Explore Career Paths
Exploring potential careers is a critical part of postdoctoral training. Whether you are considering opportunities within academia or pursuing roles in industry, government, nonprofits, or other sectors, understanding your skills, interests, and values is key to making informed career decisions. This section provides a curated set of resources to help postdocs assess their strengths, explore career possibilities, and connect with professionals and opportunities across a wide range of fields.
Self Assessment โ The Individual Development Plan (IDP)
The IDP is a career exploration and planning tool that clarifies your career direction and maps out the best course of action for achieving your goals. Accessed online, myIDP (recommended for STEM fields) and Imagine PhD (recommended for the Humanities & Social Sciences) can be used independently or with an OPA career counselor. Each resource provides:
- Online assessments that allow individuals to self-assess their career-related skills, interests, and values
- Detailed career-related information to help postdocs and graduate students explore, connect, and build skills
- A customizable individual development plan (IDP) template will allow you to set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based goal
PhD Paths
PhD Paths is a career exploration database focused on careers outside academia, where users can enter their email address to access a free, searchable collection of over 140 PhD-level researchers and the careers they now hold. The database is filterable by doctoral field and shows the job titles and organizations where researchers now work across industry, government, nonprofits, and other sectors. Each profile includes a short interview highlighting the individualโs PhD research, current role, and how they navigated the transition from doctoral training into a non-academic career, giving trainees concrete examples of possible pathways and outcomes, and many participants are open to being contacted for informational interviews.
InterSECT Job Simulations
An interactive online tool that lets postdocs and graduate students explore careers outside academia by simulating real-world job experiences. Users can engage in realistic tasks, problem-solving scenarios, and decision-making exercises across various industries, helping them better understand different roles, identify transferable skills, and evaluate potential career paths before pursuing them.
Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Innovate Carolina
UNCโs hub for innovation and entrepreneurship, providing resources, programs, and connections to help researchers translate ideas into real-world impact. You can sign up to receive their Newsletter here.
UNC KickStart Venture Services
A program supporting UNC-affiliated startups with mentoring, education, and access to funding opportunities to accelerate early-stage venture development.
North Carolina Small Business and Technology Development Center (SBTDC)
A statewide resource offering free business counseling, training, and support for entrepreneurs and researchers interested in commercialization and small business development.
NSF I-Corps
A national program that helps researchers explore the commercial potential of their technologies through customer discovery, entrepreneurial training, and mentorship.