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A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience of taking part in the Association for Educational Communications & Technology (AECT) community and in attending its convention.

Introduction: Purposeful training and ongoing career support are necessary to meet the evolving and expanding roles of clinical research professionals (CRP). To address the training and employment needs of clinical research coordinators (CRCs), one of the largest sectors of the CRP workforce, we designed, developed, and implemented an online career navigation system, eMPACT TM (eMpowering Purposeful Advancement of Careers and Training)., Methods: A design-based research method was employed as an overarching approach that frames iterative design, development, and implementation of educational interventions. The five major phases of this project - conceptualization, task analysis for measurement development, algorithms development, algorithms validation, and system evaluation - presented specific goals and relevant methods., Results: The results reported how the eMPACT TM system was conceptualized, developed, and validated. The system allowed CRCs to navigate tailored training and job opportunities by completing their task competencies and career goals. The data sets could, in turn, support employees' and training coordinators' informed decisions about organizational training needs and recruitment. The early dissemination results showed steady growth in registered CRCs and diversity in users' ethnicity and job levels., Conclusions: The eMPACT TM service showed the possibility of supporting CRCs' individual career advancement and organizational workforce enhancement and diversity. Long-term research is needed to evaluate its impact on CRC workforce development, explore key factors influencing workforce sustainability, and expand eMPACT TM service to other CRP sectors., Competing Interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare., (© The Author(s) 2023.)

Impact: The success of any clinical research team is dependent on hiring individuals with the experience and skill set needed for a specific research project. Strategies to improve the ability of human resource (HR) recruiters to screen and advance qualified candidates for a project will result in improved initiation and execution of the project., Objective/goals: HR recruiters play a critical role in matching research applicants to the posted job descriptions and presenting a list of top candidates to the PI/hiring manager for interview and hiring consideration., Methods/study Population: Creating guidelines to screen for applicant qualification based on resumes when clinical research positions have multiple levels of expertise required is a complex process of discovery, moving from subjective rationale for rating individual resumes to a more structured less biased evaluation process. To improve the hiring process of the research workforce, we successfully developed guidelines for categorizing research coordinator applications by level from beginner to advanced., Results/anticipated Results: Through guideline development, we provide a framework to reduce bias and improve the matching of applicant resumes to job levels for improved selection of top candidates to advance for interviewing. Improved applicant to job matching offers an advantage to reduce hiring time, anticipate training needs, and shorten the timeline to active project engagement. These guidelines can form the basis for initial screening and ultimately matching individual qualities to project-specific needs., (© The Author(s) 2021.)

Purpose: This study aimed to explore students' cognitive patterns while solving clinical problems in three different types of assessments - clinical performance examination (CPX), multimedia case-based assessment (CBA), and modified essay question (MEQ) - and thus, to understand how different types of assessments can afford different thinking., Methods: A total of six test-performance cases from two fourth-year medical students were used for a cross-case study. Data were collected through one-on-one interviews using a stimulated recall protocol where students were: 1) shown videos of themselves taking each assessment and 2) asked to elaborate on what they were thinking. The unit of analysis was the smallest phrases or sentences, from the participants' narratives, representing a meaningful cognitive occurrence. The narrative data were reorganized chronologically and then analyzed according to a frame of hypothetico-deductive reasoning as clinical reasoning., Results: Both participants demonstrated similar patterns in their proportional frequencies of clinical reasoning on the same clinical assessment. The results also revealed that the three different assessment types may afford different aspects of clinical reasoning. For example, the CPX highly promoted the participants' reasoning related to inquiry strategy, while the MEQ highly promoted hypothesis generation. Similarly, the participants' data analysis and synthesis were more afforded by the CBA than the other types., Conclusion: This study discovered that different assessment design affords different thinking in problem-solving. This finding can contribute to leveraging ways of improving current clinical assessments. Importantly, the research method used in this study can be utilized as an alternative way of examining the validity of clinical assessments.