Academy of Management 2017 Update Part I

I have been at the Academy of Management conference for two days now, and so far it is a great experience as always. Although the conference as a whole is gigantic with over 15.000 attendees here in Atlanta, a lot of my activities have been focused in the Careers Division. Yesterday was a great day filled with mentoring activities. I participated in two professional development workshops (PDWs) as a mentor to help PhD students and junior faculty members to navigate their early academic careers and to write their papers. First, as part of the "Doctoral Consortium", I worked with several colleagues (e.g., Beatrice van der Heijden, Gina Dokko, Jamie Ladge, Julia Richardson) to help PhD students manage the major challenges they face, such as dealing with setbacks and rejections, mobilizing social resources, and making the most of conferences. In the afternoon, I also acted as a mentor during the "Careers in the Rough" PDW, in which I reviewed two papers from early career scholars and tried to help them towards submitting their work. Both sessions were great, and it is so rewarding to help and support these talented young researchers. Our Career Division is such a great network for this, as all of our members are very open to cooperating and helping each other, and it makes this gigantic conference a lot more manageable. 

This morning, we had our annual editorial board member of Career Development International. Many of our associate editors and editoriala advisors were present, resulting in an inspiring meeting that gave us some great new ideas again for the future of CDI. Some very interesting special issues are coming out soon on meta-analyses and future research directions for work engagement, both led by renowned experts in the field. Also, we will be sending new CDI content to scholars on a regular basis to hopefully inspire them for their own research. The future looks promising for our journal indeed.

So far so good at the AOM 2017!