 So for those of you who I haven't met already, my name is Karen Flynn. I'm the deputy associate administrator for management within the science mission directorate. And so the purpose of today's town hall is to go through the science career path tool that was recently developed. This career path tool was developed principally by a significantly sized team from NASA centers and our lab partners, APL and JPL, as well as representatives from B line. And so those representatives are Lori Simmons and Nancy Rackley, and they will do the bulk of today's presentation. With that, let's go ahead and go to the next slide. So this just outlines the agenda that we'll be following today. I'll do a very quick discussion about the science workforce study and the recommendations. And then from there, we'll jump straight into the career path tool. And that will be taken over by Lori Simmons for the bulk of the conversation. Okay. So one of the things that has recently occurred, if you've been, if you look into the science.nasa.gov website is that we have made a number of changes so that both the science workforce study of the original study and overviews on all of the recommendations that have flowed from that study and the implementation status for those recommendations are much more easily found on our SMD website. So it's under the about us tab, you'll find a tab, new net tab now on workforce initiatives. The link has been provided here and along that tab is where you're going to find both access to this tool, as well as the information on the recommendations. And Andrew, before I go any further, I just want to, I think there was a comment about whether or not the closed caption is working or available. Can you re talk about that? Yes, I can. So if you look at the bottom left of your screen, there should be a little kind of a comment looking icon that has CC on the center of it. Those are your closed captions. And you can click that to turn it on. You can also click the down carrot to change the language if you do not speak English. But if you do not see that there is a little option on the bottom right of your screen called panel options. It's the three dots button. You go ahead and click that and you can turn on captions that way as well. All right. Thank you, Karen. Okay. All right. With that, so let's go ahead and go to the next slide. This next slide shows you the full table of all of the recommendations that came from the science workforce study. You know, again, the unique thing about this workforce study is that it did not hone in just on the civil service cadre that supports NASA science. We really focused on NASA science everywhere that it's executed. And so in terms of career path leadership development in the role of project scientists, all of our recommendations have been focusing on not only how those work gets done within the civil service ranks, but also at our lab partners at JPL and APL. And as I said, so principally the recommendations fell into three areas today. We're really going to focus all of the conversation on the career paths. But a number of other things have occurred in the leadership development area, project scientists arena. And again, you can go to the easily accessible update on science.nasa.gov to keep in track on what we were doing. I would say we're probably on the order of about 75% complete with most of the recommendations. And so we're really making some great progress. Okay. With that, let's go ahead to the next slide, which I think they turn over point to Lori and company. Thanks Karen. Hi everyone, my name is Lori Simmons, and I am one of the co-leads on the project for creating the career path tool. And my colleague Nancy Rackley is also online. She was the other co-lead. And we both work for a company called Beeline Express. And we both were involved in the full workforce study. And then after that, as you saw, there were 12 recommendations that came out of the study. And two of them pertain to the career path career paths. And Nancy and I co-led that effort. So today, what we want to do is give you a little bit of background on the career path itself, the career path tool. But most importantly, we're going to show you a demonstration of the tool and how to navigate it. So the two recommendations, and this is just the two that Karen showed on that overall table, the two recommendations coming out around the career paths. The first one was to simply adopt the nomenclature around the five career tracks. So during the study, it became clear that there were five distinct career tracks that a scientist could take throughout their career. And so I'll show you that in, I think, the next slide. But so this first recommendation is just to implement those five career tracks as kind of standard language within the science workforce community. And that's that's been done. And that's kind of an ongoing thing. The second effort was developing a web-based career path tool. And that was much more involved. But we use those five career tracks as the foundation of that tool. And that's what we're going to show you today. Tell you a little bit about the team. We had actually two teams. We had a NASA team and a beeline express team. The NASA team was primarily scientists. And as you see here, locations were all across NASA. So most of the centers were represented as well as JPL and APL. The NASA team was responsible for the content. And so what I mean by that is the NASA team created or determined the career paths themselves, which positions would be on the tool, which positions would be featured on the tool. And then what paths they belong to. And then for each position. And at the moment we have 78 individual positions on that tool. They was the scientists themselves that defined each of those positions. And you'll see there's a great deal of information about each position that you'll see on this tool. The other team is the team full of software developers. And this is where I say where the magic happens. So where the content was provided over to the beeline team. It was the beeline team that built the software tools, made it work and put the data in the right place. And so that was the magic of it all. And the interesting things is, although Nancy and I led both of these teams, it was me really leading the NASA team and Nancy leading the software team. These two teams never met each other. They never interacted. So I thought that was kind of an interesting thing about how we, how we ended up working out. So these are the five career tracks that came out of the workforce study. You see it's nice and colorful