Current issues surrounding research and funding, in particular questions about training and workforce stability, affect career development amongst graduate students and postdocs. The Future of Research Symposium, held in Boston, USA, in October 2014, was organized by early career researchers to facilitate discussions about the scientific enterprise and central to these discussions were a series of postdoc-led workshops aimed at discussing problems, and identifying solutions. On May 20th at the NatureJobs Career Expo 2015 in Boston, USA, postdocs from the Future of Research organization led a workshop using a similar format, inviting participants to identify barriers to career awareness and preparedness for early career researchers, and possible solutions to these problems. Here we present the data from this workshop and summarize the main points raised, for the use of the early career research community.

Organizing this symposium was a tremendous learning process for all of us. Here, we record the process we used, and the guidelines we’d follow (or not!) if we were to do it all over again. We hope they’re helpful to junior scientists looking to organize meetings of any kind, but especially those dealing with systemic issues affecting the research enterprise.   The organizing tips are presented below in topical “chunks” arranged in the chronological order we found they first required attention. However, most chunks have tasks that need to be executed over a long time scale. To facilitate the management of this, we assigned individual people to coordinate many of them.   If you’d like to organize your own symposium on these topics, please feel free to use whatever assets we have that may be useful to you. We would be delighted to offer additional advice; please feel free to contact us at info@futureofresearch.org. We’d love to help spread the word about your meeting!