The biomedical workforce is increasingly plagued by job shortages for young scientists, according to a January report—the first public offering from a working group created last year by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study strategies for maintaining a sustainable pool of researchers in the country.

The report compiled information from an online survey conducted last year that asked participants to rate the importance of eight workforce issues and invited them to include comments. Around half of the 219 primary investigators, institutional administrators and research trainees who responded identified 'supply and demand' as one of the most pressing concerns, with issues surrounding the characteristics of PhD and post-doctoral training programs not far behind.

Now that the problems have been flagged, attention is shifting to finding potential solutions. Creating more jobs to tackle the demand side of the equation may be difficult, however. “NIH budgets haven't been growing, and with government austerity measures now, the prospects for future spending increases don't seem very encouraging,” notes economist Paula Stephan, who studies trends in the biomedical workforce at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Indeed, US President Barack Obama's budget request for fiscal year 2013, released on 13 February, proposed to keep the NIH's budget level at $30.7 billion.

So, rather than relying on increased funding for the NIH, the working group is considering suggestions that include reducing the number of training grants for PhD students and post-doctoral fellows, creating more programs for biomedical master's degrees rather than full-blown doctorates and providing preparation for jobs outside tenure-track academic research, according to the panel's co-chair Sally Rockey, who is also the NIH's deputy director for extramural research. But, at this point, the panel is still gathering further data on training and career options. “We would like to know as much information as possible about the potential careers open to physician-scientists and PhDs,” Rockey says.

Researchers, government officials and analysts all agree: something needs to change if the biomedical workforce is to remain a viable and attractive career option. “We need to rethink the approach we take to research in order to create a better balance between training and productivity,” says Howard Garrison, deputy executive director for policy at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, a Washington, DC–based advocacy group. “Everyone is looking forward to seeing the NIH recommendations.” The working group is scheduled to present its full set of proposals to the NIH director's advisory committee in June.