Results of our survey “Workshops topics for 2025”
We also would like to thank all 131 of you who completed this workshop survey! We are really delighted about the constructive feedback and are currently in the middle of finalizing the workshop program for next year, which we will publish in autumn. In the following you will find only a brief overview of the major results. If you would like to have a more detailed look, please email us (career@gauss.uni-goettingen.de) and we will provide you with further details.
Our first question asked where you are based and showed that we have a very good distribution over all the GAUSS institutions across the Göttingen Campus. When looking more specifically at the different positions (e.g. postdocs, PhDs in their 3rd year or above, group leaders etc.) the distribution is similar.
| Institution where you are based | Number | Percentage |
| Faculty of Biology and Psychology | 32 | 24% |
| Faculty of Chemistry | 6 | 5% |
| Faculty of Geosciences and Geography | 1 | 1% |
| Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics | 7 | 5% |
| Faculty of Physics | 7 | 5% |
| MPI Dynamic and Self-Organisation | 10 | 8% |
| MPI Solar System Research | 5 | 4% |
| MPI Multidisciplinary Sciences (former MPI-em and MPI-bpc) | 13 | 10% |
| German Primate Institute (DPZ) | 7 | 5% |
| University Medical Center Göttingen (including ENI) | 25 | 19% |
| Other | 18 | 14% |
This leads to the second question – your current position.
| Your current position | Number | Percentage |
| Postdoc | 76 | 58% |
| PhD student (3rd year or above) | 28 | 21% |
| PhD student (1st or 2nd year) | 4 | 3% |
| Group leader | 5 | 4% |
| Science manager | 3 | 2% |
| Alumni (left Gö Campus) | 13 | 10% |
| Other | 2 | 2% |
The thirds question concerned topics of workshops you already attended in the past (no matter if they were provided by the GAUSS Career Service, GAUSS, GGNB or others).
| Workshops you already attended | Number | Percentage |
| None | 20 | 16% |
| Third party funding / grant writing (academic) | 4 | 3% |
| Career planning (academic) | 11 | 9% |
| Interview training (non-academic) | 11 | 9% |
| Career planning (non-academic) | 9 | 7% |
| Company World / the non-academic job market (non-academic) | 9 | 7% |
| Job hunting / application skills (non-academic) | 9 | 7% |
| Team and leadership (both) | 11 | 9% |
| Conflict Management (both) | 4 | 3% |
| Networking (both) | 10 | 8% |
| Resilience training / mental health (both) | 18 | 14% |
| Project management (both) | 8 | 6% |
| Other | 9 | 7% |
The category “other” included answers like communication or scientific communication, consulting, body language / voice projection, science management, intercultural competency, BWL für nicht-BWLer, female leadership etc.
Our next question concerned specifically workshops you attended which were provided by us – the GAUSS Career Service.
| Attended workshops provided by the GAUSS Career Service | Number | Percentage |
| None | 47 | 36% |
| Third party funding / grant writing (academic) | 27 | 21% |
| Career planning (academic) | 16 | 12% |
| Interview training (non-academic) | 12 | 9% |
| Career planning (non-academic) | 17 | 13% |
| Company World / the non-academic job market (non-academic) | 18 | 14% |
| Job hunting / application skills (non-academic) | 15 | 11% |
| Team and leadership (both) | 17 | 13% |
| Conflict Management (both) | 13 | 10% |
| Networking (both) | 6 | 5% |
| Resilience training / mental health (both) | 8 | 6% |
| Project management (both) | 19 | 14% |
| Other | 8 | 6% |
The listed other workshop actually weren’t provided by the GAUSS Career Service but other providers.
Our last question concerned the topics you actually would like to attend. We summarized the results in the table below and highlighted the percentages of topics you are interested in, which are around/above 70%, and those above 30% you are rather not or not interested in.
The good news are that we are offering the most sought after workshops again in 2025 and we are looking forward to many registrations! Those workshops which have relatively low interest include some purely academic topics, like grant writing. However as these workshop are sometimes three-times overbooked, we of course will offer them again. Over the last years we always included workshops on mental health and resilience, but unfortunately we had really difficulties to fill the places and also had to cancel some as we couldn’t find enough participants, which is also visible by the survey with a relatively high number of you not interested in this topic. We are still in the process of evaluating this for 2025 and will keep you posted if we give it another go and offering a workshop on these topics.
| very/rather interested | (rather)not interested | already attended | |
| Third party funding / grant writing (academic) | 56% | 39% | 5% |
| Career planning (academic) | 59% | 36% | 5% |
| Interview training (non-academic) | 76% | 21% | 3% |
| Career planning (non-academic) | 76% | 21% | 3% |
| Company World / the non-academic job market (non-academic) | 64% | 28% | 8% |
| Job hunting / application skills (non-academic) | 63% | 29% | 8% |
| Teams and leadership (both) | 74% | 19% | 7% |
| Conflict Management (both) | 69% | 25% | 6% |
| Networking (both) | 62% | 35% | 3% |
| Resilience training / mental health (both) | 61% | 35% | 4% |
| Project management (both) | 74% | 18% | 8% |
| Time management (both) | 70% | 25% | 5% |
Our last question concerned topics you are actually interested in and if we have listed them or not. We are very happy that in your opinion (83%) we are covering the majority already and the remaining of you provided us with further ideas, which we would like to refer to here:
- Start-up/entrepreneur workshops: there are plenty of great workshops available for free provided by different providers on the Göttingen Campus and online and we are advertising them very prominently in our monthly newsletter – there is non without any workshops related to these topics 🙂 Have fun exploring these options and sign up for those opportunities)
- Interview Training for academics: this is a topic which came up also in our team meetings and we are happy to let you know that this will be part of the Workshop Program 2025!
- GMP courses: the GMP academy is providing workshops across Germany and online each year and we have really good experiences with the providers. We are also advertising theses workshops and training courses on a regular basis in our monthly Newsletter.
- Project Management: we are offering in our current workshop portfolio this topic and we will do so next year as well!
- Supervising skills: we are offering this topic usually every two years in our workshop program as there are always a few interested participants but unfortunately not enough to fill a workshop every year. So watch out for the next one and sign up for it!
- Programming workshops (Python, R, etc.): Workshops with this focus are offered also by the GWDG (GWDG Academy) and therefore we are not including those in our portfolio – please check out their webpage for further details.
- Science Communication: this workshop topic is regularly offered by the press relation office (Melissa Sollich) and everybody is very welcome to sign up.
- Public speaking, presentation, body language, voice projection: this topic was also mentioned twice. However, as GAUSS/GGNB are offering plenty of workshops in these areas for PhD students, we haven’t included those in our program as most postdocs are already familiar with the techniques and have quite some experience in presenting. If you – as postdocs – however have the feeling that you need a workshop like this, please contact us via email (career@gauss.uni-goettingen.de) and if we have a significant number of interested people we might offer a workshop like this in the future.
- Women specific courses: We are highlighting in our newsletter on a regular basis courses which are only for female academics provided usually by the university or other institutions/organisations. If you have specific questions regarding career/family planning you are always welcome to book a career counselling session with us – there we can answer specific questions better and more individualized.
Thanks again to everybody who completed the survey and we are looking forward to an exciting workshop program 2025!
All the best,
Stefanie and Christin