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Early Career Members: Recruitment, Retention and Engagement (Fireside Chat)
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Early Career Members: Recruitment, Retention and Engagement (Fireside Chat)
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Segment:0 .
ERIN LANDIS: Hello, everyone and welcome to the Society Street fireside chat, "Early Career Members: Recruitment, Retention and Engagement." Thank you so much for joining us today. Just as a quick reminder, there will be an open Q&A session at the end of our discussion, but please feel free to add your questions or comments in the chat during the discussion because we do want this session to be interactive.
ERIN LANDIS: My name is Erin Landis, and I am today's moderator. I am the Managing Director for Origin Editorial, which is an editorial services and publishing consulting firm. Before coming to Origin in January of last year, I was the Vice President of Publications for the American Gastroenterological Association. Today, I'm joined by an esteemed panel of guests who can help us understand how associations can better serve their early career members.
ERIN LANDIS: So I'll just take a minute and introduce them to you now. So we have Celena NuQuay. She is the Vice President of Constituency Programs and Governance at the American Gastroenterological Association. Hi, Celena. We also have Josel Fritz. She is the Senior Manager of Career Development and Services at the American Society of Hematology.
ERIN LANDIS: Welcome, Josel. And we also have Rodneikka Scott, who is the Vice President of Member and Stakeholder Engagement at the National Society of Professional Engineers. Hi Rodneikka. So I'll spend just a few minutes setting the scene and then we'll jump into the discussion. Over the last several years, early career professionals in nearly all fields have been engaging with associations at decreasing rates.
ERIN LANDIS: Broadly speaking, membership in associations has been flat or declining, and the acquisition, retention and engagement of early career members is significantly lower than for previous generations of members. Research into this trend has shown that early career professionals are increasingly obtaining their educational and networking needs from popular channels that they already frequent.
ERIN LANDIS: For example, social media such as Twitter, or sometimes even TikTok or online platforms like YouTube, and often these sources of information are free or inexpensive, and this can be incredibly advantageous to early career professionals because sometimes joining associations can be cost prohibitive. And even when organizations can entice early career professionals to join, finding ways to engage them can be challenging.
ERIN LANDIS: These individuals often lack the same level of experience and knowledge that more established professionals have, and so they find it challenging to get involved or to hold leadership positions. These factors amount to early career professionals not seeing associations as providing additional or distinctive benefits. And in many cases they're just very busy. They have young families, they're at the beginning of their careers, and so they may not have the capacity or the time to join organizations and engage with them.
ERIN LANDIS: But associations -- for associations, early career professionals are the future of the organization. They bring a unique energy to the association, and they're also innovative. And often they are more open to bringing about much needed change. So it's critical then for associations to understand why early career professionals aren't joining or aren't staying members, and identify ways to turn that around.
ERIN LANDIS: Today's panelists are well equipped to talk about this problem and share solutions that they've put in place at their own organizations. So I'm really excited to hear their perspectives on this topic. So we'll go ahead and dive into the questions. So my first question for you is, I just kind of want to set the stage. Can you explain how your organization defines early career members?
ERIN LANDIS: So, Celena, I'll start with you.
CELENA NUQUAY: Sounds good.
CELENA NUQUAY: Thank you so much. I want to also state that I've had the pleasure of working with Erin at the American Gastroenterological Association, AGA, for many years. Just to set the tone, AGA is a 16,000 member association focused on digestive disease.
CELENA NUQUAY: Our members are physicians. They're in industry. They're, they're allied health professionals, nurse practitioners, et cetera. And in this important discussion about trainees and early career, with a focus on early career, I just want to start with the definition of trainees and then shift to early career. For our trainees, our trainees represent physicians who've completed medical school.
CELENA NUQUAY: They've completed three to four years of medical residency, and then they've entered into a GI fellowship which typically lasts three years. But there are times where there is an extended fellowship or fourth year. What we categorize as early career, it's interesting; the definition can differ depending on different departments within our organization, which is one of our discussions about trying to come up with a clear definition.
CELENA NUQUAY: But from a membership standpoint, an early career member is one that is up to three years out of fellowship. But for our award programs, our young investigators our NIH funded programs, it can range from five to seven years. And then we even have some that will classify early career up to ten years outside of fellowship. So that's how we handle it at AGA.
CELENA NUQUAY: And again, as I mentioned, I think there's some work that needs to be done on harmonizing the definition
ERIN LANDIS: Thank you, Celena.
ERIN LANDIS: That's interesting that there's, depending on department, the definition varies. I'm not sure I was aware of that when I was at AGA. Thank you. Rodneikka.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So thank you again for the opportunity to speak with the group. I want to set the stage and let you know that I'm recently new to the National Society of Professional Engineers. Prior to my experience here, I was with the Endocrine Society. For the purpose of this discussion, I'll be blending a little from the Endocrine Society as well as NSPE. In that space.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So first, the Endocrine Society. Our mission is really to serve endocrinologists, both physicians and scientists in the community to improve health overall.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So, our members were physicians, nurse practitioners, PAs and scientists in that spectrum. When we started to think about early careers, we're really looking at individuals who are three years post training. To become an endocrinologist, whether, through whichever path you choose, you would need to not only go through a bachelor's program as well as medical school, complete a residency, and then go into a fellowship.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So we're thinking post-fellowship in individuals in that one to three year range. Now it gets a little gray. Like Celena, when we look at different areas of the organization, we define early career a bit differently. So when we take a look at governance and opportunities to serve in our Early Career spot in board positions, that range goes up to 10 years. So what we do is we capture not only true early careers but individuals who are starting to get in that mid-career phase.
ERIN LANDIS: So, Rodneikka, did you say that there's a governance position for early career?
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: That's correct. Within our board of directors, we have one slot that is reserved for early careers. We noticed a few years ago that in order to get new life into the blood and create other opportunities, we needed to have representation, that pipeline of individuals.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: And we were actually able to use individuals who've participated in our leadership development programs as potential candidates for that board role.
ERIN LANDIS: That's a really interesting idea, and I think one that I would hope that more associations would consider. I think that perspective is so critical. I think sometimes there's reluctance to include that position on boards because there's the perception that they don't have enough knowledge or experience, but that, you know, they bring another perspective, sort of irrespective of that knowledge and experience that is so critical to hear.
ERIN LANDIS: Thank you. All right, Josel.
JOSEL FRITZ: I just want to say thank you. It's an honor to be part of this discussion alongside Celena and Rodneikka. Thank you, Erin, for the invitation and for putting this together. So the American Society of Hematology, or ASH, is a professional organization with more than 18,000 members from North America and all over the world. ASH is the world's largest professional society, serving both clinicians and scientists from all over the world who are working to conquer blood diseases.
JOSEL FRITZ: ASH's mission is to foster high quality, equitable care, transformative research and innovative education to improve the lives of patients with blood and bone marrow disorders. So to ASH, early career members of ASH include high school students, undergraduate students and medical students, residents, Fellows, graduate students, postdoctoral students, and junior faculty. So our team, my training team, develops training programs, educational products, awards and scholarships and activities to engage hematology trainees across the evolution of their hematology career pathway.
ERIN LANDIS: So it sounds like you have a broader definition of what an early career member is at ASH?
JOSEL FRITZ: Yes, we offer a lot of resources and we try to impact and engage different levels of the early trainee career.
ERIN LANDIS: So just so I'm clear, you don't segment out kind of like with Rodneikka and Celena's organizations, those that are several years post fellowship and classify them as early career members, is that correct?
JOSEL FRITZ: Yes, we do offer programs for junior faculty. So those who are just out of fellowship and have their new their positions. But we don't have a strict "years out of fellowship".
