How to recognise your transferable skills

Posted on 13 Oct 2014 by Julie Gould

L-R: Jenna Stevens-Smith, Tom Weller, Elizabeth Bohm{credit}Creit: Lisa Restelli{/credit}

Anna Price and a panel of academics-turned-other-careers show that all scientists in academia have transferable skills, but the trick lies in recognising and applying them.

Contributor Lisa Restelli

Elizabeth Bohm is a policy advisor at the Royal Society. Before that, she was working in a lab and she also trained in law.

Tom Weller is a science teacher and runs children’s parties to transmit his love of science. Before that, he was studying physics and has a PhD from University College London.

Jenna Stevens-Smith is the outreach and public engagement manager for the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London. Before that, she studied bioengineering, for which she also holds a PhD.

They all started off on one career path, only to realize that their talents and interests lay elsewhere. Luckily, they found that they already possessed a number of abilities that made them especially suited for their prospective alternative careers. In short, they exploited their transferable skills.

At the Naturejobs Career Expo in London, I — along with other participants to the transferable skills session — was guided by panel chair Anna Price, Researcher Development Adviser at King’s College London, to discover these elusive abilities and their uses. Price defined a transferable skill as “any skill that you can learn in one context and employ in another”. This definition is certainly broad, but so are the skills it refers to. The challenge lies in identifying the ones we possess, as well as in establishing how to channel them into a rewarding career. They are not hard to find: a number of tools and lists exist, but the real question is, ‘how to apply them?’ To answer it, there are nothing like success stories. Continue reading →

How to succeed at a career in industry

Posted on 10 Oct 2014 by Julie Gould

L-R: Simon Cutler, Mark Christie, Nessa Carey, Emma Garvey and Ramana Sundara{credit}Annalise Smith{/credit}

Lessons learned from the Naturejobs Careers in industry panel

Contributor Annalise Smith

A love of science, willingness to try something new, forward thinking, planning and discipline were the key tenets of success presented during the Naturejobs Career Expo panel discussion on Careers in Industry. The panel included three prominent scientists who have maintained successful careers in industry, plus a recently minted PhD; it was chaired by: Simon Cutler, Innovation Programme Manager developing collaborative training programs at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

One common theme among the panelists was the importance of passion. “If you find something you love then that’s the first step,” said panelist Mark Christie, a director of Akranim Ltd, who has a PhD in pharmacology. The other speakers echoed this view. Ramana Sundara, manager of external research collaborations at Nestle Product Technology Centre (PTC) in York, UK (PhD in food science), advised attendees to “choose the job you love to do, that way you won’t be working every day.” Nessa Carey, international director of PraxisUnico and visiting professor at Imperial College London (PhD in virology), said “it’s not being successful that makes you happy, it’s being happy that will make you likely to be successful.” Continue reading →

Lindau: May cause drowsiness

Posted on 08 Oct 2014 by Julie Gould

At this summer’s 64th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 37 laureates spent a week with 600 young scientists from almost 80 countries to share their ideas, experiences and knowledge. Discussions revolved around global health, the latest findings in cancer and Aids research, challenges in immunology, and future approaches to medical research. All of the lectures can be viewed on Lindau’s Mediatheque website.

We’ve already heard about the future directions of HIV and ageing research. This week Lorna explores the side effects of pharmaceuticals.

May cause drowsiness

The benefits of modern pharmaceuticals are often accompanied by side effects, and although some are minor, like headaches or drowsiness, others can be much more serious. In this Nature Video, reporter Lorna Stewart asks scientists if we will ever eliminate side effects. Lorna is surprised when Nobel laureate Martin Evans claims there are no side effects, and fellow laureate Oliver Smithies explains how complicated it can be to eliminate the unwanted effects of taking medicine. However, exciting research is on the horizon, as two young researchers explain.

Nature Outlook also produced a supplement based on the Lindau meetings.

How to build a career in the biomedical sciences

Posted on 06 Oct 2014 by Julie Gould

Professor Jim Smith at the Naturejobs Career Expo in London on September 19th 2014

Passion is the key to success, says Jim Smith in his keynote speech at the London Naturejobs Career Expo in September 2014.

