It is critical that future sustainability leaders possess the skills and aptitudes needed to tackle increasingly ‘wicked’ challenges. While much has been done to identify this need, inadequate Leadership Training for graduate students in Sustainability (LTS) continues to plague even the most highly-resourced institutions. Collectively, the authors of this paper represent the small yet growing number of LTS programs across the United States and Canada working to close this training gap. In this paper, we describe the integrative approach we took to synthesize our collective knowledge of LTS with our diverse programmatic experiences and, ultimately, translate that work into concrete guidance for LTS implementation and design. We present a framework for the suite of key LTS aptitudes and skills yielded by our collaborative approach, and ground these recommendations in clear, real-world examples. We apply our framework to the creation of an open-access curricular database rich with training details, and link this database to an interactive network map focused on sharing programmatic designs. Together, our process and products transform many disparate components into a more comprehensive and accessible understanding of what we as LTS professionals do, with a view to helping others who are looking to do the same for the next generation of sustainability leaders.

Graduate professional development is a highly dynamic enterprise that prepares graduate students for personal and career success in a variety of fields, including the biosciences. National policies, funding awards, and institutional programs have generated myriad tools and services for graduate bioscience students, including new learning resources, events, connections to prospective employers, and opportunities to strengthen academic and professional portfolios. These interventions are welcome and have done much to enhance graduate bioscience training, but they may also be overwhelming for trainees. To streamline professional development and career education information for the bioscience graduate students at our institution, we tested a model where we built a centralized web portal of career development resources. Here we present our strategy and best practices for website design. We show data that students preferred a centralized online portal over other forms of resource communication; that programming, paired communication and environmental factors (e.g. remote learning and work as in the COVID-19 pandemic) combined to increase sustained engagement with the site; and that harnessing website analytics is an effective way to measure site utilization and generate insights on programming and resource development. This data, in turn, fits into broader priorities to evaluate interventions in graduate bioscience education.