ERIN LANDIS: OK got it. Thank you. So moving on to our next question. Why do you think it's so important for organizations like yours to focus efforts on the early career individuals in your respective communities? So Rodneikka, I'm going to start with you for this one.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So thank you. You know, we all talk about early careers being the pipeline of our organizations. And many of our organizations have experienced over the last few years
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: a decrease in the number of early careers. For Endocrine Society, which I'm speaking of, we had a decrease before the pandemic and not necessarily individuals entering into the early career category, but individuals who were retaining their membership afterwards because it's such a tough transition period.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: The reason why we need to focus on that particular area beyond the pipeline is, again, people learn different, the experiences are different, and the pandemic changed that, especially for individuals who finished training in a very tough time where, for example, an endocrinologist would typically see patients in office and not be pulled into emergency rooms to deal with issues like covid, that which we have seen over the last few years.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So really being able to reach beyond just the education and think about the whole person, the whole scientist, and how can we support them through their career. As you mentioned earlier, there are so many other opportunities out there online where you can get education, where you can really get the tools that you need that are outside of our professional organizations.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: But what you don't get from those is that sense of professional community. How we've tackled this over the last four years has been: one, we taught early career members how to be members of our society, and that's not just through emails. We created what we call Endocrine Ambassadors, and that is an ambassador, one from the member perspective, as well as one from the staff perspective, that really reaches out to every single one of our members that are in that category and says, hey, this is something that you'd be interested in.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: We use ringless voicemails instead of just using emails to say, hey, you know, your dues renewals coming up, these are the reasons why you should attend the conference, and actually developed a relationship with individuals in this category. We've taken a strong step.
ERIN LANDIS: Oops Rodneikka, you went on mute.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: Thank you. We've taken a strong stance on advocacy and have gotten our early career members involved in a multitude of components there. And also increased, again, many of those professional development programs to reach them where they are and to guide them along the path of volunteerism, which we found to have a great impact of sustaining their membership and also growing their career.
ERIN LANDIS: That really resonates with me. I am on a co-chair of a committee for a professional organization right now, and I had the opportunity to join a board call and we were talking about creating possibly a pathway or a journey for early career members in this organization to learn how to be a member, just to your point, and how to get involved, because it's really unclear to those members how they can get involved.
ERIN LANDIS: So I think that's a really useful idea.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: It is. And so many times at this stage of their career, they pay and they may have a full year where they're getting emails and not really know what to do with it. So really being able to increase that value.
ERIN LANDIS: Right right. You have a nice sort of high touch approach. Yes so, Josel, from your perspective, why is it important for ASH to focus on these early career members?
JOSEL FRITZ: So the hematology profession is facing an ongoing crisis for quite some time now, where the number of trainees are dwindling and there are growing number of retirees. There's a shortage of hematologists specifically in classical hematology. Classical hematology encompasses a large number of diseases and conditions that are noncancerous, including hemophilia, sickle cell disease, thrombocytopenia. Malignant hematology includes diseases such as leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma.
JOSEL FRITZ: Many physicians are board certified in both hematology and oncology, but many of these physicians rarely treat patients with classical hematologic conditions and oftentimes have to call their classical hematology colleagues for advice. We have a shortage in all aspects of hematology, from clinical care to education to traditional research and hematology trainees face unique professional and personal challenges.
JOSEL FRITZ: There are very few trainees going into classical hematology in the first place because of negative perceptions, the lack of mentorship, the perception of low compensation compared to oncology, work life balance disparities, and too few hematology focused fellowship training programs. So I think education and training are one of the most powerful recruitment tools. And in ASH, we need to recruit trainees and spark their interest in the specialty.
JOSEL FRITZ: First, to build and preserve the hematology workforce. The more trainees we recruit, the more likely future generations will view hematology as a viable career. So ultimately, it's about patients and patient outcomes. And if we don't have enough hematologists in the future to treat blood diseases, then the patient population will suffer. And I believe that investing efforts to retain early career individuals in any society will improve career pathways of members and in turn will benefit the constituents they serve.
ERIN LANDIS: Right so it's really about nurturing that group so that you have adequate supply of those types of providers for the patient population. Thank you. So, Celena, I recall from my time at AGA that -- and perhaps this has changed -- and you can of course, correct me if I'm wrong, but having getting trainees to join AGA was not so challenging.
ERIN LANDIS: But then there would be some challenge around the early career segment of the membership, either not being able to retain them or what have you. So from your perspective, why is it so important for AGA to focus on early career members?
CELENA NUQUAY: You are still spot on with the challenges with the situation and like Rodneikka and Josel it is a matter of the workforce and it's a matter of the patient population. And we also in GI have the challenge of, there's an aging, aging physician population and they're retiring and with the really post pandemic, they're retiring not only because of age. They're retiring because the workforce in health care has changed so much with regulation and private equity and solo practitioners are almost non-existent.
CELENA NUQUAY: People are now employed, employed physicians and educational requirements.
CELENA NUQUAY: Re certifications are changing. And so there are a number of stressors on, on the physician population. And then when we look at the population, the patient population, we know there's a huge commitment at AGA with our equity project to eradicate disparities and to address, address equity. We're seeing quite a bit of progress and change in the demographics of the workforce.
CELENA NUQUAY: So when I say that, I say that not only are we looking at numerically the pipeline changing, we're looking at the need to focus on who is in the pipeline. For example, within, AGA just approved a week ago, a new comprehensive gender equity strategy to complement our equity strategy, because the recognition is right now among female gastroenterologists in medical school, it's almost 50/50 and that's a huge change for years at AGA the percentages were 20% female 80% male.
CELENA NUQUAY: Now among the trainee population is 36 to almost 40% female in our trainee population. So we're seeing that the needs and the demographics are changing. And so. So that's critical to us. To your specific point about membership, from a membership standpoint, we average we averaged around 85% to 88% retention at the trainee level.
CELENA NUQUAY: But just immediately after graduation or fellowship, it would drop to 60% to 65% We do estimate that people are probably coming back within some years, but it's hard to track that. And I think it goes to what I've heard my colleagues talk about is the lifestyle changes, the demands that are on them, and membership is not necessarily top of mind. And so I'll say some of our strategy at AGA focuses more on engagement and trying to, as we talk about, get them in the pipeline of engagement and leadership in AGA and membership is still critical, but it's a big focus on on, on engagement because I do think that's the sticky factor that keeps the younger members members in an organization.
ERIN LANDIS: Right I think that's interesting. Do you know or do you have data about how that membership drops off when they hit that early career stage? If there's disparity between males and females, do females drop off more acutely?
CELENA NUQUAY: Females are dropping off more. Females are dropping off more. And if you just think about the age they're coming out of fellowship, they are, they're in their mid thirties, many of them have waited on a family and they are saying I'm finished fellowship now it's time to start a family.
CELENA NUQUAY: I'm balancing a new practice, I've moved to a new location and membership is just not top of mind at that particular point. So some of the things we're doing is, is trying to do career development, training, mentorship, sponsorship with a very specific recognition of the changing demands that are on early career professionals.
ERIN LANDIS: I mean, just what you said reminds me of a conference I went to back in February. It it was for publishing and it was on the intersection of open access and diversity, equity and inclusion. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with the open access movement in scholarly publishing, but some of the research that someone presented showed that gender disparity is similar in publishing, where they start as when they're much younger.
ERIN LANDIS: The disparity women are publishing and reviewing at the same rates as men. But then as they enter that more early career phase, they start to drop off again. So there's clearly work to be done for that group in particular of early careers.
CELENA NUQUAY: Yes if I could just interject that just very specifically, what there's data showing that the pandemic caused that gap for women, early career women in publishing to even be greater because when they were home, they're juggling the family and they weren't writing. And so there was that gap that's also trying to be made up.
ERIN LANDIS: Exactly very, very important point. And yes, we absolutely saw that, which was interesting because we had higher rates of submissions than we ever did before. And yet there was that that gender disparity in representation. Josel, before I move on to the next question, did you have any responses or feedback based on what Celena or each of you said that you wanted to respond to before I move on?
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: I actually think that the experiences that Celena's members at AGA have are very similar to endocrinologists. The same here. We actually within our membership our active members. We are over 50% female at this point and again, really thriving, really engaging. Unlike some of the other groups in the publishing space, we did see more women having opportunities to publish in our particular space, but I would say that's the only difference that I see.
ERIN LANDIS: Great Thank you. So I think we've touched on this a little bit. Some of you have touched on this in some of what you've said already. But I'm curious to hear from your perspective, what is the value proposition of societies for early career members? You know, as I touched on in my opening remarks, and this is what I experienced, too, when I was at AGA, they would find what they needed.
ERIN LANDIS: In other places. And so they weren't really seeing joining an association as particularly valuable or beneficial or a good use of their time as maybe previous generations were. So what do you think today's value proposition is for early career members? And Josel, I'll start with you.
JOSEL FRITZ: Thanks, Erin. Some of the items that I'll be talking about, I think, Celena, you mentioned a lot of them as well. So we have some similarities. At ASH there is a wealth of resources and opportunities to become involved for our early career members. ASH provide support to help boost careers in hematology and there are a few items that are very important. So mentorship, as Celena mentioned, is an extremely valuable offering for early career members.
