Reinventing postgraduate training in the plant sciences: T‐training defined through modularity, customization, and distributed mentorship

Abstract The Plant Science Research Network (PSRN) comprises scientific societies and organizations with a mission to build and communicate a consensus vision of the future of plant science research, education, and training. This report enumerates a set of far‐reaching recommendations for postgraduate training that emerged from workshops held in October 2016 and September 2017. These recommendations broaden and deepen the T‐training concept presented in the Decadal Vision for Plant Science, which emphasizes experiential learning beyond the traditional disciplinary focus. Both workshops used the scenarios developed in Imagining Science in 2035 as a mechanism to encourage out‐of‐the‐box thinking, an approach that led to the innovative recommendations and solutions described here. At the heart of our recommendations is the empowerment of trainees, who should be enabled to customize and take ownership of their training experiences. This fundamental concept is embodied in five principles: (a) Trainees should be provided guidance and resources needed to define and pursue career objectives within and beyond academia, conferring to them greater independence and responsibility in shaping their own future. (b) Learning should be flexible, adaptable, and distributed. Training should combine traditional and modular coursework to encompass both technical and professional skills. Guidance from diverse mentoring teams will support and tailor training toward diverse, personalized career paths. (c) Scientific research experiences should be broad and question‐driven, whether motivated by basic discovery or seeking solutions to societal challenges. Trainees should continue to gain mastery of one or a few core scientific disciplines and their key tools and approaches. (d) Trainees should be skilled in science communication and incentivized to engage with and learn from the broader public community, helping to maintain an active dialogue among public, private, and academic sectors. (e) Training programs should foster and facilitate the inclusion of individuals with a diverse range of life experiences and should prioritize trainee well‐being. The report recommendations call for a profound cultural shift, one that embraces and extends educational delivery trends toward self‐learning and distance learning, considers trainee well‐being as an essential requirement for success, and acknowledges the importance of effective two‐way communication with the public. This shift is intended to broaden participation in the plant science workforce, both in terms of diversity and numbers, while maintaining excellence in core scientific training. Cultural change takes time, but among academic institutions the need for significant change and innovation in postgraduate training is increasingly pressing. As such, the immediate intent is for these recommendations to catalyze pilot programs and also build on emergent prototypes that exist globally while creating momentum for larger scale changes over longer time periods.

delivery trends toward self-learning and distance learning, considers trainee well-being as an essential requirement for success, and acknowledges the importance of effective two-way communication with the public. This shift is intended to broaden participation in the plant science workforce, both in terms of diversity and numbers, while maintaining excellence in core scientific training. Cultural change takes time, but among academic institutions the need for significant change and innovation in postgraduate training is increasingly pressing. As such, the immediate intent is for these recommendations to catalyze pilot programs and also build on emergent prototypes that exist globally while creating momentum for larger scale changes over longer time periods. as a mechanism to encourage out-of-the-box thinking, an approach that led to the innovative recommendations and solutions described.

| Core principles
At the heart of our recommendations is the empowerment of trainees, who should be enabled to customize and take ownership of their training experiences ( Figure 2). This fundamental concept is embodied in five principles: 1. Trainees should be provided guidance and resources needed to define and pursue career objectives within and beyond academia, conferring to them greater independence and responsibility in shaping their own future.
2. Learning should be flexible, adaptable, and distributed. Training should combine traditional and modular coursework to encompass both technical and professional skills. Guidance from diverse mentoring teams will support and tailor training toward diverse, personalized career paths.
3. Scientific research experiences should be broad and question-driven, whether motivated by basic discovery or seeking solutions to societal challenges. Trainees should continue to gain mastery of one or a few core scientific disciplines and their key tools and approaches.
4. Trainees should be skilled in science communication and incentivized to engage with and learn from the broader public community, helping to maintain an active dialogue among public, private, and academic sectors.

| Specific recommendations
Our recommendations are scalable and can be adapted to various training environments; they also learn from and may be applied to other disciplines ( Figure 3).