here. And that's purposeful. When you see the career path tool, it is color coded throughout. So anytime we're talking about one of these five tracks, it will have the corresponding color. So the first track is supervision. And this is management type roles, supervisory roles at various organizational levels. The next career track is mission. So this is roles that would support any type of mission. You know, a suborbital type mission, a space mission and varying size and complexity of missions. The bulk of our scientists seem to be in the research analysis and application track. And again, this is any type is a broad definition of doing research work or analyzing the data or applying the data in any way. The next track is technology development. And these are the roles that would be enabling future missions through discovering new technologies. And then the last one here is science program management. These are the leadership roles that contribute to the strategic planning of the NASA science work. A lot of these positions are supervisory and many of them happen to be at NASA headquarters. Not exclusively, but a lot of them are at NASA headquarters. So some of the features of the career path tool, as I mentioned, it has five distinct career tracks. There are summary descriptions on a number of science roles. So at the moment there are 78 science roles on here. And the reason why I say at the moment it could change if we realize that there is a role that we didn't cover and we should be adding to this. So it is flexible going forward. But at the moment there's 78 individual positions across those five career tracks. There is something called a career path map. And this is an interactive display of, we took, I think there's probably about 10 or so key leadership roles and we did an interactive display of some common paths of getting to those leadership roles. As Karen mentioned, we wanted to make sure this was applicable, not just to NASA, but also to our lab partners. So it is not specific to one particular organization, but rather broadly focused so it could apply whether you're at a NASA center or a lab partner or a large center or a small center. And then it is public facing. So we wanted to make sure that it could reach a broad science community. We wanted to also make sure that it could reach those who not necessarily are in the science NASA workforce at the moment, but might be aspiring to. So grad students, any of your neighbors, anybody can see it. It is a public facing website. Some of the benefits that we hope come out of this tool certainly gives you a better understanding of the science of the NASA science workforce. It will increase your awareness of how to navigate your own career. Some of the features you'll see is information, not just about the roles and responsibilities of a particular position, but what are some ideal skills and competencies that someone should have and how you can. What are some suggested developments to how you can either work to attain that position or possibly and grow from that position. Certainly talks about different career opportunities and development strategies. It would help. I believe it could help you prepare more for leadership roles from a management perspective supervisors can use this tool when working with career planning or development discussions with their employees. Since it is public facing, as I mentioned it, it help can engage those individuals that might be looking to come to the NASA workforce, the science workforce. We can use it as a recruitment tool and we're hoping that with this transparency of ones of navigating one's career that can help raise morale and also increase retention. Okay, I'm going to attempt to go live here and give you a demo. Go home and because I'm working my own. It looks like I am on full screen. Okay. I'm working off of a laptop. So I want to make sure that I'm looking at a full screen here. And because I'm at a full screen, I'm going to get this off because I'm in a full screen. You can't see the URL. So the most important thing is how to get here. Back on the slide deck. It does say the URL. And we will give you a copy of this as well. But the URL is sciencecareers.apps.nasa.gov. And so that's the most important thing is how to get there. Thank you, Andrew, for putting that up. Okay, so this is our homepage. We also call this our landing page. And so I want to talk a little bit about I guess what's across the top before we get into the meat of the tool, the meat of the tool being this here that looks like the USS Enterprise. So across the top, this banner, if you will, not that banner, this one here is going to be on any screen that you're on throughout the tool. So you'll always be able to reach these things across the top. So these are just additional information in addition to what's featured in the career track itself. So the first thing that says NASA science orgs. So what you see here are the listing of the NASA centers, as well as our two lab partners at APL and JPL science mission director headquarters and also the office of the chief scientist. If you click on any of those, it's going to give you the description of that particular organization. It will give you the URL for the for the science program that happens at that particular organization, as well as a link to the overall organization. And I'm going to go back here. Also show you if I click on a on a center. So if I click on Langley, as an example, this is going to give you the link to the overall to the science organization at Langley. This is a link to the overall URL, the overall site for Langley as a center. This is a description of Langley as what the science work is. And then it also gives you an estimate of the number of scientists at that particular organization. So that way, if you're looking to see is it a large science program or medium or so. There's a range of the number of scientists that that reside at that particular location. The next tab here is career tracks. And so these are the five career tracks that are also down here. So this is just another way of getting to those career tracks. The next year is career levels. See here on the graphic, we have three main career levels, early, mid and senior up here. This goes to the same definitions of those levels, as well as we added on here, executive levels. And then with the federal civil servants, there's something called an ST and SL. So if you click on any of these, it will give you the description of what that means. But down here in terms of early, mid and senior, if you hover over or click on either any of these 