JOSEL FRITZ: Our ASH career development training programs, including we include small group mentorship, peer mentoring, one on one mentoring on career development issues and project related feedback. And the early career members have access to world renowned hematology leaders. So they build they build bonds and become lifelong friends and colleagues.
JOSEL FRITZ: So they always have someone to kind of go to if they have questions throughout their whole career. ASH also provides scholarships and awards at each stage of their training career. For example, we have hematology opportunities for the next generation, our research Scientist Award or our honors program, and it provides research funding for talented medical students and residents.
JOSEL FRITZ: So offering these awards, we have multiple awards, kind of keeps trainees coming back for more and they apply each stage of their trainee career. Also visibility and recognition through ASH's publications. They have opportunities to present at the annual meeting and showcase their research. Our trainee counsel, who represents our trainee members, they offer an online newsletter called Hematopoiesis, which is content created by trainees for trainees.
JOSEL FRITZ: So it's a good way to get involved and also get their -- and publicise their work. And another offering that is a value proposition is our free educational resources. During the early stages of the pandemic, we assessed trainees and program directors on how ASH can help them during COVID. And so we the results showed that trainees wanted free educational material.
JOSEL FRITZ: So we provided a hematology board review series. We kind of just quickly developed this program and within months a board series program, which is a 16 week free exam review series with lectures and weekly live study sessions going over board review questions with experts. It was highly attended and utilized all over the world. It was free. That was the main thing, where other board review programs were like $ 2,000 or $ 3,000 and ours is free.
JOSEL FRITZ: So we've gotten really good engagement there and we've continued the program ever since. That sounds
ERIN LANDIS: like a really incredible benefit. Thank you. Rodneikka, how about you? What do you think the value proposition is?
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So as similarly mentioned, mentorship is big. Mentorship is key And I've already told you about that concierge experience of walking people through membership. But we took a step back and we said, what does everyone really want? We surveyed them and it seemed like they didn't know how to get to that next path on their career, that next rung on their career. So we created a few pathways, pathways to getting published.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So not only having information on our website, but also having webinars and just quick talks and podcasts that talked about what the process is like to encourage individuals who may try to get published and experience failure because there is a lot of failure when trying to get published and getting your research out there.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: You're not going to get everything published in that space. Also, whether it's virtually or in person, creating spaces to network, and network without judgment. So many times when you come to the annual meetings, you're there with the rock stars in the industry, so you can't always let your hair down and release. And talk about the issues that are challenging you because it can have detrimental effects on your career.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So creating pods or groups where individuals who are like minded can, you know, express what's going on. Our online community, I know many people say that their online communities have been helpful, but we made a transition from one platform to DocMatter And this was a community where it shifted from what was the norm. We actually had cases and early careers as well as those who are more established in the industry, really working through and talking through cases which helped with the again career development, it helped with general understanding and it fit back into our mission.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: Beyond that, creating a program where we allowed early careers to participate in an early career review process for our journals so they can know actually what goes in to reviewing abstracts and articles that have been submitted. Beyond that, we don't just think that locally, thinking globally, because the early career audience on the global spectrum and the global field, they do have very different needs in that space.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: And if we're talking about the greater endocrinology community, we looked at the global leadership academy, which took early careers from across the world, brought them together and actually worked on the things like white papers and just really what's affecting them and what's challenging their career space. We've, again, like many of you have found that giving back is extremely important and looking at our underrepresented populations are extremely important.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: Over the course of the last two years in particular, we launched a clinical leadership in endocrinology program, which brings a selected group of individuals, again, early career together to talk about all the things that people usually just find out along the way or by accident. And we're trying to create a space where you don't have to find out by accident that you have a cohort that you're a part of.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: And we teach you about compensation, we teach you about insurance. We teach you about those little known paths to endocrinology in that space. Beyond that, we also took a shift away from the norm for the 100 year history, 100 year plus history of endocrinology. We actually never had a member on the cover of our journals. And we made a shift in the last two years to not just show, like our Nobel laureates there, but also to show emerging rock stars in that space.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: And we took a look at whether it was, you know, Women's History month. Do we have women who are really growing, who are really rock stars in both the scientific and medical space that we can truly feature? The other thing that I would add again would be that just to summarize would be that we looked for opportunities to take them from early to mid-career level.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: We look for opportunities to get them involved in leadership, whether it's through our special interest groups, which was an entry point for volunteer engagement and once they had that foundation, now when it takes, when it comes to committee leadership and committee involvement, we created a pipeline to those larger and greater leadership positions where people who were rock stars in industry now knew our early career folks names. So that was our path to creating a value proposition.
ERIN LANDIS: So much of what both of you have said resonates with me, both personally and with my experience at AGA. A common theme here is, is obviously mentorship. I think that in any field, no matter the discipline, mentorship is so important. And mentorship programs at professional organizations like yours can really facilitate those relationships.
ERIN LANDIS: I've had the opportunity to be a mentor in my own field, and I've really enjoyed that. And at the time, though, when I joined. When I became, when I got into the field of scholarly publishing, there weren't really mentorship programs. And to your point, Rodneikka, I found a lot of things out by accident and providing early career professionals with the resources they need. So they're not necessarily putting together a piece of a puzzle that they don't know the picture of is incredibly beneficial and an incredible value an association can provide.
ERIN LANDIS: So Celena, I'll turn it over to you. From your perspective, what is the value proposition for organizations, for early career members?
CELENA NUQUAY: Sure you know, it's interesting. The traditions of associations have has always been that networking is a key reason for people to join an association. Like minded people associating is the definition of associations. The reality, I think, is that networking still reigns supreme. The difference is with early career now is how one networks is different.
CELENA NUQUAY: What AGA has been focused on over the last year and a half is really stepping back with a future- focused vision of what's happening in the greater society.
CELENA NUQUAY: So we're looking at the society drivers with a focus of saying, how are our decisions now going to impact the successors that are following us? And that's something in my governance hat we're working with the board on. So the board is very focused on saying what is the future not only of GI, but the future of health care, the future of society? And how will that impact trainees and early careers that are coming behind us and how do we engage them now?
CELENA NUQUAY: So it's looking at things such as looking at the future of scholarly publishing, looking at the role of artificial intelligence, looking at the role of private equity, looking at physician burnout. And by looking at those types of topics, there's been more of an outreach to the early career professionals who don't see these things as very distant. They see them as right now.
CELENA NUQUAY: So for example, through one of our programs, which is the future leaders program, which is a dedicated leadership development mentorship pipeline program for early career professionals that we've had for quite a number of years. That program is designed to take a small cohort of emerging leaders and take them through a comprehensive 18 month training program where they have some of the top leaders in the field in mentoring relationships with them.
CELENA NUQUAY: They're working on strategic projects. And we had them this year say, OK, we need you to look at artificial intelligence. We need you to look at climate change. We need you to look at this and make recommendations to the board because you are the successors and you're going to experience that. And that was incredibly engaging. I know later you'll ask us about success.
CELENA NUQUAY: But I think with programs like that, with future leaders, for example, we average about 90 to 92% of the graduates of future leaders become committee members. And we're now starting to see who's likely going to emerge to the board in the next few years coming through that program. We have a similar program along with our partners at Endocrine, which is an NIH, R 25 grant that we call the forward program, fostering opportunities resulting in workforce diversity.
CELENA NUQUAY: And it's a program for underrepresented physicians and scientists that are early in their career. They're trainees. They too go through a two year, very comprehensive one on one mentoring program. They're taught grant writing and academic skills. They're taught leadership development. And we actively work to transition them into leadership.
CELENA NUQUAY: We actively work to make sure that they become grant grant funded and we actively work -- we do manuscript development with them to ensure that they become published scholars in the workforce. So I think so the networking when I talk about networking, I think it's through these mentorship opportunities is through these cohort type programs that allow them to really pair up in peer to peer networking, which is something that we're also seeing.
CELENA NUQUAY: And we're seeing that the world of networking, especially related to meetings, we're looking at the future of meetings. No longer are younger people necessarily going to sit-in a 90 minute didactic lecture. They're watching, they'll log in for on-demand part of that, but then show up for the meetup and the networking event. So they'll actually fly to the conference but not attend the lecture sessions, but will attend the networking.