Development of expertise in area of specialization
Transferable Skills e.g., leadership, entrepreneurship, communication

Disciplinary Training
F I G U R E 1 T-training approach for diverse careers. The T-shaped individual develops professional skills and takes part in deep disciplinary training. Skills may vary among disciplines but include transferable as well as technical skillsets. Disciplinary training may be acquired through specific research experiences or degree programs. Modularity, customization, and distributed mentorship further support T-training. Figure adapted from the Decadal Vision report (Unleashing a Decade of Innovation in Plant Science: A Vision for [2015][2016][2017][2018][2019][2020][2021][2022][2023][2024][2025]2013) 1. Increase the number of competitive grants available to trainees.
Emphasize direct funding of trainees including "gap year" students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and those engaging in continuing education. As the possessors of their own funding, trainees will experience greater ownership of their path, increased choice and mobility, and heightened accountability for their own progress.

Rethink mentoring to emphasize individualized development.
Encourage the formation of distributed mentoring teams that assemble advisers from job sectors that reflect and support a trainee's personalized aspirations and areas of focus. Individual development plans are recommended to formalize expectations, encourage introspection, foster accountability, and monitor goalsetting and achievements.
3. Create a validated system of customizable, modular experiences.
Develop a modular approach to supplement institutional offerings, comprising e-learning, short courses, workshops, and internships, thus creating a curriculum that spans institutions, learning methods, technical and professional skills, and topic areas beyond the plant sciences. In parallel, implement a credentialing system that documents and validates learning experiences and acquired skills in a widely accepted format. 4. Establish institutional support for and facilitation of life-work transitions. Promote opportunities for career flexibility, allowing and encouraging trainees to transition more smoothly from the traditional academic pipeline, so that they may accommodate diverse personal, community, and financial circumstances, and facilitate training throughout the duration of scientific careers. 5. Develop policies to promote individual well-being. Increase diversity and inclusion through policies that support work-life balance, mental health, wellness, and family leave.
6. Provide opportunities and practical training to develop communication skills and foster a research environment that promotes two-way public engagement.

| Intended outcomes
These recommendations call for a profound cultural shift-one that embraces and extends educational delivery trends toward self-learning and distance learning, considers trainee well-being as an essential requirement for success, and acknowledges the importance of effective two-way communication with the public. This shift is intended to broaden participation in the plant science workforce, both in terms of diversity and numbers, while maintaining excellence in core scientific training. Cultural change takes time, but among academic institutions the need for significant change and innovation in postgraduate training is increasingly pressing. As such, the immediate intent is for these recommendations to catalyze pilot programs and A Vision for [2015][2016][2017][2018][2019][2020][2021][2022][2023][2024][2025]2013)). Among the five major goals described in the Decadal Vision is "Reimagining Graduate Training," which outlines a "T-training" model ( Figure 1) that retains deep disciplinary training as a major component (the vertical part of the "T") while incorporating a broader palette of professional skills (the horizontal top of the "T"). Our concept of T-training for the sciences is analogous to calls to train "T-shaped professionals" that were developed over the past few decades (Donofrio, Spohrer, & Zadeh, 2009).
The T-training concept is embodied in two programs launched in 2014, the year after the Decadal Vision was published: the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Research Traineeship (NRT) program, which supports transformative graduate training models that serve a range of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers, and the NIH Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training (BEST) program, which supports innovative approaches to prepare postgraduates for a range of career options (White, 2018;Meyers et al., 2016). Given the resonance of these promising pilot programs, the PSRN sought ways to bring T-training into the mainstream, using plant science as a focus for postgraduate program conception, but with the expectation that any novel approaches would both learn from and contribute to a range of disciplines.
The PSRN's strategy was to assemble diverse participants for two successive but independent workshops, in both cases creating an environment that stretched minds and encouraged imaginative rather than incremental thinking. The PSRN first constructed a set of four future scenarios that lay out a spectrum of global contexts in which plant science research and training might be playing out 20 years hence. The scenarios were described in the report Imagining Science in 2035: Strategies for Maximizing the Value and Impact of Plant Science, and Beyond (Science in 2035), and envision and explore a range of possibilities for the types of science that will be emphasized and the manner in which that science will be resourced (Plant Science Research Network, 2016). In the two workshops, participants asked how T-training could be implemented in each Science in 2035 scenario before homing in on specific strategies that would be most effective across all four highly divergent scenarios. Participants in the first workshop were predominantly industry scientists, academic faculty, and senior university administrators, whereas the second workshop was restricted to early career trainees (see Appendices S1 and S2). Despite the very different cohorts, their recommendations overlapped extensively and have been merged in the current report.