3 buttons, it's going to give you a description of what a early level scientist or mid level scientist or senior level scientists should be doing at that phase of their career. Going back up here across the top career path maps. This is what I mentioned where we picked about it. It's probably about 10 senior leadership roles within the science workforce. If you click on any of these, and this will be the last thing that I'll demonstrate. It's going to give you an interactive map of some common ways of getting to those leadership roles. And then this last button, I'm not going to click on it, but if I did, it's going to exit the screen. It's going to go to the NASA science.nasa.gov site. So it takes you to the science mission director at web page. Across the top here is the first one here is a search function. That's a really nice feature in here. And that I mentioned there's 78 positions on the website on this tool. And you may not necessarily know all 78 positions or what there might be called. And so this allows you to search for a particular position and it will search on the overall title, the main title of the position, or if you guessed wrong. You may not have alternate titles listed as well. And so you can use this to search for any position that you might be looking for. The home button simply gets you back to this site here. This roadmap here, as I said, everything is color coded. So this reminds you of what that legend is and allows you to click to those to those tracks if you want to from there. The thing here is this question mark. And if you click on this question mark, basically it gives you navigational instructions for the overall site and also it gives you navigational instructions for each individual type of page. So let's jump into the meat of this here. And so as I mentioned this one of the, the, the, the chuckles I guess coming out of developing this, the scientist team and especially ended up liking the looks of this is because it looked like the USS enterprise for those Star Trek fans out there. So these are the five career tracks that we landed on. We're essentially drawn this way to represent what, you know, a visual of the, the career tracks for a scientist. So in particular, the three in the center here, the mission, the research analysis and application and technology development. Those are what we believe to be the core science work or the hands on science work. All of our scientists will be working in one of these three areas probably throughout their career. And so we drew it in parallel very close to each other and someone intertwined. So we did that to show that many scientists either can work in more than one track at any given time or flow in between these two tracks over time. So it was drawn this way intentionally. These other two tracks are drawn a little bit outside of the what I would call the core science work. The top one here being supervision. And so we wanted to draw it in a way that it wasn't, you know, once you went into supervision, you never came back. So it showed it that you go into supervision. You can come back down to the core science work and go back out if you want. One of the things that you see as I'm hovering over this, I believe that you can see it. When you hover over supervision or any of these titles and any of these tracks, it's giving you a definition of what that what that track is and what type of roles might be in that track. And so this bottom, the bottom track is a science program management and that track. Again, it's like supervision and many of these positions are supervisory. But again, we wanted to show that you could leave some of this core science work come out to this track and then go back in. So I am going to go ahead and jump into this. So again, you can click on any of these tracks, but I'm going to start with the research analysis and application track. The reason why I start there is the bulk of our scientists probably start their career with NASA in this particular track. It has the most roles. You'll see the three tracks in the center that the mission, the research and the technology development are set up the same way, meaning that there is a cluster of early level roles, a cluster of mid level roles and a cluster of senior level roles. These color swirls basically represent an opportunity to transition to another track. And so these icons here represent in the color coded as well represent those tracks and allow you to you can click on this and jump over to that other track. Clicking up here or hovering up here will give you a definition of the research track or any other label that's up there. Okay, so all of these white boxes are positioned some position boxes. They are all clickable. I'm going to go ahead and click on this first one this principal investigator at the research track. And one of the things that you'll see is sometimes you'll see a name of a track in parentheses and other times you do not. The reason for that is there are sometimes some positions in this case a principal investigator, where you can be a PI or principal investigator in the research track or in the mission track so anytime a title can be used in more than one track. You're going to see the parentheses. The other time you might see a parentheses if it's unique to a center so there's a few positions that are unique to JPL and you'll see in parentheses and it says JPL. So we open up so any of those white boxes open up to what we call here the summary position summary. There's a title across the top and I mentioned there's alternative titles. Anything that might be an alternative title in some cases like one, one center might call it X and another center might call it Y. We tried to capture them across the top here. So it gives you a description of the roles and responsibilities. Where does the position reside. And like I said at the beginning where you have up here where you can click on a description of any NASA organization. And here if you want to click on the organizations from here knowing that this position resides or you can click on that and see a little bit more about that organization. Some ideal skills and competencies for that particular position and then also suggested development activities across the side here to the right side. You'll see again everything is color coded and stays consistently that way. And so here, well, let's go back that was an accident. So positions that are positions that might lead one to this particular role. So, in order to get to the principal investigator at the mid level, what might you have done before then. And then