CELENA NUQUAY: So we're experimenting with ways to provide a little bit more micro education. We have a podcast, small talk, big topics that is dedicated to early career. We have we have an app, a mobile app called Career Compass that is focused for trainees and early career and what we're it provides education, but right now what we're really focus on is building out the online mentoring section that we call Connections Corner within the app.
CELENA NUQUAY: So again, I think the greatest value is understanding what the future is going to look like for them and cultivating our programs to prepare them for that future while we learn it ourselves.
ERIN LANDIS: Right well, those are a lot of really robust programs that you have. I do want to ask a quick follow up question before we I move it move us into our last question. Do you feel or do you think that the pandemic has affected the value proposition of organizations or I mean, Josel, you touched a little bit on that, having to pivot quickly because of the pandemic. But have you seen anything as a result of the pandemic in changing the value proposition for early career members?
JOSEL FRITZ: So I think it's a lot easier for them to become involved because a lot of our Fellows and our medical students are really busy, and if we offer something virtual, they'll jump right on it because it's very accessible. And I think that yeah, and we do offer a lot of podcasts and recordings, so it's on their own time. It's very conducive to their learning style. So it's been a good shift for us.
ERIN LANDIS: Right? yeah, I've observed that as well, that accessibility has really changed how organizations think about things. Rodneikka, you have any comments on that?
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So just to add to that, I think that for us as professional associations, we have also learned to be more nimble. And instead of talking about the emerging generations in our respective fields of practice, as you know, it's a "us and them" mentality. Now we're starting to see each other as we are, you know, peers. And I am bridging that gap to bring the next generation along.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: I see many of our more established leaders are more focused and much more centered, especially with the workload shortages. Again, in endocrinology, if every endocrinologist treated an equal amount of patients in the US, they would have 17,000 patients. That's definitely not possible. So it's opened up opportunities not just for early careers, but also some of the, I would say adjacent spaces again like nurse practitioners.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: And it's really creating an environment that is more inclusive. And so I think the pandemic actually did help us in that space and help us being more open minded to other voices outside of our own. Right excellent point, Celena.
CELENA NUQUAY: No, I agree. The pandemic was exhausting from an association management standpoint. But it did it forced us to pivot. It forced us to be nimble. We created new programming. We had we created a new online newsletter called GI distance learning, because everyone was working from home. And it was, again, an opportunity to provide micro education to the Fellows.
CELENA NUQUAY: And so we created that for them. It's now morphed into something that we're calling the Fellows Feed, which is more of taking content from a variety of sources that is that's dedicated for trainees and for early career and, and feeding that to them on a weekly basis in small bites.
CELENA NUQUAY: So, so I do think, and interestingly enough, again, even though the virtual is something that's been very beneficial, we just saw it a week and a half ago at our annual conference. The level of energy to get back in person is huge. So we've begun to organize in our women's programming, Regional Women's workshops, and we're very focused on reaching trainees and early career women through those workshops.
CELENA NUQUAY: And, and again, the opportunity to meet in person, even though everyone says it's wonderful to have this accessibility once they get in the room, there's so much energy and excitement. So so I think the pandemic helped us as well in that respect. But I will add, I think a challenge to it is I think there's kind of a line that blurs early career members want value, but they don't care as much who they get it from.
CELENA NUQUAY: So traditionally there was the I'm a member of this association. And this is my home. Right now, I think it's more of this is my home for this and this is my home for that and this is my home for this. So I think that's the part we've got to figure out. We I think we get our feelings hurt when we see them with the other association. But I don't know if we know how to respond just yet.
ERIN LANDIS: Yeah, absolutely. And again, that resonates with me personally because I am a member of several different organizations. And I get I have a home for this and a home for that and home for that. So I completely agree with that. And I also agree too Celena that there is such energy with returning in person.
ERIN LANDIS: I really value the remote accessibility and I want that to continue, but I also value the in-person opportunity as well. So there has to be a happy balance there, I think. So we are going to need to wrap up our conversation here. And, of course, we'll continue it with the live Q&A and roundtable. But I'm actually going to go a little off script here from what I said was going to be our final question.
ERIN LANDIS: So don't be afraid. I'm going to ask this question. So you've all talked a lot about the importance of engagement, right? And that's kind of the key to retaining who you have, thinking about the programs that you offer that are around engagement, what would you say? You can certainly tell us what that program is, but what would you what would you say the factors are for that being a successful program?
ERIN LANDIS: If that question makes sense in terms of engagement, anybody can start. Who would like to start?
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: I can go. I can jump in.
CELENA NUQUAY: I think we've all talked about it is it's understanding that our trainees and early career members have very busy lives and they're juggling a lot. It's a changing dynamics in the workforce.
CELENA NUQUAY: So programs that fit that model. So we have what we call a young delegate program. And that young delegates is a micro volunteer program that's designed for trainees in early career. They don't have time to serve on a committee for three years, and it's competitive to get on the committees. But they want to volunteer and maybe they want to review an abstract or maybe they want to respond in some way to a committee's question about what's the perspective of trainees and early career.
CELENA NUQUAY: So with our young delegates program, they're able to sign up. Membership is required, but that's really the only restriction with it. Then they sign up and they say, I'm available to volunteer in a variety of ways. They indicate what they're interested in, but then we send them as opportunities arise. Here's an opportunity for you to volunteer.
CELENA NUQUAY: We let them know the time commitment and they have the opportunity to sign to sign up. And it may be one week, it may be one month, it may be two hours. But then one thing we're trying to do is make sure we're capturing that on their record, because as they do get engaged in these micro volunteer opportunities, it's getting their foot more and more in the organization and and it prepares them for serving on a committee or a more long term commitment.
CELENA NUQUAY: So I think with the young delegates and then as we're building out career compass, it's about building programming that addresses their needs in the way that they are living their life.
ERIN LANDIS: Right meeting them where they are. Right where they are.
ERIN LANDIS: Thank you. That's sort of the concept of micro volunteerism. Celena Thank you. Rodneikka.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So of course, we can measure engagement through our normal means, which is how many people attended a webinar or how many people attended the annual conference and so forth. But we've taken a step back and not just look at the numbers and what those numbers can tell you. Of course, we need a critical mass in that space, but we've also started doing pre, during, and post evaluations of many of our products.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So one so we can get an understanding of before we even launch a program, the people who are signing up for it, what is their expectation? What do they think they're going to get from this program? Did we meet their expectation on the back end? Yes, we do all of that post evaluation. But during, did something shift in them to get them to think about another topic, which not only could develop our future pools of topics, but really to see how they're thinking, how they're evolving, and also to be able to show them where they started versus where they've come through our programs.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So really not only evaluating but actually showing the progress in that space. And also using that information to provide recommendations for other resources. Like many of you, in endocrinology, we are typically the third organization on their list of organizations to join because they have specialized in whether it's something cancer related or something that's more niche in the endocrinology space.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So again, providing that whole pathway from early career to mid and more advanced career stages is what we have focused on for engagement.
ERIN LANDIS: I like that idea of showing them their progress or showing them their journey of engagement. It's really compelling, I think, as a means to showing the value of being a member. Right Josel, you've got the final word. How about you? What do you think has made successful engagement programming?
JOSEL FRITZ: So I quickly, quickly want to just mention our newest program, the hematology focused fellowship training program, or HFFTP. It's newly established and it provides more training opportunities for hematology by creating new fellowship slots at training programs focused specifically on hematology.
JOSEL FRITZ: So a few years ago, we conducted a workforce study to assess the current and future state of Hematology as a profession and with the goal of preserving and furthering the field. Based on the data and the results from the workforce study the ASH leadership approved $19 million to support an HFFTP program to fund 10 new classical hematology focused fellowship slots for five cohorts, with the goal of graduating 50 academic hematologists in 2030.
JOSEL FRITZ: So that was a huge deal. And we have a consortium of all of these institutions who will work together and share their best practices. But we did. There are other organizations who are not being funded by ASH, who wanted to be part of it. So they are also starting these fellowship slots at their organizations too. So this has been a really great program so far. The first class will be starting in July 2023, so that should be really interesting and valuable to our members.
ERIN LANDIS: Yeah, absolutely. That is an incredible way to engage your members. Well, I we need to wrap up here, so I really appreciate everyone's time. I'm so grateful that you chose to take part in this fireside chat with Society Street, and I look forward to our continued conversation with the roundtable and the open Q&A from our audience.