| Recommendations
In this section we outline six focus areas that will empower trainees to achieve outcomes that align closely with their personal and professional goals (Figure 4). In doing so, we challenged two established perspectives on training, recognizing the simple fact that only a minority of doctoral trainees desire or obtain careers as academic faculty. The first paradigm we challenge is that degree attainment marks the acquisition of a suitable set of competencies (Commission on Creating the Next in Education, 2018; White, 2018;Lohr, 2018).
Instead, we believe that success is achieved when the acquired competencies match both the trainee's need to prepare for their preferred career trajectory and the employer's expectations with respect to that individual's competencies and potential. Second, we challenge the pervasive use of "pipeline" terminology, with its impermeable, linear connotation and its susceptibility to imagery of blockages and leaks. Instead, we contextualize training as a network of paths, which may be combined and sequenced throughout one's training and subsequent career to promote preparation for a variety of professional destinations ( Figure 5). The specific recommendations for postgraduate training that resulted from the PSRN workshops are described below (Figure 3).

Institutional Support
Practical Training

Modular Learning
Career Flexibility F I G U R E 4 Place the trainee and their needs at the center. Individual development plans (IDPs), which enable mentors and mentees to personalize training, should be used to achieve personal and professional objectives. The trainee-centric approach comprises six elements: direct funding of trainees; a flexible, multi-mentor model; modular training that build skill sets outside of degree programs; support for flexible career on-ramps and off-ramps; a focus on trainee well-being; and opportunities for practical training (e.g. science communication, research internships, or experiences in other sectors)

| Recommendation 1: Increase the number of competitive grants available to trainees
We recommend increasing direct funding, not only for doctoral students and postdocs, but also for nontraditional students, such as those in gap years and those seeking training to enable workforce re-entry or career switches. Therefore, although funding would include traditional support, such as NSF or USDA Graduate Research and Postdoctoral Fellowships or NIH National Research Service Awards (NRSAs), we recommend creating new types of short-and medium-term fellowships for specific purposes. The benefits of funding trainees directly include

To careers in science education
To careers in science outreach E n t e r U n i v e r s i t y

P a t h w a y t o o t h e r c a r e e r s
Invited conference presentation G r a n t w r i t i n g c o u r s e T r a i n a n i n t e r n trainees with open research slots, and it will impact the manner in which laboratories are populated. We recommend adequate additional funding that would be awarded directly to trainees, while acknowledging that continued awarding of research grants to laboratories will be required to maintain infrastructure, technical support, and materials.
A second challenge is that trainees will generally benefit from or require sustained attention to ensure that they effectively design and manage their professional development and technical training.
Recommendation 2 addresses the need to couple program and mentor accountability with training to ensure that these expanded opportunities fully benefit the trainee.
The need to support lifelong training reflects the fact that career adaptability and mobility can be critical assets, but scientists may be unsure how to learn a new technology or discipline, transition between the public and private sectors, or reenter the workforce after a hiatus. We therefore recommend creating funding programs for professionals and faculty at all types of higher-learning institutions, as well as for individuals outside academic settings who otherwise may have no recourse to funding to support their continued education and professional development. Mentoring teams, which could advise both thesis students and nontraditional learners, might be drawn from both active and retired scientists from all sectors of the workforce, including academia, industry, nongovernmental organizations, or public service (Schmidt, 2006). Even if a mentoring team were strictly academic, it should be the rule rather than the exception to include faculty from different fields, as well as from other institutions. New models for committee management should be explored, such as a cochair structure that splits primary responsibility between research advising and career counseling. Those mentors whose role emphasizes career counseling should be offered specialized training so that they can provide effective guidance on transferable skill development and career options, and they should be recognized and rewarded for their contributions in this regard.

