Berkeley Lab postdoc association (BLPA) supports about 800 postdocs at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with very different career interests. Career development plays a key role in advancing our postdocs’ careers. In 2019, BLPA has integrated a new career development program in order to help navigate and increase awareness of the sea of opportunities that highly skilled postdocs encounter. Over the past year we have launched the Lab-Industry Networking Connection or LINC and a new peer to peer mentoring program. In our poster we will explain in deep detail the LINC mission, which aspires to educate postdocs at the lab about careers beyond academia and also facilitates effective networking between postdocs and industry partners. We will cover the events that we have organized under the LINC umbrella such as onsite company visits, virtual tech talks and the first Berkeley Lab Postdoc Career Fair. The career fair was co-organized together with the Berkeley Lab Postdoc Office and brought together more than 250 postdocs across all science and engineering disciplines, 10 companies and more than 15 senior scientists and faculty willing to share their expertise. The career fair was an excellent opportunity for postdocs to establish fruitful collaborations with companies. We will also cover our new peer to peer mentoring program called Postdoc to Postdoc. These are a series of seminars given by a postdoc about a specific topic of broad interest such as how to apply for faculty, personal experiences on getting the Green Card for international postdocs, drafting an elevator pitch, careers in science policy or how to make the most of social media for your career. This poster summarizes our efforts to support our mission of advancing careers of postdocs not only in academia or industry, but also in non-traditional settings such as science policy and science communication and make them ready for the next career move. We will include implementation tips and strategic moves that are making our new programs a success.