ERIN LANDIS: So I will see you in just a bit.
Segment:0 .
ERIN LANDIS: Hello, everyone and welcome to the Society Street fireside chat, "Early Career Members: Recruitment, Retention and Engagement." Thank you so much for joining us today. Just as a quick reminder, there will be an open Q&A session at the end of our discussion, but please feel free to add your questions or comments in the chat during the discussion because we do want this session to be interactive.
ERIN LANDIS: My name is Erin Landis, and I am today's moderator. I am the Managing Director for Origin Editorial, which is an editorial services and publishing consulting firm. Before coming to Origin in January of last year, I was the Vice President of Publications for the American Gastroenterological Association. Today, I'm joined by an esteemed panel of guests who can help us understand how associations can better serve their early career members.
ERIN LANDIS: So I'll just take a minute and introduce them to you now. So we have Celena NuQuay. She is the Vice President of Constituency Programs and Governance at the American Gastroenterological Association. Hi, Celena. We also have Josel Fritz. She is the Senior Manager of Career Development and Services at the American Society of Hematology.
ERIN LANDIS: Welcome, Josel. And we also have Rodneikka Scott, who is the Vice President of Member and Stakeholder Engagement at the National Society of Professional Engineers. Hi Rodneikka. So I'll spend just a few minutes setting the scene and then we'll jump into the discussion. Over the last several years, early career professionals in nearly all fields have been engaging with associations at decreasing rates.
ERIN LANDIS: Broadly speaking, membership in associations has been flat or declining, and the acquisition, retention and engagement of early career members is significantly lower than for previous generations of members. Research into this trend has shown that early career professionals are increasingly obtaining their educational and networking needs from popular channels that they already frequent.
ERIN LANDIS: For example, social media such as Twitter, or sometimes even TikTok or online platforms like YouTube, and often these sources of information are free or inexpensive, and this can be incredibly advantageous to early career professionals because sometimes joining associations can be cost prohibitive. And even when organizations can entice early career professionals to join, finding ways to engage them can be challenging.
ERIN LANDIS: These individuals often lack the same level of experience and knowledge that more established professionals have, and so they find it challenging to get involved or to hold leadership positions. These factors amount to early career professionals not seeing associations as providing additional or distinctive benefits. And in many cases they're just very busy. They have young families, they're at the beginning of their careers, and so they may not have the capacity or the time to join organizations and engage with them.
ERIN LANDIS: But associations -- for associations, early career professionals are the future of the organization. They bring a unique energy to the association, and they're also innovative. And often they are more open to bringing about much needed change. So it's critical then for associations to understand why early career professionals aren't joining or aren't staying members, and identify ways to turn that around.
ERIN LANDIS: Today's panelists are well equipped to talk about this problem and share solutions that they've put in place at their own organizations. So I'm really excited to hear their perspectives on this topic. So we'll go ahead and dive into the questions. So my first question for you is, I just kind of want to set the stage. Can you explain how your organization defines early career members?
ERIN LANDIS: So, Celena, I'll start with you.
CELENA NUQUAY: Sounds good.
CELENA NUQUAY: Thank you so much. I want to also state that I've had the pleasure of working with Erin at the American Gastroenterological Association, AGA, for many years. Just to set the tone, AGA is a 16,000 member association focused on digestive disease.
CELENA NUQUAY: Our members are physicians. They're in industry. They're, they're allied health professionals, nurse practitioners, et cetera. And in this important discussion about trainees and early career, with a focus on early career, I just want to start with the definition of trainees and then shift to early career. For our trainees, our trainees represent physicians who've completed medical school.
CELENA NUQUAY: They've completed three to four years of medical residency, and then they've entered into a GI fellowship which typically lasts three years. But there are times where there is an extended fellowship or fourth year. What we categorize as early career, it's interesting; the definition can differ depending on different departments within our organization, which is one of our discussions about trying to come up with a clear definition.
CELENA NUQUAY: But from a membership standpoint, an early career member is one that is up to three years out of fellowship. But for our award programs, our young investigators our NIH funded programs, it can range from five to seven years. And then we even have some that will classify early career up to ten years outside of fellowship. So that's how we handle it at AGA.
CELENA NUQUAY: And again, as I mentioned, I think there's some work that needs to be done on harmonizing the definition
ERIN LANDIS: Thank you, Celena.
ERIN LANDIS: That's interesting that there's, depending on department, the definition varies. I'm not sure I was aware of that when I was at AGA. Thank you. Rodneikka.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So thank you again for the opportunity to speak with the group. I want to set the stage and let you know that I'm recently new to the National Society of Professional Engineers. Prior to my experience here, I was with the Endocrine Society. For the purpose of this discussion, I'll be blending a little from the Endocrine Society as well as NSPE. In that space.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So first, the Endocrine Society. Our mission is really to serve endocrinologists, both physicians and scientists in the community to improve health overall.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So, our members were physicians, nurse practitioners, PAs and scientists in that spectrum. When we started to think about early careers, we're really looking at individuals who are three years post training. To become an endocrinologist, whether, through whichever path you choose, you would need to not only go through a bachelor's program as well as medical school, complete a residency, and then go into a fellowship.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So we're thinking post-fellowship in individuals in that one to three year range. Now it gets a little gray. Like Celena, when we look at different areas of the organization, we define early career a bit differently. So when we take a look at governance and opportunities to serve in our Early Career spot in board positions, that range goes up to 10 years. So what we do is we capture not only true early careers but individuals who are starting to get in that mid-career phase.
ERIN LANDIS: So, Rodneikka, did you say that there's a governance position for early career?
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: That's correct. Within our board of directors, we have one slot that is reserved for early careers. We noticed a few years ago that in order to get new life into the blood and create other opportunities, we needed to have representation, that pipeline of individuals.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: And we were actually able to use individuals who've participated in our leadership development programs as potential candidates for that board role.
ERIN LANDIS: That's a really interesting idea, and I think one that I would hope that more associations would consider. I think that perspective is so critical. I think sometimes there's reluctance to include that position on boards because there's the perception that they don't have enough knowledge or experience, but that, you know, they bring another perspective, sort of irrespective of that knowledge and experience that is so critical to hear.
ERIN LANDIS: Thank you. All right, Josel.
JOSEL FRITZ: I just want to say thank you. It's an honor to be part of this discussion alongside Celena and Rodneikka. Thank you, Erin, for the invitation and for putting this together. So the American Society of Hematology, or ASH, is a professional organization with more than 18,000 members from North America and all over the world. ASH is the world's largest professional society, serving both clinicians and scientists from all over the world who are working to conquer blood diseases.
JOSEL FRITZ: ASH's mission is to foster high quality, equitable care, transformative research and innovative education to improve the lives of patients with blood and bone marrow disorders. So to ASH, early career members of ASH include high school students, undergraduate students and medical students, residents, Fellows, graduate students, postdoctoral students, and junior faculty. So our team, my training team, develops training programs, educational products, awards and scholarships and activities to engage hematology trainees across the evolution of their hematology career pathway.
ERIN LANDIS: So it sounds like you have a broader definition of what an early career member is at ASH?
JOSEL FRITZ: Yes, we offer a lot of resources and we try to impact and engage different levels of the early trainee career.
ERIN LANDIS: So just so I'm clear, you don't segment out kind of like with Rodneikka and Celena's organizations, those that are several years post fellowship and classify them as early career members, is that correct?
JOSEL FRITZ: Yes, we do offer programs for junior faculty. So those who are just out of fellowship and have their new their positions. But we don't have a strict "years out of fellowship".
ERIN LANDIS: OK got it. Thank you. So moving on to our next question. Why do you think it's so important for organizations like yours to focus efforts on the early career individuals in your respective communities? So Rodneikka, I'm going to start with you for this one.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So thank you. You know, we all talk about early careers being the pipeline of our organizations. And many of our organizations have experienced over the last few years
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: a decrease in the number of early careers. For Endocrine Society, which I'm speaking of, we had a decrease before the pandemic and not necessarily individuals entering into the early career category, but individuals who were retaining their membership afterwards because it's such a tough transition period.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: The reason why we need to focus on that particular area beyond the pipeline is, again, people learn different, the experiences are different, and the pandemic changed that, especially for individuals who finished training in a very tough time where, for example, an endocrinologist would typically see patients in office and not be pulled into emergency rooms to deal with issues like covid, that which we have seen over the last few years.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So really being able to reach beyond just the education and think about the whole person, the whole scientist, and how can we support them through their career. As you mentioned earlier, there are so many other opportunities out there online where you can get education, where you can really get the tools that you need that are outside of our professional organizations.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: But what you don't get from those is that sense of professional community. How we've tackled this over the last four years has been: one, we taught early career members how to be members of our society, and that's not just through emails. We created what we call Endocrine Ambassadors, and that is an ambassador, one from the member perspective, as well as one from the staff perspective, that really reaches out to every single one of our members that are in that category and says, hey, this is something that you'd be interested in.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: We use ringless voicemails instead of just using emails to say, hey, you know, your dues renewals coming up, these are the reasons why you should attend the conference, and actually developed a relationship with individuals in this category. We've taken a strong step.