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Access to mentors is envisioned to occur via a network or demonstrate the potential of this approach. Although management of "alternative credentials" is still in its infancy, it is clearly on the radar of higher education (Buban, 2017).
We recommend that access to, and credentialing of, modular training for plant science be managed jointly. Access could be optimized by establishing a "one-stop" repository for accredited learning opportunities, with a suitable organizational framework for searches.
At present, there is no widely accepted gateway, leaving trainees to rely on career offices, mentors, word of mouth, and web searches.
One possibility for content management would be to develop a consortium of professional societies, content providers, and academic representatives. This is not a trivial exercise, but shifting toward a common platform that reflects buy-in from PSRN members, professional societies, universities, and industry would help to standardize and organize resources and would expose students more broadly to plant science and the range of career trajectories available to them (see Pilot 8 in Appendix S3).

| Recommendation 4: Establish institutional support and acceptance for work-life transitions
Currently, leaving for employment without completing a degree tends to be regarded as making the best of a failure; our recommendation is to regard the exit as a positive, strategic choice, so long as it is deliberate and has been planned for. We recommend a wider acceptance of, and preparation for, career transitions that do not coincide with completion of a degree and may not even envision a degree from the beginning. Such cafeteria-style curricula are currently under consideration within academia (Commission on Creating the Next in Education, 2018). Also, the credentialing system outlined above could be leveraged to validate an individual's competencies and skills beyond or outside of an academic curriculum.
Degree-independent training would provide support for work-life transitions that currently might derail a career. Economic, family, or other considerations might call for one or multiple transitions that could be buffered by retraining that had the benefit of a visible structure of learning modules, mentoring, and possible financial aid.
It is additionally likely that this type of framework would assist in broadening participation among groups currently underrepresented in science, who disproportionately face economic or institutional barriers.
The specter of economic barriers is also raised by the 2018

Science & Engineering Indicators published by the National Science
Board (National Science Board, 2018). As one example, the time to Ph.D. degree is 7.3 years in agricultural fields overall, but 8.7 and 8.5 years for Hispanic and African American students, respectively. Graduate student stipends are scarcely sustainable for many trainees, especially those with family responsibilities or undergraduate student loan debt. These facts underscore that alternatives to formal degree paths are urgently required.

| Recommendation 5: Develop policies to promote individual well-being
It is well documented that diverse teams are more effective and make better decisions when the participation of all team members is encouraged and equally valued. Moreover, there is a widely held imperative to work actively toward enabling a STEM workforce that mirrors the demographics of the broader population. Although the present report does not make specific recommendations as to how to broaden participation in the plant sciences, we believe that several of the recommendations will help lower barriers to attracting and retaining diverse populations. These include IDPs and mentoring, HENKHAUS ET AL.
| 7 which set out goals that are attainable and with purpose, along with funding that supports a variety of career pathways (Roach & Sauermann, 2017 While scientific misconduct is more frequently covered, the gray areas prevalent in collaborative work, including unconscious bias, are ripe for exploration and will enable researchers to handle issues related to credit, responsibility, and scientific disagreements with more confidence. Collaborations increasingly involve biologists of many stripes, as well as data scientists or engineers, and the capacity to communicate effectively across these boundaries is critical but often does not come naturally (Friesner et al., 2017;Plant Science Research Network, 2017). Furthermore, trainees equipped with such skills will tend to be more effective in team-oriented workplaces, particularly in the private sector.