likewise down here is what are some positions. If you are principal investigator in the research track, where can you where can you grow from there. And so these are some might some possible growth opportunities. So one of the things I want to show you is this go back and so research scientists. So this happens to be the early level research scientists. Again, same format in terms of describing the roles and responsibilities skills and competencies as well as suggested development and where the position resides. Here, because this is a very common position and it's an entry level, so to speak position. There's a number of different titles that other some places might call it. So again, if you use that search function, it's going to find these alternate titles as well. But what I want to point out here to the right side is there are a few positions here that are not color coded. They are gray. And the reason for that is so what might you have done before being a research scientist at the early level of one's a science career. You may have been a university science scientist you may have been a pathways intern or part of the NPP program or contractor. So we don't have these positions in our system. It's not defined here, but we had it here it's great out it's not clickable, but for informational purposes only. And so there's some senior level positions again that growing from that position might take you to a position external to the science workforce. And so it's great out as well. So just to know that there's some informational tabs here, but not clickable, not defined within our tool. So when I go back, one of the things that I believe that you can't see because I can't see it as I'm looking here, but I'm on a full screen which took, which takes off the URL. But one of the things to note is every single position on this tool has a unique URL. So what that means is you can copy and paste the definition of that particular position and share it with someone if you wanted to. So every single one has a unique URL. That's kind of a neat handy feature. So let me go back to the track here and let me just show you quickly that the mission track is set up similarly where you have the early roles, mid-level roles and senior level roles. Again, each of these boxes are clickable. You can hover over the label here. I'll give you the definition of mission. And then likewise, the technology development track, fewer positions on this particular track. But again, we have it set up of career stages. So what I want to show you is the supervisory track and the science program track are set up differently. So they're not set up by early, mid and senior level, but rather by organizational structure. So when you're in the supervisory track here, you have a choice of going to NASA centers, JPL, APL or NASA headquarters. So I'm going to show you a couple of these right here to show you how it's set up. So this one is NASA centers. One of the things that you can't see and I'm not, here we go, let's grow up here. One of the things that it's important for NASA centers is that every NASA center varies in size of their science program. And because of that, the career track might be supervisory career track in particular might look different, it might be labeled a little bit different or the options may not be there. So what we did is we went ahead and mapped out what would be the center with the most amount of positions and recognize that some of the smaller ones may not have that. So at the lowest organizational structure is a branch or lab. And so there are some supervisory roles at that level. The next level up if the science program has a next level would be a division. And so again, these are some of the positions at a division level. And then the highest level and again, not every NASA center will have a science directorate. But if they do, these would be the positions that would sit at a, that would reside at a directorate level. And again, you can click on any of these. They'll give you a description of that particular position where it resides. And so in this case, it only resides at NASA centers. Some of the skills and competencies and this particular one I showed you is a senior executive position. And so there are certain competencies that are required for senior exec. So we showed those general competencies as well as the technical qualifications and then some suggested developments for that particular position. And then again, it shows you roles where you may have come from and growth roles, growth opportunities from this position. So and go back and then let's go home. And I will go ahead and pick. Let's go with JPL to show JPL here. So again, a little bit different organizational structures the same, but the titles are a little bit different. Rather than a branch or a lab, there's their first organizational level as a group. Going up one higher is a section level. And then the next level is a division level. And again, all of these positions are clickable. And I can jump, I can jump over to any track from here, but I'm going to go ahead and use this legend. And from this legend, I'll show you one more. This is set up a little bit differently. There's not really a hierarchical structure as much as just showing you the various supervisory roles. It is somewhat hierarchical and that the associate administrator would be higher up than than these others positions to the left. And then also the office of chief scientists has some supervisory roles as well. And then the last track to show you as a science program management track. Again, this one is set up by organizational structure as well instead of the early mid and senior level. So you have science program management positions at an asset center or lab partner as well as at headquarters in the office of the chief scientists and a lot of positions in this track and the science mission directorate. So one of the things that we that looks different here than the others is we still have this orange tab across the top and I mentioned early on that a lot of the positions in the science program management track or supervisory position. So we did want to take away and say, okay, you only can find these particular roles. If you look at supervisor, you know, over here as well. And the reason for that is, even though these are supervisory positions. The most important part of what they do is science program management. So these positions across the top five over here at SMD and very sensitive. And then these two over here at the office of chief scientists, they're shown twice those supervisory roles down