ERIN LANDIS: Oops Rodneikka, you went on mute.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: Thank you. We've taken a strong stance on advocacy and have gotten our early career members involved in a multitude of components there. And also increased, again, many of those professional development programs to reach them where they are and to guide them along the path of volunteerism, which we found to have a great impact of sustaining their membership and also growing their career.
ERIN LANDIS: That really resonates with me. I am on a co-chair of a committee for a professional organization right now, and I had the opportunity to join a board call and we were talking about creating possibly a pathway or a journey for early career members in this organization to learn how to be a member, just to your point, and how to get involved, because it's really unclear to those members how they can get involved.
ERIN LANDIS: So I think that's a really useful idea.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: It is. And so many times at this stage of their career, they pay and they may have a full year where they're getting emails and not really know what to do with it. So really being able to increase that value.
ERIN LANDIS: Right right. You have a nice sort of high touch approach. Yes so, Josel, from your perspective, why is it important for ASH to focus on these early career members?
JOSEL FRITZ: So the hematology profession is facing an ongoing crisis for quite some time now, where the number of trainees are dwindling and there are growing number of retirees. There's a shortage of hematologists specifically in classical hematology. Classical hematology encompasses a large number of diseases and conditions that are noncancerous, including hemophilia, sickle cell disease, thrombocytopenia. Malignant hematology includes diseases such as leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma.
JOSEL FRITZ: Many physicians are board certified in both hematology and oncology, but many of these physicians rarely treat patients with classical hematologic conditions and oftentimes have to call their classical hematology colleagues for advice. We have a shortage in all aspects of hematology, from clinical care to education to traditional research and hematology trainees face unique professional and personal challenges.
JOSEL FRITZ: There are very few trainees going into classical hematology in the first place because of negative perceptions, the lack of mentorship, the perception of low compensation compared to oncology, work life balance disparities, and too few hematology focused fellowship training programs. So I think education and training are one of the most powerful recruitment tools. And in ASH, we need to recruit trainees and spark their interest in the specialty.
JOSEL FRITZ: First, to build and preserve the hematology workforce. The more trainees we recruit, the more likely future generations will view hematology as a viable career. So ultimately, it's about patients and patient outcomes. And if we don't have enough hematologists in the future to treat blood diseases, then the patient population will suffer. And I believe that investing efforts to retain early career individuals in any society will improve career pathways of members and in turn will benefit the constituents they serve.
ERIN LANDIS: Right so it's really about nurturing that group so that you have adequate supply of those types of providers for the patient population. Thank you. So, Celena, I recall from my time at AGA that -- and perhaps this has changed -- and you can of course, correct me if I'm wrong, but having getting trainees to join AGA was not so challenging.
ERIN LANDIS: But then there would be some challenge around the early career segment of the membership, either not being able to retain them or what have you. So from your perspective, why is it so important for AGA to focus on early career members?
CELENA NUQUAY: You are still spot on with the challenges with the situation and like Rodneikka and Josel it is a matter of the workforce and it's a matter of the patient population. And we also in GI have the challenge of, there's an aging, aging physician population and they're retiring and with the really post pandemic, they're retiring not only because of age. They're retiring because the workforce in health care has changed so much with regulation and private equity and solo practitioners are almost non-existent.
CELENA NUQUAY: People are now employed, employed physicians and educational requirements.
CELENA NUQUAY: Re certifications are changing. And so there are a number of stressors on, on the physician population. And then when we look at the population, the patient population, we know there's a huge commitment at AGA with our equity project to eradicate disparities and to address, address equity. We're seeing quite a bit of progress and change in the demographics of the workforce.
CELENA NUQUAY: So when I say that, I say that not only are we looking at numerically the pipeline changing, we're looking at the need to focus on who is in the pipeline. For example, within, AGA just approved a week ago, a new comprehensive gender equity strategy to complement our equity strategy, because the recognition is right now among female gastroenterologists in medical school, it's almost 50/50 and that's a huge change for years at AGA the percentages were 20% female 80% male.
CELENA NUQUAY: Now among the trainee population is 36 to almost 40% female in our trainee population. So we're seeing that the needs and the demographics are changing. And so. So that's critical to us. To your specific point about membership, from a membership standpoint, we average we averaged around 85% to 88% retention at the trainee level.
CELENA NUQUAY: But just immediately after graduation or fellowship, it would drop to 60% to 65% We do estimate that people are probably coming back within some years, but it's hard to track that. And I think it goes to what I've heard my colleagues talk about is the lifestyle changes, the demands that are on them, and membership is not necessarily top of mind. And so I'll say some of our strategy at AGA focuses more on engagement and trying to, as we talk about, get them in the pipeline of engagement and leadership in AGA and membership is still critical, but it's a big focus on on, on engagement because I do think that's the sticky factor that keeps the younger members members in an organization.
ERIN LANDIS: Right I think that's interesting. Do you know or do you have data about how that membership drops off when they hit that early career stage? If there's disparity between males and females, do females drop off more acutely?
CELENA NUQUAY: Females are dropping off more. Females are dropping off more. And if you just think about the age they're coming out of fellowship, they are, they're in their mid thirties, many of them have waited on a family and they are saying I'm finished fellowship now it's time to start a family.
CELENA NUQUAY: I'm balancing a new practice, I've moved to a new location and membership is just not top of mind at that particular point. So some of the things we're doing is, is trying to do career development, training, mentorship, sponsorship with a very specific recognition of the changing demands that are on early career professionals.
ERIN LANDIS: I mean, just what you said reminds me of a conference I went to back in February. It it was for publishing and it was on the intersection of open access and diversity, equity and inclusion. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with the open access movement in scholarly publishing, but some of the research that someone presented showed that gender disparity is similar in publishing, where they start as when they're much younger.
ERIN LANDIS: The disparity women are publishing and reviewing at the same rates as men. But then as they enter that more early career phase, they start to drop off again. So there's clearly work to be done for that group in particular of early careers.
CELENA NUQUAY: Yes if I could just interject that just very specifically, what there's data showing that the pandemic caused that gap for women, early career women in publishing to even be greater because when they were home, they're juggling the family and they weren't writing. And so there was that gap that's also trying to be made up.
ERIN LANDIS: Exactly very, very important point. And yes, we absolutely saw that, which was interesting because we had higher rates of submissions than we ever did before. And yet there was that that gender disparity in representation. Josel, before I move on to the next question, did you have any responses or feedback based on what Celena or each of you said that you wanted to respond to before I move on?
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: I actually think that the experiences that Celena's members at AGA have are very similar to endocrinologists. The same here. We actually within our membership our active members. We are over 50% female at this point and again, really thriving, really engaging. Unlike some of the other groups in the publishing space, we did see more women having opportunities to publish in our particular space, but I would say that's the only difference that I see.
ERIN LANDIS: Great Thank you. So I think we've touched on this a little bit. Some of you have touched on this in some of what you've said already. But I'm curious to hear from your perspective, what is the value proposition of societies for early career members? You know, as I touched on in my opening remarks, and this is what I experienced, too, when I was at AGA, they would find what they needed.
ERIN LANDIS: In other places. And so they weren't really seeing joining an association as particularly valuable or beneficial or a good use of their time as maybe previous generations were. So what do you think today's value proposition is for early career members? And Josel, I'll start with you.
JOSEL FRITZ: Thanks, Erin. Some of the items that I'll be talking about, I think, Celena, you mentioned a lot of them as well. So we have some similarities. At ASH there is a wealth of resources and opportunities to become involved for our early career members. ASH provide support to help boost careers in hematology and there are a few items that are very important. So mentorship, as Celena mentioned, is an extremely valuable offering for early career members.
