathways Project: a project encompassing several resources from SPS and the AIP Statistical Research Center, including the Careers Toolbox
APS IMPact program: a program that connects physics students with industry mentors
PIPELINE/EPIC: Educating Physicists for Impactful Careers: materials that integrate workforce-relevant scientific, technical, and business skills into the undergraduate curriculum
VentureWell: a non-profit organization that supports innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) in STEM fields through faculty and student grants, workshops on commercializing research, and community building among I&E practitioners
Physics InSight slideshows: presentations illustrating career pathways for physics students
AIP Statistical Research Center: a group that regularly collects and analyzes data on education, careers, and diversity in physics, astronomy, and other physical sciences. Career-related resources include employment data for physicists, astronomers and related scientists and a state-by-state list of who is hiring physics graduates.

Career Preparation

How to Use This Guide

Benefits

Effective Practices

Effective Practices

Communicate to and educate students about a variety of career options

Publicize to prospective and current students and to faculty varied career options as being valued and rewarding

Provide guidance and resources to support students in choosing careers that fit their interests

Support all students in envisioning themselves in a wide variety of careers

Support faculty taking an active role in expanding students’ awareness of careers

Invite guest speakers with physics backgrounds from a variety of professions to interact with students via departmental colloquia or seminars

Inform students about and encourage students to take advantage of on- and off-campus career-focused resources

Provide students with on-campus experiences that explicitly teach skills and knowledge relevant to future careers

Develop student learning outcomes for skills and knowledge that are aligned with your department’s mission and relevant to future careers

Provide degree-plan options that align with students’ career goals

Review and modify the physics curriculum to align with student learning outcomes for career preparation program

Explore co- or extra-curricular options to meet program-level student learning outcomes for career preparation

Seek opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration for physics students

Provide support for students to become self-motivated, independent problem solvers

Provide students with off-campus learning experiences that explicitly teach skills and knowledge relevant to future careers

Create connections between your physics program and employers, professionals, and alumni

Create infrastructure that will allow students to take part in summer research experiences and/or internships in local companies

Engage foundations, non-profits, government entities, and your development or fundraising office to promote student innovation

Programmatic Assessments

Programmatic Assessments

What are the mechanisms through which your program educates students to be aware of, pursue, and succeed in diverse careers? What are the additional mechanisms through which your program could do so?

How do students perceive and understand diverse careers and your program's approach to career preparation?

What resources, experiences, perceptions, and knowledge do your faculty bring to student career preparation?

How successful is your program at educating students to pursue and succeed in diverse careers? How has its success changed over time?

Evidence

Resources

Related Sections