below here are the non supervisory roles. And then over here at the NASA center, it's not indicative whether it's a supervisory position or not, but some of the types of roles at a NASA center or lab partner that would be considered science program management. And then the last thing I want to do, let's go back home. And the last thing is to show you this career path maps. And so all of these are considered to be senior level roles that one might aspire to in their career. I'm going to start with the PI, the principal investigator and the research track since we've looked at that early on. And so this is sort of like a spaghetti map, but once you kind of digest it. It's pretty neat. So first of all, the caveat to share here is that this is a common role. These are common paths to so the target positions over here, the principal investigator research track. These are common paths, but not the only path so many scientists will go variety of different ways of getting to one of these roles. So any of these positions you can hover over it and you see the immediate positions that are feeding into it. And then you can kind of work yourself backwards and again and this is very sensitive. It's my laptop that's all. And so you can hover over, you know, if you wanted to walk backwards or walk forwards, you can kind of see if I'm starting off here as a research scientist where might I go. I want to follow on to this track and all these boxes are clickable. So again, if I want to click on an instrument manager, I can see what an instrument manager does and all the information that we saw before. If we want to see other maps here, let's just click on division director at headquarters. So again, this is your target position and you can hover over any of these positions and kind of see where what path you might have taken. Or might you might you take to go ahead and get to this to these roles and I can do one more for you. Just let's do principal investigator and a mission. So this is a case where you can be a PI and more than one career track. And so again, your target position is always to your right and you can hover over and see what are some of the common paths to get you over to that. That target position. So with that, and I'm going to just check in with my colleague Nancy. Is there anything that I have forgotten in the demo? I don't think so. It's perfect. Okay. Well, you're perfect. We won't say perfect. Okay. So that is, that's, that's my demo. I certainly hope that one that you enjoyed seeing the demo, but most importantly, that you can get some good information from, from this tool. And I will take questions and I'm going to ask Andrew, should I stay on the tool or should I go, I guess I'll stay here and see what kind of questions we might have. I'd go ahead and stay on the tool because you could probably answer some of those questions by just showing where they lie in the tool on there. Okay. So number one right now is, is there a way to know what the degree requirements for each position are? For example, MS versus PhD for research or data scientists. There is, it's a good question. There is nothing specific in this track that says, I'm just taking a look at some of these early levels. There might be a couple positions where it says advanced degree, but it's not specific. We didn't want to, there was a, there was an assumption that most of these positions would be PhD positions. But there were a few that would be maybe grad level, a master's level, but not many. And so we didn't speak to the educational requirements and I don't know if that's something that we would revisit or not. If there is anything about a degree, it will just say an advanced degree in one of these fields, but it won't say what level. Perfect. Thank you. The next question is where can we find salary ranges for each role? So that gets a little trickier. There's nothing in here about salary. So this is very broad and it includes both civil servant roles at NASA centers as well as JPL and APL. Everything at NASA is a civil servant role and their pay is going to be determined by the Office of Personnel Management. So it's OPM. You can see the grade levels there and what the associated pay would be. And it is set up by area. So if you are looking to be a scientist in Langley, it's going to be one pay scale versus being a scientist at Ames in California. And so when you look, if you look at the, I guess it's USA Jobs is the link and it will show you the pay scale for civil servants. Now I am unfamiliar with, because I'm a former federal employee, I'm much more knowledgeable of civil servant pay. JPL and APL, they have their own pay setting. I do not know where you can get information about that, but I would certainly start with their websites. I think each of those websites would probably list vacancy announcements. And usually on vacancy announcements, they would list a pay salary. I'll also ask Karen if she wanted to add anything to that. I believe that's those are the right answers, but do you have any other information about informational and JPL or APL salaries? No, I don't. Okay, I didn't think so. Okay. Thanks, Karen. Alrighty, perfect. So you mentioned USA Jobs. There is a question slash comment saying it'd be very useful to have USA job links to open positions for each center off of the tool and or if not positions that are currently available that could be stated as well. Okay, thank you for that feedback. I know Goddard Space Flight Center has. Several career path tools for engineering type roles and we tried to go down that path of linking it and I had some difficulties and Nancy, do you want to talk to that? Some of the challenges we found in trying to do that. Sure. I mean, we could link to like the USA jobs, but it's very hard to link into their search engine that would only bring up scientists jobs for a specific position. I mean, it's definitely something we can look into because I know with USA jobs, they have, I mean, the website has been upgraded. So it might be easier to interface with that and actually bring, you know, if you're in a data scientist position and have a link that says, you know, check, you know, opportunities at USA jobs for this position, we can maybe try to do a search and bring you actually to that to a page to a page that would have a list of data scientists. Yeah, so I think that's something. So I appreciate that feedback and I've taken notes of that. It might be something as an enhancement that we can just at least add a link to where one might search on USA jobs, but then also add a link to where one might search at APL or