Empowering incoming fellows: a structured workshop to enhance teaching and professional skills

Transitioning into a graduate medical education (GME) fellowship presents challenges, including increased responsibilities and expectations. Fellows must supervise and teach trainees while navigating early career development. Many enter a fellowship with limited educational training. There is also a lack of specialty-specific resources and infrastructure to adequately prepare incoming fellows in these key educational areas. To support this transition, we developed a workshop focused on supervisory skills, on-shift teaching, and career development. The goal was to build fellows' confidence and competence in educational roles while consolidating GME resources.

A 4-hour workshop was delivered in Summer 2025 at a large academic medical center and offered to all incoming fellows with participation was limited to 30 attendees. Invitations were distributed in Spring 2025. The curriculum covered goal setting, supervision, feedback, work-life balance, scholarly work, and help seeking. Participants completed pre and post workshop surveys assessing confidence (5 point Likert scale) and a 10 item knowledge assessment. Paired t tests compared pre and post intervention scores.

Among 28 fellows from 13 specialties who attended, 22 completed both pre and post intervention surveys (79% response rate). Knowledge scores improved from 9.1 to 9.6 (p < 0.01). Significant increases in confidence were observed across several domains, including goal setting, feedback, supervision, and scholarly activity (p < 0.001). Eighty-six percent found the workshop useful and engaging.

This multispecialty workshop was feasible to implement and led to meaningful gains in fellows' teaching related knowledge and confidence. As a Kirkpatrick Level 2 evaluation, the findings demonstrate short term improvements but do not assess behavioral change in clinical settings. These results support incorporating structured "fellows as teachers" programming early in fellowship training, with plans to expand faculty involvement across additional specialties.