JOSEL FRITZ: Our ASH career development training programs, including we include small group mentorship, peer mentoring, one on one mentoring on career development issues and project related feedback. And the early career members have access to world renowned hematology leaders. So they build they build bonds and become lifelong friends and colleagues.
JOSEL FRITZ: So they always have someone to kind of go to if they have questions throughout their whole career. ASH also provides scholarships and awards at each stage of their training career. For example, we have hematology opportunities for the next generation, our research Scientist Award or our honors program, and it provides research funding for talented medical students and residents.
JOSEL FRITZ: So offering these awards, we have multiple awards, kind of keeps trainees coming back for more and they apply each stage of their trainee career. Also visibility and recognition through ASH's publications. They have opportunities to present at the annual meeting and showcase their research. Our trainee counsel, who represents our trainee members, they offer an online newsletter called Hematopoiesis, which is content created by trainees for trainees.
JOSEL FRITZ: So it's a good way to get involved and also get their -- and publicise their work. And another offering that is a value proposition is our free educational resources. During the early stages of the pandemic, we assessed trainees and program directors on how ASH can help them during COVID. And so we the results showed that trainees wanted free educational material.
JOSEL FRITZ: So we provided a hematology board review series. We kind of just quickly developed this program and within months a board series program, which is a 16 week free exam review series with lectures and weekly live study sessions going over board review questions with experts. It was highly attended and utilized all over the world. It was free. That was the main thing, where other board review programs were like $ 2,000 or $ 3,000 and ours is free.
JOSEL FRITZ: So we've gotten really good engagement there and we've continued the program ever since. That sounds
ERIN LANDIS: like a really incredible benefit. Thank you. Rodneikka, how about you? What do you think the value proposition is?
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So as similarly mentioned, mentorship is big. Mentorship is key And I've already told you about that concierge experience of walking people through membership. But we took a step back and we said, what does everyone really want? We surveyed them and it seemed like they didn't know how to get to that next path on their career, that next rung on their career. So we created a few pathways, pathways to getting published.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So not only having information on our website, but also having webinars and just quick talks and podcasts that talked about what the process is like to encourage individuals who may try to get published and experience failure because there is a lot of failure when trying to get published and getting your research out there.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: You're not going to get everything published in that space. Also, whether it's virtually or in person, creating spaces to network, and network without judgment. So many times when you come to the annual meetings, you're there with the rock stars in the industry, so you can't always let your hair down and release. And talk about the issues that are challenging you because it can have detrimental effects on your career.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So creating pods or groups where individuals who are like minded can, you know, express what's going on. Our online community, I know many people say that their online communities have been helpful, but we made a transition from one platform to DocMatter And this was a community where it shifted from what was the norm. We actually had cases and early careers as well as those who are more established in the industry, really working through and talking through cases which helped with the again career development, it helped with general understanding and it fit back into our mission.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: Beyond that, creating a program where we allowed early careers to participate in an early career review process for our journals so they can know actually what goes in to reviewing abstracts and articles that have been submitted. Beyond that, we don't just think that locally, thinking globally, because the early career audience on the global spectrum and the global field, they do have very different needs in that space.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: And if we're talking about the greater endocrinology community, we looked at the global leadership academy, which took early careers from across the world, brought them together and actually worked on the things like white papers and just really what's affecting them and what's challenging their career space. We've, again, like many of you have found that giving back is extremely important and looking at our underrepresented populations are extremely important.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: Over the course of the last two years in particular, we launched a clinical leadership in endocrinology program, which brings a selected group of individuals, again, early career together to talk about all the things that people usually just find out along the way or by accident. And we're trying to create a space where you don't have to find out by accident that you have a cohort that you're a part of.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: And we teach you about compensation, we teach you about insurance. We teach you about those little known paths to endocrinology in that space. Beyond that, we also took a shift away from the norm for the 100 year history, 100 year plus history of endocrinology. We actually never had a member on the cover of our journals. And we made a shift in the last two years to not just show, like our Nobel laureates there, but also to show emerging rock stars in that space.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: And we took a look at whether it was, you know, Women's History month. Do we have women who are really growing, who are really rock stars in both the scientific and medical space that we can truly feature? The other thing that I would add again would be that just to summarize would be that we looked for opportunities to take them from early to mid-career level.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: We look for opportunities to get them involved in leadership, whether it's through our special interest groups, which was an entry point for volunteer engagement and once they had that foundation, now when it takes, when it comes to committee leadership and committee involvement, we created a pipeline to those larger and greater leadership positions where people who were rock stars in industry now knew our early career folks names. So that was our path to creating a value proposition.
ERIN LANDIS: So much of what both of you have said resonates with me, both personally and with my experience at AGA. A common theme here is, is obviously mentorship. I think that in any field, no matter the discipline, mentorship is so important. And mentorship programs at professional organizations like yours can really facilitate those relationships.
ERIN LANDIS: I've had the opportunity to be a mentor in my own field, and I've really enjoyed that. And at the time, though, when I joined. When I became, when I got into the field of scholarly publishing, there weren't really mentorship programs. And to your point, Rodneikka, I found a lot of things out by accident and providing early career professionals with the resources they need. So they're not necessarily putting together a piece of a puzzle that they don't know the picture of is incredibly beneficial and an incredible value an association can provide.
ERIN LANDIS: So Celena, I'll turn it over to you. From your perspective, what is the value proposition for organizations, for early career members?
CELENA NUQUAY: Sure you know, it's interesting. The traditions of associations have has always been that networking is a key reason for people to join an association. Like minded people associating is the definition of associations. The reality, I think, is that networking still reigns supreme. The difference is with early career now is how one networks is different.
CELENA NUQUAY: What AGA has been focused on over the last year and a half is really stepping back with a future- focused vision of what's happening in the greater society.
CELENA NUQUAY: So we're looking at the society drivers with a focus of saying, how are our decisions now going to impact the successors that are following us? And that's something in my governance hat we're working with the board on. So the board is very focused on saying what is the future not only of GI, but the future of health care, the future of society? And how will that impact trainees and early careers that are coming behind us and how do we engage them now?
CELENA NUQUAY: So it's looking at things such as looking at the future of scholarly publishing, looking at the role of artificial intelligence, looking at the role of private equity, looking at physician burnout. And by looking at those types of topics, there's been more of an outreach to the early career professionals who don't see these things as very distant. They see them as right now.
CELENA NUQUAY: So for example, through one of our programs, which is the future leaders program, which is a dedicated leadership development mentorship pipeline program for early career professionals that we've had for quite a number of years. That program is designed to take a small cohort of emerging leaders and take them through a comprehensive 18 month training program where they have some of the top leaders in the field in mentoring relationships with them.
CELENA NUQUAY: They're working on strategic projects. And we had them this year say, OK, we need you to look at artificial intelligence. We need you to look at climate change. We need you to look at this and make recommendations to the board because you are the successors and you're going to experience that. And that was incredibly engaging. I know later you'll ask us about success.
CELENA NUQUAY: But I think with programs like that, with future leaders, for example, we average about 90 to 92% of the graduates of future leaders become committee members. And we're now starting to see who's likely going to emerge to the board in the next few years coming through that program. We have a similar program along with our partners at Endocrine, which is an NIH, R 25 grant that we call the forward program, fostering opportunities resulting in workforce diversity.
CELENA NUQUAY: And it's a program for underrepresented physicians and scientists that are early in their career. They're trainees. They too go through a two year, very comprehensive one on one mentoring program. They're taught grant writing and academic skills. They're taught leadership development. And we actively work to transition them into leadership.
CELENA NUQUAY: We actively work to make sure that they become grant grant funded and we actively work -- we do manuscript development with them to ensure that they become published scholars in the workforce. So I think so the networking when I talk about networking, I think it's through these mentorship opportunities is through these cohort type programs that allow them to really pair up in peer to peer networking, which is something that we're also seeing.
CELENA NUQUAY: And we're seeing that the world of networking, especially related to meetings, we're looking at the future of meetings. No longer are younger people necessarily going to sit-in a 90 minute didactic lecture. They're watching, they'll log in for on-demand part of that, but then show up for the meetup and the networking event. So they'll actually fly to the conference but not attend the lecture sessions, but will attend the networking.
