Promotion of postdoctoral researchers

In compliance with the Career Guidelines of the Leibniz Association, we aim to strike a good balance between offering postdoctoral researchers (PostDocs) freedom to hone their own scientific profile and providing them with guidance in the process of developing a career plan fitting their individual skills and wishes. We offer PostDocs a stimulating scientific environment, and they can particularly benefit from joining our long-term projects with established infrastructures and already existing valuable datasets. We foster their links to scientific networks, not only through research but also by involving PostDocs in the organisation of seminars and conferences and in conducting research-based services. To elucidate career options outside of academia, we also include PostDocs in industry collaborations, stakeholder dialogues and public relations work. We recently conducted a survey among Leibniz-IZW PostDocs and PostDoc supervisors, with the goal to clarify expectations on both sides. Having already established “Guidelines for the good supervision of doctoral students at the Leibniz-IZW” in 2019, we will use the survey results to develop similar guidelines for good mentoring of PostDocs.