JPL for some of their openings as well. This might be a good time to just let folks know that the expectation is that this tool will continue to undergo some, you know, improvement and changes over time. So the NASA official owner owning organization for this tool is going to be that is the SMD admin branch. The new branch head there is Tomas Rainier. So you'll see his name listed down as the NASA official here. And so that is the intake point for recommendations around changes that might be needed. I. I'll note that there was already run recommendation to review the Ames Center Director Center description to ensure that there's biology. So we'll certainly take that as an action as well. But it, you know, the, the tool, you know, will try to evolve as careers and paths and organizations continue to evolve. So thanks. Perfect. Thank you, Karen. Excuse me. So the next question is, is there a plan to add guidance on how contractors can be some become civil servants or how postdocs can become civil servants. My silence means I'm thinking. There are any current plans to do that. And again, as not saying that's not a good idea. You know, certainly this shows you paths that once you are there, or what are some of the entry level or early level roles that one might look towards. And also keep in mind, NASA's science workforce hires at many different levels. They don't just hire at the early level. They also hire a lot of positions at the mid and senior levels. But at this moment, there is not a plan to add that guidance. It's not a bad idea. And again, as Karen mentioned, the admin branch of SMD would be the one to decide what the content enhancements would be. So certainly I will take that as something back to SMD for discussion as to whether we would put something in there that would give that particular information. And that might also link into, you know, the USA jobs is the path into the federal government and then APL and JPL might have different paths. So it might feed into if we add some type of link on here to refer you to those sites for application purposes. So that might all kind of link together. But thank you for that feedback. Karen, did you want to add anything to that? No. Okay. All right. Well, there are several other questions related to contractors versus civil servants. So first off, is this tool only for civil servant positions? Or does this include contractor positions as well? So I'll take a stab at this. And if Karen wants to enhance my reply, I welcome that. So this is a broad look at the NASA science workforce. Many of these positions are federal positions and certainly more senior level positions are likely to be either civil servant roles or full time roles at a lab partner. And JPL and APL is our lab partner. But there may be some applicability in the contractor world. So a lot of these roles like your research scientist, a data scientist, some of the roles that I would probably say more at the early and mid level might be, I hate to say that we're generic but more universally applicable as a contractor. So you might see yourself in one of these 78 roles that are on this website at the moment. You may see yourself there and you may see some growth to certain roles, but some of them might be unique to civil servants and others may not. So it is not designed to show a path within a contractor workforce, but you can perhaps see some similarities. And I will say that I guess APL and JPL are not civil servant roles, but they're not quite contractors either. So they're sort of an in between type thing. So again, it's not designed to be specific to just civil servants, but it's also not designed to be a particular contractor because there's a number of different contractors out there. And their paths might look a little bit different. Their labels might be a little different set of the titles. But like I said, there are some specific roles that one has to some of the leadership roles that one has to be a civil servant to be. Karen, do you want to add to that at all? Well, just to say that, you know, from a, from a pure definition standpoint, right? I mean, APL and JPL where staff were contractor badges, right? So in that regard, it is inclusive of both contractors and civil servants, regardless of what badge that they're wearing in the HEST of NASA science. I think the nuanced answer that Lori gave you is really about how much to what degree does this involve also contractors who are in more support service roles at a variety of the centers. And that might be the, you know, the Wiley's of the, you know, and those kind of Jacobs, those kinds of things. And I would say, you know, I think she hit the answer correct and that, you know, some of that work is going to be representative. But as you get into some of the paths around supervision organizational leadership, then it becomes less representative of roles that can be done by support contracts. Thanks Karen. Thank you Karen and Lori. To finish off the contractor side of things, there is one more question saying since so many positions are at NASA centers are performed by contractors, it would be really helpful and important to have somehow capture the contractor list for each NASA center and what contracts are currently in place for each competency. So the types of science positions offered by those contractors are also listed on the tool. I'm going to punt that one to Karen. We can take a suggestion to look into what the capabilities are. You know, you kind of, yeah, your contracting environment is also one that's a bit dynamic, much like the, the conversation around the USA jobs and the dynamics associated with that. So, but we can certainly look into how can the tool better represent the contract workforce at centers. You know, maybe it's something that falls under the center descriptions as an example is some description of what each center's contracting environment looks like and the roles that they play. Okay. Thanks Karen. Then next question would be, is there a map where all of the quality possible NASA locations are without clicking one by one. You chuckle Nancy. Does that mean you want to answer that? Yeah, one of the enhancements that we thought that would be really nice to be to have a map and show you where all the NASA centers are. And then allow you to click on, you know, each like a star or some kind of emblem on the map and then bring up that information about that center. So that is on our enhancements list. Perfect. Thank you Nancy. Next, are there avenues through which non US citizens can get a position at NASA. I'm going to ask Karen to because