A Prospective Look at Career Aspirations Among Pediatric Emergency Medicine Trainees

Before delivering a contract negotiation workshop to pediatric emergency medicine fellows in training, we wanted to understand the group's career aspirations. We hypothesized that fellows would be interested in nonclinical skill building in addition to the clinical training.

A 9-question survey was anonymously administered to fellows registered for the national conference using SurveyMonkey before the conference date. Six questions were quantitative, 2 were qualitative and open ended, and 1 required ranking of elements.

Seventy-seven (47%) of the conference attendees responded to the survey, and approximately 80 (48%) attended the workshop session.Of the 77 fellows responding when asked about desired percentage of time per week devoted to the 4 categories of clinical, research, education, and administrative work within a 40-hour week, 76 (99%) chose the clinical category with an average of 58% of total hours devoted, 71 (92%) chose education with an average of 14% of total hours, 69 (90%) chose administration with an average of 8% of total hours, and 62 (81%) chose research with an average of 11% of total hours.Seventy attendees provided 1 sentence with the description of their ideal job. Thematic analysis of these responses revealed the following 5 main themes: academic potential, clinical environment, remuneration, job location, and work-life balance.

Diversification in pediatric emergency medicine training is becoming a growing area of importance. Our study highlights a discrepancy in the expected time dedicated for nonclinical activities from those seen in previous workforce studies.