Monthly Archives: December 2012

Internships: Time to think small?

Posted on by
Reply

For those keen to get an internship, SMEs provide a different kind of experience, and placements may be easier to come by.

Personality is key at SMEs Credit: Stockbyte/Thinkstock

By Rob Blythe, contributor

Securing internships and graduate placements in 2012 is difficult. There has been a 25% increase in applications to graduate employers since 2009, with an average of 52 applications for each job, according to a comprehensive survey by High Flyers Research.

Certainly, as you’ll know if you’ve found your way to this blog, research roles are particularly competitive, but the landscape isn’t as bleak as the statistics suggest.

There are only vast numbers of applications for a small minority of well-publicised opportunities. Big corporations spend enormous amounts of money making sure their roles are really competitive both because it ensures they are introduced to the very best candidates but also because graduates subsequently really want their jobs.

But what about smaller companies? A recent survey produced by UKCES that interviewed over 15,000 UK employers from a cross-section of sectors reported that 27% of businesses have recruited someone aged between 19 and 24 in the past twelve months. There are jobs out there, but the vast majority will be with companies you won’t be familiar with and won’t have been on campus trying to reach you there.

‘SMEs’ (or small to medium enterprises) is an umbrella term for a real array of businesses. It might be a company run from the founder’s kitchen table or a business with hundreds of employees and very slick offices. The category represents the vast majority of UK employers – and a vast majority of prospective jobs.

If you haven’t considered applying for work placements at SMEs, you could be missing out. Not only are there fewer applicants per role but also some real advantages to the roles themselves. Working in close contact with senior management gives any new recruit the chance to learn from the best, and fast-growing businesses delegate real responsibility early on.

Finding the roles can be the hard part. To increase your chances of success:

Continue reading →

LinkedIn tips for scientists

Posted on by
Reply

Are you In?{credit}LinkedIn{/credit}

This week, one Naturejobs reader sent us the following question:

“How important is it and in what way can a scientist make their LinkedIn profile look good? I hear it so often that sometimes I wonder whether it is worth all the effort to keep it savvy the way I see IT professionals or finance professionals do.”

As scientists work in different ways to a lot of other professionals, having online profiles might seem unnecessary. But whilst many scientific contacts are made through more formal networks, that’s no reason to dismiss the power of sites like LinkedIn. Here are just a few reasons why:

  •   So many people now use social media sites like LinkedIn to look for other professionals, you don’t want to be left out in the cold.
  •  Science involves collaboration – and online profiles are a great way to network and share ideas. It doesn’t replace more traditional methods like conferences, but adds to them.
  • You can tailor your profile more easily than an academic profile page, which often follows a standard format. What’s more, your online profile will go with you when you change jobs/institutions, whereas academic profiles get outdated.
  • It’s about more than a profile – joining groups and discussions on LinkedIn, and following others, can help you with your career interests.
  • Any digital profile allows you to include links to other sites, projects, or work that says even more about who you are -such as blogs, a Twitter profile, or a conference you spoke at recently, to name but a few.
  •  Algorithms that match you to people with similar interests could lead to unimagined opportunities.
  • Having all your information in one place means you can us it to create tailor made CVs for different jobs, or to supply information to visualisation tools, like Vizify.

As for the other part of the question – how to make your profile look good?

Continue reading →

10 tips for surviving the office Christmas party

Posted on by
Reply

{credit}iStockphoto/Thinkstock{/credit}

We all like to let our hair down, but the work Christmas party is a potential minefield. Whilst a drunken slip-up at the end-of-year bash is unlikely to annihilate your career, it may crush your reputation. To prevent you spending the next 12 months laughing off jokes about that time you threw-up in a colleague’s handbag (yes, this really can happen) the Naturejobs team has compiled their own anecdotes and advice on how to have a good time, without leaving your reputation behind at the bar come the end of the night. Take heed!