CELENA NUQUAY: So we're experimenting with ways to provide a little bit more micro education. We have a podcast, small talk, big topics that is dedicated to early career. We have we have an app, a mobile app called Career Compass that is focused for trainees and early career and what we're it provides education, but right now what we're really focus on is building out the online mentoring section that we call Connections Corner within the app.
CELENA NUQUAY: So again, I think the greatest value is understanding what the future is going to look like for them and cultivating our programs to prepare them for that future while we learn it ourselves.
ERIN LANDIS: Right well, those are a lot of really robust programs that you have. I do want to ask a quick follow up question before we I move it move us into our last question. Do you feel or do you think that the pandemic has affected the value proposition of organizations or I mean, Josel, you touched a little bit on that, having to pivot quickly because of the pandemic. But have you seen anything as a result of the pandemic in changing the value proposition for early career members?
JOSEL FRITZ: So I think it's a lot easier for them to become involved because a lot of our Fellows and our medical students are really busy, and if we offer something virtual, they'll jump right on it because it's very accessible. And I think that yeah, and we do offer a lot of podcasts and recordings, so it's on their own time. It's very conducive to their learning style. So it's been a good shift for us.
ERIN LANDIS: Right? yeah, I've observed that as well, that accessibility has really changed how organizations think about things. Rodneikka, you have any comments on that?
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So just to add to that, I think that for us as professional associations, we have also learned to be more nimble. And instead of talking about the emerging generations in our respective fields of practice, as you know, it's a "us and them" mentality. Now we're starting to see each other as we are, you know, peers. And I am bridging that gap to bring the next generation along.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: I see many of our more established leaders are more focused and much more centered, especially with the workload shortages. Again, in endocrinology, if every endocrinologist treated an equal amount of patients in the US, they would have 17,000 patients. That's definitely not possible. So it's opened up opportunities not just for early careers, but also some of the, I would say adjacent spaces again like nurse practitioners.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: And it's really creating an environment that is more inclusive. And so I think the pandemic actually did help us in that space and help us being more open minded to other voices outside of our own. Right excellent point, Celena.
CELENA NUQUAY: No, I agree. The pandemic was exhausting from an association management standpoint. But it did it forced us to pivot. It forced us to be nimble. We created new programming. We had we created a new online newsletter called GI distance learning, because everyone was working from home. And it was, again, an opportunity to provide micro education to the Fellows.
CELENA NUQUAY: And so we created that for them. It's now morphed into something that we're calling the Fellows Feed, which is more of taking content from a variety of sources that is that's dedicated for trainees and for early career and, and feeding that to them on a weekly basis in small bites.
CELENA NUQUAY: So, so I do think, and interestingly enough, again, even though the virtual is something that's been very beneficial, we just saw it a week and a half ago at our annual conference. The level of energy to get back in person is huge. So we've begun to organize in our women's programming, Regional Women's workshops, and we're very focused on reaching trainees and early career women through those workshops.
CELENA NUQUAY: And, and again, the opportunity to meet in person, even though everyone says it's wonderful to have this accessibility once they get in the room, there's so much energy and excitement. So so I think the pandemic helped us as well in that respect. But I will add, I think a challenge to it is I think there's kind of a line that blurs early career members want value, but they don't care as much who they get it from.
CELENA NUQUAY: So traditionally there was the I'm a member of this association. And this is my home. Right now, I think it's more of this is my home for this and this is my home for that and this is my home for this. So I think that's the part we've got to figure out. We I think we get our feelings hurt when we see them with the other association. But I don't know if we know how to respond just yet.
ERIN LANDIS: Yeah, absolutely. And again, that resonates with me personally because I am a member of several different organizations. And I get I have a home for this and a home for that and home for that. So I completely agree with that. And I also agree too Celena that there is such energy with returning in person.
ERIN LANDIS: I really value the remote accessibility and I want that to continue, but I also value the in-person opportunity as well. So there has to be a happy balance there, I think. So we are going to need to wrap up our conversation here. And, of course, we'll continue it with the live Q&A and roundtable. But I'm actually going to go a little off script here from what I said was going to be our final question.
ERIN LANDIS: So don't be afraid. I'm going to ask this question. So you've all talked a lot about the importance of engagement, right? And that's kind of the key to retaining who you have, thinking about the programs that you offer that are around engagement, what would you say? You can certainly tell us what that program is, but what would you what would you say the factors are for that being a successful program?
ERIN LANDIS: If that question makes sense in terms of engagement, anybody can start. Who would like to start?
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: I can go. I can jump in.
CELENA NUQUAY: I think we've all talked about it is it's understanding that our trainees and early career members have very busy lives and they're juggling a lot. It's a changing dynamics in the workforce.
CELENA NUQUAY: So programs that fit that model. So we have what we call a young delegate program. And that young delegates is a micro volunteer program that's designed for trainees in early career. They don't have time to serve on a committee for three years, and it's competitive to get on the committees. But they want to volunteer and maybe they want to review an abstract or maybe they want to respond in some way to a committee's question about what's the perspective of trainees and early career.
CELENA NUQUAY: So with our young delegates program, they're able to sign up. Membership is required, but that's really the only restriction with it. Then they sign up and they say, I'm available to volunteer in a variety of ways. They indicate what they're interested in, but then we send them as opportunities arise. Here's an opportunity for you to volunteer.
CELENA NUQUAY: We let them know the time commitment and they have the opportunity to sign to sign up. And it may be one week, it may be one month, it may be two hours. But then one thing we're trying to do is make sure we're capturing that on their record, because as they do get engaged in these micro volunteer opportunities, it's getting their foot more and more in the organization and and it prepares them for serving on a committee or a more long term commitment.
CELENA NUQUAY: So I think with the young delegates and then as we're building out career compass, it's about building programming that addresses their needs in the way that they are living their life.
ERIN LANDIS: Right meeting them where they are. Right where they are.
ERIN LANDIS: Thank you. That's sort of the concept of micro volunteerism. Celena Thank you. Rodneikka.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So of course, we can measure engagement through our normal means, which is how many people attended a webinar or how many people attended the annual conference and so forth. But we've taken a step back and not just look at the numbers and what those numbers can tell you. Of course, we need a critical mass in that space, but we've also started doing pre, during, and post evaluations of many of our products.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So one so we can get an understanding of before we even launch a program, the people who are signing up for it, what is their expectation? What do they think they're going to get from this program? Did we meet their expectation on the back end? Yes, we do all of that post evaluation. But during, did something shift in them to get them to think about another topic, which not only could develop our future pools of topics, but really to see how they're thinking, how they're evolving, and also to be able to show them where they started versus where they've come through our programs.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So really not only evaluating but actually showing the progress in that space. And also using that information to provide recommendations for other resources. Like many of you, in endocrinology, we are typically the third organization on their list of organizations to join because they have specialized in whether it's something cancer related or something that's more niche in the endocrinology space.
RODNEIKKA SCOTT: So again, providing that whole pathway from early career to mid and more advanced career stages is what we have focused on for engagement.
ERIN LANDIS: I like that idea of showing them their progress or showing them their journey of engagement. It's really compelling, I think, as a means to showing the value of being a member. Right Josel, you've got the final word. How about you? What do you think has made successful engagement programming?
JOSEL FRITZ: So I quickly, quickly want to just mention our newest program, the hematology focused fellowship training program, or HFFTP. It's newly established and it provides more training opportunities for hematology by creating new fellowship slots at training programs focused specifically on hematology.
JOSEL FRITZ: So a few years ago, we conducted a workforce study to assess the current and future state of Hematology as a profession and with the goal of preserving and furthering the field. Based on the data and the results from the workforce study the ASH leadership approved $19 million to support an HFFTP program to fund 10 new classical hematology focused fellowship slots for five cohorts, with the goal of graduating 50 academic hematologists in 2030.
JOSEL FRITZ: So that was a huge deal. And we have a consortium of all of these institutions who will work together and share their best practices. But we did. There are other organizations who are not being funded by ASH, who wanted to be part of it. So they are also starting these fellowship slots at their organizations too. So this has been a really great program so far. The first class will be starting in July 2023, so that should be really interesting and valuable to our members.
ERIN LANDIS: Yeah, absolutely. That is an incredible way to engage your members. Well, I we need to wrap up here, so I really appreciate everyone's time. I'm so grateful that you chose to take part in this fireside chat with Society Street, and I look forward to our continued conversation with the roundtable and the open Q&A from our audience.
ERIN LANDIS: So I will see you in just a bit.
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