In the last couple of years, the EPS Young Minds (YM) program committee has made a point to strengthen the collaborations between YM members, EPS Divisions and Groups, and national physical societies. As a network of students and young professionals in physics, YM has always had the goal of promoting career opportunities and growth perspectives all over Europe.

In this view, we have happily accepted the invitation to organize three special sessions during the CMD2020GEFES (cmd2020gefes.eu), the largest condensed matter conference in Europe, taking place every two years. This edition has been co-hosted by EPS and the Spanish Royal Physical Society (RSEF), so this event combines the purpose of reinforcing the relations between the YM program and national physical societies and the professional development and empowerment of the new generation of physicists.

The first session on Aug 31^st was devoted to an overview on the career perspectives within academia. Prof. Petra Rudolf gave a talk titled “A PhD is not enough”, where she gave useful suggestions and strategies to prepare for a career in academia after the PhD, while Dr. Janne Salo gave an overview of the ERC grant scheme, the evaluation procedures and future perspectives for the program.

On Sept 1^st, we hosted an open discussion with Samindranath Mitra – PRL editor, David Abergel – Nature Physics senior editor, and Bart Van Tiggelen – editor-in-chief of EPL regarding the editorial policies, the evaluation processes and the personal experiences of the panelists.

The last – in order of time – session on Sept 2^nd has been an open discussion with representatives from the industry, with different backgrounds and positions: Almudena Carrera-Vazquez from IBM Quantum, Matt Hutchings from SeeQC-eu, and Nicolas Cassinelli from nB nanoScale Biomagnetics SL.

On average, we had roughly 60 participants at each session, with a lively discussion triggered by many questions from the audience.

The great success of the event, especially given the online format of the conference, demonstrates how the community has not been discouraged by the Coronavirus pandemic, and that events devoted to the professional development of the young researchers are needed now more than ever.

The sessions have been recorded and are available on the CMD2020GEFES Youtube channel, together with the recordings of plenary and semi-plenary sessions, and can be found in the following links:

Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/CMD2020GEFES

Youtube playlists: https://www.youtube.com/c/CMD2020GEFES/playlists