  1. Have fun, drink, be merry, but remember to do it within reason…these are still your co-workers and you don’t want to be the topic of conversation the next day as the drunkest person at the holiday party.
  1. Holiday parties give you the platform to get to know people you wouldn’t normally interact with at work; it’s a good opportunity to meet new people, network, and get to know colleagues who work in different departments, so don’t be cliquey, and speak to everyone. Try to speak to the CEO/boss/PI and other senior people at the start of the night when you’re at your most coherent. This will prevent you falling over drunk in front of the CEO like one ill-fated Naturejobs team member. Luckily, it was his last day.
  1. If it’s fancy dress, don’t go overboard with your costume, and read the labels of any products used. Take it from one ex-Naturejobs employee, who dressed up as Hulk Hogan. He already had the muscles so all he needed was to invest in some fake tan lotion. Inexperienced as he was in the use of such products, however, he did not see any noticeable difference in skin colour after the first liberal application of the product and hence applied several more layers to get the full effect. It worked, as he was a lovely orange for the X-mas party, almost like the great man himself. The rude awakening came when he went home and discovered the tan did not wash off. Walking to the office the next morning, head held low in shame, he seemed even more orange than the night before – despite a few hours in a bath, scrubbing to no avail. He then spent a rather quiet week at work as he tried to run into as few people as possible…
  1. On the subject of fancy dress, here is some very specific practical advice from one Naturejobs team member: make sure your fancy dress outfit has an accessible zip, or else you may need a toilet buddy – and that’s how rumours start!
  1. Plan your escape route. Investigate how you’re getting home from the party beforehand, and make enquires about local cab numbers in advance. Take out the cash you need to get home, and check you haven’t left your house keys or travel card in the office before you went out. We have heard of colleagues who ended up sleeping in the park…
  1. If you think you might be liable of going overboard, buddy up with a colleague you get on well with and look out for each other during the night. That way they can stop you making a beeline for unsuitable colleagues you don’t fancy without your beer goggles on, and send you safely on your way home if you look worse for wear.
  1. Don’t talk about work! Parties are meant to be fun.
  1. Get everything you need ready for the next day at work before you go out, to make getting up in the morning as pain-free as possible. Then, have some breakfast and get on with it. Whatever you do, don’t call in sick – just get to work on time and laugh off any embarrassing moments from the night before. Everyone will be in the same boat.
  1. At the same time, know what you’re capable of the next day. “Never plan to load an electrophoresis gel the day after the Christmas do,” says one Naturejobs staffer who used to work in a lab. “Hands shake, pipettes burst, preps don’t work and you end up with DNA all over the place and paranoid fears of sabotage when you can’t interpret the results. Best thing to do is to lock yourself up in the electron microscope room and sleep.” We won’t tell.
  1. And finally, have plenty of tea and good mince pies (they’ve got to be good ones!) both before and after the party. And from everyone at Naturejobs: have a great time!

 

Where did I put my party hat?{credit}iStockphoto/Thinkstock{/credit}

Want an internship in 2013? Then now is your time

Posted on by
Reply

What deadline?{credit}iStockphoto/Thinkstock{/credit}

We know it’s nearly the Christmas holidays, and you deserve a break. But as well as getting some well-earned rest, this is also the perfect time to start thinking about what you want to do next Summer. If some kind of internship or work placement is on the list, don’t get too comfortable in front of the fireplace. With many of the application deadlines for top placements closing in the New Year, now’s the time to make sure your name is on the shortlist.

If  you’re not sure where to start, the good news is we’re here to do the hard work for you – just call it an early Christmas present. Over the next few weeks, Naturejobs will be will be serving up advice on how to find the right placement – whether at home or abroad, tips for an attention-grabbing application, and knowing your rights when it comes to what people can and can’t ask you to do. We’ll also show you how to make the most out of your internship when the time comes around, including how to make a good impression and all-important networking.

Follow the series here on the Naturejobs blog, and if you don’t already, you can also get updates by following us on social media:

Twitter

Facebook

Linkedin

Google +

As always, we would love to hear your thoughts and share your experiences, so keep in touch, and let us know if there’s any advice that is missing. And have a great holiday!

Ten words to avoid on your online job profile

Posted on by
2

Universally unoriginal{credit}LinkedIn{/credit}

Are you a motivated employee? Boring! Creative? Yawn! Responsible? We’ve heard it all before! This week, LinkedIn have released a list of the words that are the most abused by their users. Recognise any of them?