| How PSRN recommendations might impact post-Ph.D. training and trajectories
Most of the recommendations above apply equally to graduate students and postdoctoral scientists, all of whom would benefit from garnering independent funding, use of IDPs, access to modular training, and improved communication skills. The question that is not addressed, however, is the proper role of postdoctoral training over the coming decades. To wit, none of the four scenarios that make up Imagining Science in 2035 played out in our workshops featured postdoctoral training; in other words, the hypothetical trainee, Dakota, did not seek or require postdoctoral training to achieve career success.
At present, postdoctoral training is commonly sought by life sciences Ph.D. holders to gain specialized skills or to work with a specific scientist. Such training can be invaluable and is generally considered to be a prerequisite for both industry research team leader and faculty positions in the life sciences, although such a requirement varies across fields ('Has the Use of Postdocs Changed? ', 1998). A significant number of today's trainees report, however, that they entered postdoctoral study primarily as a cultural expectation or because they were unable to secure other employment (National Science Foundation, 2015). Not infrequently, these experiences turn into "permadocs," that is, lengthy appointments with diminishing chances of career advancement into independent positions that are buffeted by adverse impacts on family life, ranging from inconvenience to extreme stress (Academics anonymous Universities, 2016;Beryl Lieff Benderly, 2015;Hendrix, 2017;Powell, 2015).
Dismay with such outcomes could be contributing to the decline in numbers of biology postdocs, which has been partly balanced by an increase in "nonfaculty researchers" as discussed below (Arbeit & Kang, 2017). Postdoc distress may also contribute to poor perceptions of career opportunities among more junior researchers, who instead opt for seemingly less arduous or more lucrative trajectories.
As the recommendations described above take hold, however, it is reasonable to expect that an increasing proportion of postgraduate trainees will reinforce this trend by identifying their preferred career trajectories much earlier and receiving the training, experiences, and mentoring they need to achieve their objectives.

| Pathway to implementation
The PSRN training recommendations call for a cultural shift over a 20-year time frame toward empowering trainees to develop and complete customized training pathways (Figures 4 and 5). Recognizing this, the PSRN envisions two main implementation phases.

| Phase 1: Developing pilot programs
Pilot program concepts have been developed both during the writing of this report and as a component of the September 2017 PSRN workshop. In the latter case, the major contributors are credited.
The complete programs are fully described in Appendix S3 and summarized here. These ideas are intended either for implementation or to stimulate the creation of additional pilot concepts.

| Pilot 1: Unconventional training through direct funding
Direct funding is critical to encourage nontraditional entry into science training pathways. This pilot would make awards to support career-switching, workforce re-entry, retraining, or nondegree training to fill out a resumé. Existing laboratories accommodating such trainees would also help to fulfill the broader impacts aspect of NSFsupported research.

| Evaluation
Short-term pilot programs suffer from small datasets and a lack of longitudinal information. Simple evaluation mechanisms are appropriate in such cases that match specific inputs (activities) to desired outputs/goals within a framework of the desired long-term objective.
Guidelines are available to select and employ evaluation protocols (Torchim et al., 2012). Where appropriate, pilot program outcomes should also be assessed from the perspective of employers, whether academic or otherwise. pre-and postdoctoral fellowships require "productive and interactive mentoring" and "appropriate and applicable training activities." Institutions and trainers will respond as such criteria are worked into peer review of their applications.

| CLOSING REMARKS
Academia is being challenged to change to keep pace with national needs that include preparing a workforce made up of individuals who are adaptable, quick learners, and adept at communicating across boundaries. Digital fluency is an absolute requirement: five of the largest six U.S. companies are in the technology space, with traditional manufacturing and services lagging behind (Kiesnoski, 2017).
At the same time, however, our universities will be drawing their clients from a well of increasing socioeconomic diversity, suggesting that the need to balance family and career obligations will expand (The Changing Face of U.S. Higher Education, 2016).
The personalization and modularization of training articulated in our recommendations resonate with everyday experiences driven by social media, relentless improvements in data analysis and targeting, the needs of the private sector, and the ability to customize most of the interactive world around us. Whether such a world is desirable or not is largely beside the point; science will either learn to function within it, or it will lose its societal support and find itself adrift. This is an end that will serve no one and militates for bold actions that the plant science community is poised to lead.

ACKNOWLEDG MENTS
The