I don't know the right answer. I think there might be something, but it's complicated. So, Karen, do you happen to know that answer. So, so for nationals given certain, you know, Meaning certain criteria certainly do exist within the NASA workforce. Each one of them, each of those cases, however, going to be pretty specific to the individual positions and requirements. So, I think it's a little tough to answer that question in a broad fashion. Alrighty. Thank you. Is there a ability to search all open early or mid or senior positions based on location? Not at the moment. That's a good. It's an interesting, good suggestion right now. The search function just goes by that title, regardless of whether it's an early mid or senior level position and regardless of where it's located. So that's a. An interesting enhancement suggestion and we'll take note of that, but right now it's just title regardless of where it sits. Perfect. And then as a confirmation. Is it safe to assume all positions across the tracks are for US citizens only. Generally, yes, as Karen pointed out, there might be some nuances of how to get. A very specific for a national that has some specialty. But for the most part, I would say that they are for US citizens. Alrighty. Back to searching. By specific areas. Is there some way to search by discipline? For example, physics, biology, engineering, etc. No, one of the things that it's a very good question as well. One of the things that we did when we were designing this, and this came down to the science team deciding that to make this. I believe the term was discipline agnostic. I don't know agnostic, I guess it's more appropriate, but that you could be a data scientists or research scientists are involved in technology development, whatever. Regardless of what your discipline was, as it didn't matter if it was aerospace or biology, we wanted to capture that role so we don't have science discipline in here. Alrighty, thank you. Rolling through, this is semi related to contractors, but it's another suggestion for center lab science size to include the contractor counts that are aligned. And because the size of the centers would be drastically different if that was included. It would also be beneficial to share annually updated direct funding or subsidy received by each center lab towards science portfolios. Okay, I'm jotting that down. Thank you. Another request for including pass for biology disciplines, especially at ARC, KSC and JSC as well as JPL. Yeah, if you do. So, to that, to that point, although the positions aren't specific to a to a discipline, if you do look at the organization descriptions, they will tell you. So, Kennedy, for instance, it's going to tell you exactly, you know, this is going to be some biology type work, I believe your plant research. So they're going to give you a little bit of description about what the type of work it is that the science that the organization does. If you look at Goddard, it's going to talk about earth science and talk about astrophysics, heliophysics, the solar system, that sort of thing. So you can glean it from that. But again, it's not on the individual positions. Perfect. Thank you, Lauren. So there is a question in the chat for students majoring in specific or a specific discipline or indices suggestion as much as a question. It would be really helpful, really useful to know which centers they should be aiming for if they're majoring in specific discipline, or whether their track goes all the way through program management, etc. Even just to know how many jobs may exist within that discipline. Okay, I mean, so one of the ways to get into the point of how many jobs. So, like, if you look at the research track, you don't see that there's X number. But you can see that the types of positions in the research track is very broad for a lot of positions. Whereas mission. Still a decent number of positions, but in particular technology development is going to be fewer. So, I don't know if that helps hit that mark. But, but I am taking down notes here in terms of some of the enhancements that we might look to do. Perfect. Thank you, Laura. So now there is a ask for a mechanism to provide feedback and or additional suggestions to the tool. Nancy, you want to. Is that something that's doable. I think, you know, if Lori, if you scroll down to the footer, I mean, they can always submit comments to Thomas. He's on there in the footer. I guess you can't see it in the full screen. I can't see it. Okay. Yeah, he's in the footer as the NASA official. Yeah, down there on the bottom right. Yeah. I had to get my face off of here. But I don't know where I went. It's very, very sensitive. I'm not sure why, but yeah, so, so to your point down at the bottom here are, you can click on the names down here. Tomas Reina is really the one to. Because he's the NASA official. Yeah. Okay. And again, as Karen pointed out, the owner of this falls under Thomas Reina, but he's the chief of admin brand for the science mission directorate. And so they will decide what enhancements to add and what priority. Alrighty. Um, coming to the end of the questions in the tool. But there's a question about remote career paths versus onsite. Is that the sting bush within this tool? No, not at all. Alrighty. Additionally, as their career paths outside of the stem categories, for example, human resources, accounting or marketing. Currently, there are no career path tools that have. I guess some of the mission support roles, which would be like your business roles or human resource roles. The only organization at the moment that has other career path. Tools would be Goddard space flight center has. 3 tools 3 career path tools 1 for engineering 1 for safety and mission assurance and 1 for flight projects. Nancy probably can tell you what the the URL is for those, but there's their efforts underway for other centers to possibly have a career path tool. And so at the moment, the 4 that exists are the 3 that Goddard that are specific to an organization. And this is the only 1 that's overarching for all of NASA. You know, in 1 particular field. So this is the only 1 that's that's that world. The other 3 are very specific to an organization. And Nancy, I don't know if you can drop that in the chat to put the URL. I'm going to try that. Okay, I can do that. And switching over to finalizing some of the things that I can see in the chat as we are finished, most of all of the questions within the tool. There is a question about seeing P I under technology rules as technology is to exist, but they did not find them within