In the US, these include:

  1. Creative
  2. Organizational
  3. Effective
  4. Motivated
  5. Extensive experience
  6. Track record
  7. Innovative
  8. Responsible
  9. Analytical
  10. Problem solving

If you too describe yourself in this way, you will need to find another way to stand out, says Linkedin’s career expert Nicole Williams: “If you want opportunity to come knocking, you’ve got to make your LinkedIn Profile stand out from the pack. Millions of professionals say they’re ‘creative,’ so set yourself apart by describing and linking to projects you’ve worked on that truly were different, unique and compelling. Pointing to concrete examples of the creative work you’ve done is more convincing than simply stating you are a ‘creative’ professional.”

If you’re using these hackneyed words on you online profiles, chances are they are littering your CV and cover letters too, so make sure you give specific examples in each, or crack open that thesaurus! And for those outside the US check out the infographic above; ‘Creative’ isn’t just unoriginal in the US, but across much of the globe – if you really are all that creative, you won’t find it hard to think of a better way to say it!

 

 

Working from home does not make you a slacker

Posted on by
Reply

Who are you calling slack?{credit}Getty/Thinkstock{/credit}

Contrary to popular opinion, people who work from home are not slacking off. In fact, those who work part of the time from home end up working between five and seven hours longer than their peers in the office, according to a study of over 60,000 people in the US.

Mary Noonan, from the University of Iowa, and Jennifer Glass from the University of Texas at Austin, analysed data from two US data sources — the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 panel and special supplements from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of about 50,000 respondents of which the team took samples from 1998, 2002 and 2004. The study was published earlier this year in Monthly Labour Review. 

The findings challenge the idea that working from home is a good solution for those employees needing a better work-life balance or with care-giving responsibilities, suggest the authors. They also challenge the idea that those who work from home are not working as hard as their colleagues in the office.

The authors also speculate as to whether employers take advantage of people working from home, and the resulting longer hours, to increase demands on them. Further studies should look at whether or not those people started working longer hours after they started working from home, they say.

In many workplaces, there is much stigma attached to home-working, and some people may feel pressurised into working longer hours to prove that they are still doing invaluable work. Of course, having the flexibility to work from home is often an essential benefit, but It can also be hard to switch off at the end of the day, when you aren’t physically leaving the office – which might also account for extra hours.

If you are considering working from home, or are struggling to get the balance right, here’s our advice on how to get things done without adding extra pressure: Continue reading →

Away from home: Indian postdocs abroad

Posted on by
Reply

Cross- posted from the Indigenus blog, a blog from Nature India.

Every Wednesday, Indigenus blog takes a peek into the lives of Indian postdocs working in foreign labs. The ‘Away from home’ series will feature one postdoc each week recounting his/her experience of working in a foreign lab, the triumphs and challenges, the culture factor, tips for Indian postdocs headed abroad and what he/she misses most about India. 

Last week, we met Mainpal Rana, a PhD from the Biological Sciences and Bioengineering Department of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and currently a postdoctoral associate at the Magee-Womens Research Institute Pittsburgh affiliated to University of Pittsburgh, USA. He told of the joys of not having to wait for reagents for experiments and the woes of not having Indian utensils in an American kitchen. Read more.

The week before, Moumita Chaki, a PhD from Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB-CSIR), Kolkata, currently working as a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Medical School, USA, talked among other things, about the problems of funding for independent postdoctoral research that visa-holders like her might face in the US. Read more.

Then there was synthetic and systems biologist Kayzad Nilgiriwala who is working as a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA. Kayzad completed his Ph.D. (Microbiology) at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai, India and wants to import some strong points from the US research scene when he comes back home. Read more. 

Finally, the first in the series was Kangkan Halder, who completed his doctoral thesis at the Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology (IGIB), New Delhi and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Applied Synthetic Biology Group at the University of Göttingen, Germany, who offers his advice on how to find a postdoc position in Germany. Read more.

Don’t forget to check back for the latest addition to the series each Wednesday, or follow Indigenus on twitter for more.