FEMAC - Career Development Programme for Female Academics

FEMAC2 - the three-semester career development program for female postdocs and habilitation candidates was the follow up program of FEMAC (Project Number EI-VRG14-021) and thus the second career development program for female postdocs at the University of Vienna held in English.

The program aimed to offer a space for female postdocs to reconsider their current profile, academic standing, and their future career options. The program was built on interdisciplinary group coaching and the transfer of strategic and structural knowledge in specific soft skill workshops. While coaches supervised the participants throughout the whole program and provided their professional expertise on the Austrian and international landscape of higher education, the international trainers focused on personal skills and competencies an academic career demands. Additionally, the participants could exercise the option of individual coaching to meet the specific needs of individual career paths.

FEMAC2 contributed to establishing equal opportunities for female researchers at the University of Vienna in order to increase the number of female academics in leadership positions. The results of internal evaluations of the program have shown that participants could benefit especially from the mixture of different group compositions, the supportive role of the peers and the reflection of their performance with professional coaches and trainers.