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Industry Careers

Insights from some of our top Associates on the best industry careers for PhDs that you can use to determine which role(s) are right for you

How Any PhD Can Get Hired In Industry (6 Steps)

By: Isaiah Hankel, PhD

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…

How To Shorten The Hiring Funnel And Get Hired Faster

By: Isaiah Hankel, PhD

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…

5 Job Search Time Wasters That PhDs Should Stop Doing Immediately

By: Isaiah Hankel, PhD

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…

The Competitive Advantages Every PhD Has In Industry

By: Isaiah Hankel, PhD

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…

4 Powerful Skills PhDs Have And Employers Crave

By: Isaiah Hankel, PhD

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…

The Number One Reason PhDs Fail To Get Hired In Industry

By: Isaiah Hankel, PhD

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…

Stuck And Purposeless In Academia? Here's What To Do

By: Isaiah Hankel, PhD

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…

9 Wickedly Effective Ways To Accelerate Your Job Search

By: Isaiah Hankel, PhD

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…

5 Point Job Search Productivity Plan For PhDs

By: Isaiah Hankel, PhD

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…

4 Powerful Ways To Communicate Your PhD Value To Industry Employers

By: Isaiah Hankel, PhD

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…

3 Steps To Taking Back Control Of Your Career

By: Isaiah Hankel, PhD

Academia takes away all of your control. You probably started your PhD as a confident student, knowing exactly who you were and what you wanted.  But after years facing lack of support, lack of structure, and lack of clear deadlines, you have probably lost a lot of that initial motivation. You probably are not sure of what the next steps are. You feel that you lost all the control of your future career. Something similar happened to me when I was trying to get out of graduate school. I was in a very unique situation, where my PI was the…

If You're This Kind Of PhD, Cheeky Scientist Isn’t Worth It

By: Abha Chalpe, PhD

Cheeky Scientist isn’t worth it for you! Yes, you read the title of this article right. You’re probably wondering why Cheeky Scientist would publish such an article on its own website. Why would any company ever advocate for anyone to avoid its products? It seems like a poor business strategy. Am I right? And is it true that Cheeky Scientist isn’t worth it for some PhDs? For me, Cheeky Scientist was definitely worth it. I’m not sure I would have escaped academia and found the career I currently enjoy without it. I’ve recommended Cheeky Scientist to many fellow PhDs. PhDs…