the tool itself. Okay. Yeah, we did talk about that and we ended up going with a different name rather than a PI and technology, but we can revisit that or see if we have a co investigator and I think it was it might be. It just well rather than trying to look for it here but but I think we did. We did talk about that and we can revisit that. And then there is also a recommendation to add data scientist under the technology development track as well. So I think we have a we have a handful of positions that we are considering adding to the tool. That's why I keep saying at the moment there's 78 but there could be more in the future, but thank you for that feedback. And then there is more of an additional request to have the career path be searchable in terms of the science disciplines, for example, planetary sciences or biology. So that students who are interested in a specific discipline can figure out that there are NASA jobs for that type of science. That noted. Thank you. That I believe is coming to the very end of questions. There is one question I don't believe can be answered here, but it's popped up a couple of times in terms of the remote positions are remote positions offered. Regardless of outside of the tool that are they offered or science pass only on site. I think that might be a question for Karen. I think, you know, at one point in time. Jump in here. I mean, the, you know, the issue about whether or not any particular job can be done either, you know, in is required to be done in a lab or remote really is resident between the supervisor and the individual executing the job. So it's going to be based on what is the person doing, you know, on a day to day basis and the responsibilities and where is that location best established. So it's not as if NASA has as a whole said, you know, career path a or career path be type of work are ideal for remote. Right now it is really all situationally decided based on the work of the individual and their ability to achieve mission success in the as determined by supervisor. So I think it would be a tough thing for us to be able to try and do that in a tool since there isn't really a commonality of practice or set of definitions that exists around that particular question when it comes to NASA as a whole. Perfect. Thank you, Karen. And then. The final question that I'm seeing is there a way or suggest a path to transition from academia teaching into a career within NASA. So, in terms of showing you the types of positions. That there are possible coming into NASA. This does a good job showing you those types of positions and in particular. And I'll just show you the research scientists and believe that we'll see it. You know, you'll see here that some of the entry roles leading into a research scientists would include a university scientist example. So this certainly shows you some of the points where you might come in in terms of the mechanism of how to get into the NASA civil servant workforce in particular. USA jobs is the only mechanism that we use. We're not the only the main mechanism for applying for positions. Now those positions might be full time positions that are you see here. There's also possibilities. And this is more of a human capital type of question. There's a pathways internship program as a NASA postdoc program, but does not have necessarily have a path to civil servant roles. But there's a number of different ways in, but I'm going to say the majority of those paths in are applying for full time position through USA jobs. And Karen, did you want to enhance my answer any anyway? Well, the only thing I would say is that I mean, I think that there's there's ability to transition from academia into civil service roles at every single level along the career path. Okay, you do not have to search far into Thomas or Bueckens bio to realize that he came to NASA from academia, where he was at the time, you know, I think a chair of an entrepreneurial and science organization and teaching. So, so there is nothing that would say that you would move from academia into our career paths as civil servants at any one particular time. Or another, ideally. And just as an example, so associate administrator, which is Thomas or Bueckens roles that could have led here, we put academia and then where might you go afterwards you could say academia. I mean, I, you know, I think in terms of, you know, NASA's desire to make sure that we're maintaining scientific expertise, right relevant scientific expertise. You know, ideally you do want folks being able to come and go from both industry and academia, etc. You know, at all points across that career horizon. So, I don't think that there's any real true ideal. Perfect. Thank you. So there is a comment that just popped up about there is a application a power apps application available to help folks identify mentors to help them navigate the science of a certain world. Some centers have started you started an initiative to identify and connect people with mentors and mentees. It would be helpful to integrate this app within the career path navigator so that a user could click a link to find all available mentors under specific track and or discipline. So I'm joining that down Andrew, maybe afterwards or if you can tell me who made that recommendation, we might be able to get in touch with that person to see because I don't know that information so we can kind of explore that if we know. And if there's a URL that we can go to to see it or there is a URL that is available. I will. Copy that and send it to you all offline. Thank you. Thank you Amanda for that suggestion. One more question and then I believe that'll be all the time we have. Does this career path to link to the match NASA top opening? We've already answered that. Unfortunately, no, at the moment, no, but it might in the future. So, with that, there are a number of different comments and people in both the IO and the chat saying this is a fantastic new tool and they are very happy that it exists because it serves a function that has not been served by other tools. So, thank you. I like that feedback. Thank you so much. Thank you. And with that, that does bring us to the end of our town hall today. There have been a number of people who have requested that we will email them the recording. We will have it posted online. At science that NASA dot gov slash about us slash science workforce initiatives, but we will also email out to you to make it easier to find this recording. And with that, thank you everyone for joining us today and we hope you have a great rest of your afternoon.