Industry Careers

Most PhDs start to plan their transition journey with a narrow view of their possibilities. Many of them think they can only transition into research scientist jobs, or that they can only find a fulfilling career if they go into the pharma or biotech industries. This narrow view ends up being especially limiting for PhDs with interdisciplinary backgrounds who think that only STEM PhDs can be successful in industry. As a consequence, they end up missing out on exciting opportunities or end up stuck in academia because they are afraid to go after an industry career. You can have a…

The components of your professional job search profile are important. If you want to transition into industry, you need to talk the language of industry and show that to potential referrals and employers. You probably already heard me say this, but do you know what it actually means? It means you need to know how you are portraying yourself from the very first moment you start planning your transition. Even before you start applying for jobs. If you are looking to transition into industry, but are applying to positions using an academic CV instead of an industry resume, you are…

Do you have a job search strategy to be hired in industry? An actual job search strategy that guides the actions you will take to get hired in industry? Or do you tend to start the week without a structured plan when it comes to your transition? You wake up on Tuesday and submit a few resumes, do nothing Wednesday and Thursday, reach out to a few contacts on Friday, coast on the weekend, and search for online job postings on Monday. And expect to be hired in industry. Does this sequence sound absurd? Are you thinking that nobody searches for…

Finding a PhD-level industry job through the hiring funnel is hard.  After all, you are aiming for one of the 0.5% top available positions. Employers don’t just hand those positions out. At the same time, it’s likely that you are not getting hired because you are incorrectly aligning your efforts with what the hiring process looks like from the employer’s perspective. Do you have a strategy for getting hired or are you just winging it? If you are thinking that you will only have to apply to a couple of industry positions before getting an offer or that hiring managers…

Feeling discouraged with your job search strategy? Have you uploaded hundreds of resumes without hearing back from employers? Are you starting to think you are not cut out for an industry position? This happens to many PhDs at some point in their transition journey.  They don’t know how to execute a correct job search strategy. So they waste lots of time doing things that don’t yield any result. Then get discouraged. An industry job search is maddening. As PhDs we are never trained rigorously on how to do it in academia. Most PhDs are never trained on how to execute…

If you have a PhD, you’re overqualified for an industry job. PhDs are lab rats and can’t understand business. You can’t get a job without industry experience. Do any of these sentences sound familiar to you? Have you been looking for an industry job unsuccessfully and have reached a point where you ask yourself if your PhD has any value whatsoever? These sentences are myths, commonly said by either academics who don’t understand anything about industry, or by other job candidates who don’t want to compete with PhDs. Hiring managers for PhD-level industry positions want the best candidates possible. After…

The number of PhDs wanting to transition out of academia increases every year. Initially, most of these PhDs were recent graduates and postdocs.  But as the crisis in academia has gotten worse, we are seeing a lot of adjunct and even tenured professors wanting to leave. They feel professionally unfulfilled in academic positions because they are overworked, work in uninspiring roles, and/or are paid marginal academic stipends, fellowships, and wages.  Far too many PhDs are unable to find any meaning or joy in their academic careers, which negatively impacts both their professional and personal lives. Unfortunately, many of these PhDs…

Today, I want to talk about the number one reason you are not being hired. You might think it’s because you are overqualified or underqualified for your target position. Or that you just can’t get hired because you lack industry experience. But the number one reason you are not getting hired is because you are invisible to industry hiring managers and recruiters. They simply don’t know who you are or the value you bring to the table. Understanding and accepting this should encourage you to change the way that you approach your job search.  Only then will you increase your…

Feeling purposeless and stuck? Every PhD will reach a point in their academic career where they have to reconnect with their purpose. Maybe you realize that you are not doing what you are doing for the right reasons. That you are working towards some else’s goal. Maybe you feel that achievements like a new publication or the title of “Doctor” are some sort of carrot that you have to chase without having a clear end in sight. This is especially true at the end of your academic career, where you have spent years working towards your PhD, or chasing endless…

Have you started working on your transition only to get discouraged when you realize it’s going to be a long process? How can you accelerate it? Or have you spent a lot of time thinking about the next steps you need to take without actually taking action? Today, I want to focus on the strategies you can take to increase your productivity in your job search and get hired faster.  You might be thinking there’s no way I can get hired faster. There’s no way that I can demystify the job search process to reduce the time it takes. But…

Job search productivity plan is imperative for success. Every day, more and more PhDs realize that they have no future in academia and start to plan their first industry transition. A script keeps playing in their head that says “I want to get hired.” This often leads to frustration because this script is not accurate. You don’t just want to get hired, you want to get hired into a PhD-level position. do meaningful work, where you can have an impact on humanity, where you get fairly compensated, where you can have security. I recently talked to a PhD who told…

What’s the biggest gap that you have when it comes to transitioning into industry? How do you communicate your value? This is a common question I like to ask PhDs. And, very often, I get the following answer:  Well, I’m not sure how to position myself for industry. What this actually means is that you don’t know how to communicate your value to potential employers.  You probably only know how to talk about your skills in academic terms. You only know how to talk to other academics, but industry employees don’t really care for that type of language. This leaves…