Updates from the Professional Development & Mentoring SIG

Updates from the Professional Development & Mentoring SIG

By Hannah Ades, BA & Andres De Los Reyes, PhD
Co-Chairs, PDM SIG

In 2016, the Future Directions Forum (the Forum) was established as an annual meeting to offer professional development training to the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology’s (SCCAP) student and early career members. The Forum’s programming is grounded in a concept that we call Casual Mentoring, a process that involves advising mentees at a critical moment in their lives and careers (Uddin & De Los Reyes, 2021). Casual mentors serve as an “outside source” of advice, one that stands apart from a mentee’s nucleus of mentorship, and someone who has no formal interest or stake (i.e., as a mentor of record) in whether the mentee takes or leaves the advice being given to them. As a casual mentoring platform, the Forum provides attendees with opportunities to receive mentoring across several forms of programming including workshops, consultations, and innovative presentation formats designed to provide attendees with opportunities to develop skills relevant to networking and science communication.

The Forum has been held each year since 2017. Across 8 years of Forum meetings, we have served over 1,200 attendees, delivered 28 keynote addresses based on Future Directions articles, have had 75 colleagues serve as mentors tasked with delivering our professional development programming, and hosted over 450 presentations in both poster and oral presentation formats. The Forum’s early career award (Future Directions Launch Award) has been awarded to 24 attendees who submitted their work for presentation at the Forum. In the month leading up to the award ceremony, recipients receive one on-one consultation with the Program Chair, meant to facilitate their preparing an acceptance presentation. These presentations allow recipients to receive feedback and practice delivering a condensed version of what will eventually become their first academic job talk, examples of which can be found on the Forum’s YouTube channel.

In 2024, we completed the 8th Forum at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Along these lines, SCCAP produced a report that provides an overview of programming for the 2024 Forum, and evaluative data on how attendees experienced this year’s Forum. This report can be found here: https://bit.ly/JCCAPFORUM2024REPORT. The end of this report includes an extensive set of appendices that report data to support statements made in the report. Unfortunately, due to a combination of logistics and funding issues, we have decided to put the Forum on hiatus for 2025.