For Faculty and Staff
An Overview of this Platform
Career Navigator
Career Navigator, originally launched in fall 2018, connects students across all HMS master's and GSAS HILS PhD programs to relevant professional development tools and career services. This platform is maintained by the Career Navigator team in the Office for Graduate Education at HMS.
This page (for Faculty and Staff) is organized to help you better capitalize on the Career Navigator as you mentor and advise your students.
This website is publicly accessible, though some integrations (see below) have access restrictions (e.g. HarvardKey login requirements).
Much of the content on the site is organized around a resource taxonomy developed uniquely for this platform. This resource framework has been described in a bioRxiv preprint (2024).
Career Navigator Integrations
Career Planner
Career Planner is the events management tool for trainings, networking sessions and recruitment activities (including career fairs) -- of which are generally accessible to faculty and staff who work with these students.
Many of the posted events are hosted by the Career Navigator team, sometimes through collaborations. Other events are submitted from within or outside the university and approved for posting.
N.B. HMS master's and GSAS HILS PhD students also have access to events (and recordings) through our subscriptions to Beyond Graduate School (for master's students), Beyond the Professoriate (for doctoral students) and Interstride (for international students) -- though faculty/staff access to these platforms is not available.
Faculty and staff can login using any email address to sign in:
- as participant, to manage their own registrations for events
- as organizer, to view sign ups for events they may be organizing (with event-specific permission required)
Career Tracker
Career Tracker is the platform students use to track engagement with professional development activities, including their use of asynchronous resources and events. These activities can be those developed and delivered by the Career Navigator team; students can also add and track their engagement with activities from other providers.
Students use the platform to track their engagement across pillars of the Navigator's taxonomy. Students can also complete self-assessments which provide recommendations on new activities. N.B. Program managers who work with relevant students can be granted assess to sign in as students; however, while students see custom content based on their user profiles, staff see all activities in the system upon login.
This platform is also a tool to support Individual Development Plans (IDPs), where faculty and staff can sign in to
- Count student engagement/completion of IDPs in your respective programs
- View completed student IDPs and accompanying system recommendations (when granted permission by the students)
Career Launchpad
Career Launchpad is the platform where students sign up for counseling appointments and search for internships and jobs. They also use this platform to post notification of and get approval for experiential learning (including internships).
Staff will use Career Launchpad to approve student experiential learning (including internships).
*Career Launchpad uses HarvardKey sign in:
- Select faculty & staff (individual permission needed) can log in as students
- Some members of the community may also log in as faculty
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs): Faculty and Staff often ask...
The Office for Graduate Education (OGE) Student Development Team, AKA the Career Navigator Team, provides professional development and career services tools for HMS master’s and GSAS HILS PhD students.
The Career Navigator is a centralized professional development portal for bioscientists, primarily serving HMS master’s and GSAS HILS PhD students. Many of the tools offered on the Navigator may be also useful to biomedical and bioscience trainees beyond this population.
It consists of one centralized website, the Career Navigator, which contains links to related hubs (such as Career Planner, Career Tracker, Career Launchpad, and Career Data Diver) for specific services. All of these hubs are part of the Career Navigator Network, creating a comprehensive professional development and career services experience - all accessible from the same landing site.
The Navigator is updated multiple times per week with job/postdoc postings, events (including Navigator workshops and submitted events), resources, announcements, and more.
Career Navigator offers career readiness programming around topics including, but not limited to:
- Career Fair Prep
- Finding and Evaluating Job Postings
- Resume and Cover Letter Workshopping
- Job Searches
- Navigating International Job Markets
- Navigating applications to other academic programs
- Internships
- Interviewing
- Salaries & Negotiations
- Networking & LinkedIn
Students, faculty, and staff can view all upcoming events on our Events calendar, Career Planner. There, you can also sign up for our weekly digest emails to always stay up to date on upcoming events (via the Subscribe for Customizable Updates button under the Upcoming Events header).
Starting in Fall 2026, students can also receive custom reminders about events through Career Tracker, where they can also log and track their engagement.
We encourage faculty and staff to distribute relevant events to their students and encourage them to attend!
There are four categories of events in terms of follow-up access.
- Submitted events. We have a large volume of events that come in from other Harvard schools and offices, or from outside Harvard. Submitted events are identifiable by their iconography, a legend of which can be found on our Events page under Event Host Legend. The Navigator Team does not control these, and access to any available recordings or resources would be at the sole discretion of the host, whose details can be found in the individual event descriptions.
- Career Fairs and Networking Events. These events are jointly hosted across the university (career fairs) or with other Harvard schools such as HSPH (networking events). These are in-person interactive events for the most part (with a few exceptions, such as the GCC national virtual career fair in March), and therefore normally do not have recordings.
- Events from subscription services. We share subscriptions with other Harvard schools for some subscription service-based skill development events. The 3 we share access (and costs) for, and that are integrated into the Career Planner schedule (on Career Navigator) are Beyond Graduate School, Beyond the Professoriate, and Interstride. These platforms host a number of synchronous events, which are usually recorded and retained online (and accessible to students). These subscription-based events also have the same iconography as the collaboration events above.
- Navigator team or host speaker events. As a general policy for copyright compliance and speaker privacy, we do not keep or distribute recordings of Navigator workshops. We use an interactive workshop format (not a webinar), and this creates innate restrictions on us sharing the recordings. Wherever possible, we ask the speakers to share their slides or resources, which are then posted to the Resources area on Career Launchpad (accessible on our "Coaching and Employment" page).
There are two ways for OGE students to look through job, postdoc, and/or internship opportunities:
- Students can log into Career Launchpad (found on our Coaching & Employment page) and navigate to the “Internships & Jobs” tab along the top. There, they can use filter options to find opportunities that fit their search, filtering by position type, industry, job function, remote/on-site, and more. They can also filter by “Jobs I Qualify For” (under “Show Me”), which uses their Launchpad profile information to only show jobs they fit the qualifications for.
- They can also view our latest posted jobs and postdocs on the Navigator homepage. Please note that these opportunities are always posted to Career Launchpad as well.
You can share postings directly to the Navigator at careernavigator@hms.harvard.edu to be posted on the Navigator homepage and Career Launchpad.
Alternatively, if you are a hiring manager and would like to share a position, you can create an employer profile on Career Launchpad and post jobs directly.
Yes - all of our alumni have access to career advising for a set number of years after graduation. HMS master’s alumni retain access to 1:1 career advising through Career Launchpad for 3 years after graduation, and GSAS HILS PhD alumni retain access to 1:1 career advising through Crimson Careers for 5 years after graduation.
Currently, we do not have this information to share. As university-wide efforts to gather and present this data become available, we will connect this information through our Metrics & Evaluations page.
Yes, certain levels of this data are available on our Metrics & Evaluations page. Specific inquiries can be directed to careernavigator@hms.harvard.edu.