In this month’s Windback Wednesday series, we’ve been looking at making the move from Academia to Industry.
But what if you’re enjoying the world of academia, and want to stay? What if you want to move up the ladder from post-doc to teaching fellow to professor? No one said you can’t! But even here, it’s worth keeping an eye out for opportunities to increase that set of transferable skills that everyone keeps talking about.
What we’ve seen so far is that there are some heavy demands on a scientist to broaden their skill sets, whether it is to stay in academia or to leave: learn to communicate, network well, be a team player, manage your budgets, delegate, make a good presentation.
The daily life of a scientist includes much of the following: designing experiments, writing grants to allow those experiments to happen. Then, once they’ve been approved: doing the experiments and managing the data that comes out. And as your responsibilities increase, you need to figure out how to lead your lab and get the best out of your team.
Hidden in these tasks are a whole host of transferable skills that you need to learn to recognise in order to develop them, and thus develop as a researcher.
But if you’re just working on these in your day-to-day lab life without getting direct feed-back, how do you know if you’re improving? How do you know where to start looking? How do you know if your scientific writing is any good? What about dealing with the media? Did you handle that well?
Nature Publishing Group, the organisation that owns Naturejobs, are keen to find out more about your professional development needs. What opportunities for professional learning does your university provide? Are there any gaps in your training needs? If you are a laboratory-based researcher, why not take a few minutes to complete the following online survey. You might win a shiny new tablet for your troubles!
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