Contributor Simon Hazelwood-Smith

Jim Smith is a successful scientist by anyone’s measure. The UK scientist helped discover key growth factors required for the early development of embryos, and has received numerous awards for his scientific contributions. Smith now juggles three high-level roles at the UK Medical Research Council (MRC), National Institute of Medical Research and the soon-to-be-opened Francis Crick Institute in London with the running of his own lab at the MRC.

Like many people who have excelled in their field, Smith’s career has the illusion of being planned from the start. However he says this was not the case. He didn’t study biology until he was persuaded to take a cell biology class at the University of Cambridge while studying for a degree in natural sciences.

He fell so in love with the subject that he progressed to a PhD studentship with the famous development biologist Lewis Wolport. “You should allow yourself to fall in love with your subject, become engrossed by it,” Smith says. This passion is a key to success he stresses, because it drives you to put the necessary effort in. “There are times in your career when you know that working twice as hard will produce double the results, at these times you should work 3 or 4 times as hard,” Smith says. Continue reading →

Lindau: The long goodbye

Posted on 04 Oct 2014 by Julie Gould

Reporter Lorna Stewart was there for Nature Video to capture the unique spirit of the Meeting. In a series of four films, she asks both laureates and young researchers some of the most profound questions in medicine. The first film, HIV in hiding, highlights the research of Françoise Barré-Sinoussi who was awarded the Nobel prize for the discovery of HIV.

This is the second film: The long goodbye.

Growing old is inevitable and across the world average life expectancy is increasing. With the prevalence of age-related diseases following suit and a limited pot of resources, where should scientists be targeting research? In this Nature Video, superstar statistician Hans Rosling sets the record straight about the cause of the world’s ageing population and Nobel laureate Oliver Smithies, now 89, gives his opinion on medical research priorities. But when Lorna talks to young researchers, they disagree with the laureates on where scientists should be focusing their efforts.

Nature Outlook also produced a supplement based on the Lindau meetings.

The postdoc decision

Posted on 03 Oct 2014 by Julie Gould

Career ambitions are the most popular reasons for taking on a postdoc, followed closely by a love for science.

OK, no surprises there, but we at NatureJobs are always interested in our readers’ career choices. Knowing our audience is the first step in providing you with useful information.

Our latest poll, “Why did you decide to do a postdoc?” sought to uncover the reasons why our readers took on a postdoc position. On average, these are three year, fixed-term contract research positions; a chance for researchers to develop their skills and get some papers under their belts.

Readers were given the chance to choose three of the following reasons:

Because it is the next step in your academic career after your PhD
Because you love science and research
To reach your dream of becoming a tenured academic
Because you couldn’t find another job
To discover something new
To contribute to the body of scientific knowledge
Don’t know what else to do
You’re afraid of the unknown outside of academia
To change location
Because you couldn’t find a tenure-track position
To contribute to society
For convenience
Because you entered on the promise that the lab was expanding and further opportunities would become available
Other

And after 3 months, 482 people from all over the world have cast 817 votes, and these are the latest results, as of Tuesday September 16^th, ranked by popularity

Nearly a quarter of votes were for “Because it is the next step in your academic career”, indicating that, for better or worse, many scientists’ default option is to continue on their current career path. Continue reading →

Life after the lab

Posted on 01 Oct 2014 by Julie Gould

Contributor Ewen Callaway, reporter at Nature

Illustration by Señor Salme

Where do scientists go after they leave the lab? I profiled three exceptional ex-scientists in a feature for Nature, “The ones who got away,” and I heard from many more who participated in #LifeAfterTheLab on Twitter and Facebook. Keep them coming!

My goals with “The ones who got away” were to find out why very talented scientists left the lab, where they ended up, and how their scientific training guided their path (for more on that see our accompanying editorial: There is life after academia). For editorial reasons, we focused on three people who had drifted far from science. But sources such as the NSF Survey of Doctorate Recipients and my own intuition and experience suggest that a lot of PhDs have left academia, but not science.

While researching the story, I heard from lots of group leaders about star graduate students who are now working at biotechs, science-related NGOs or, like Jasveen Chugh, at a science-based consultancy. Here’s her story.

—-x—-

A decade after completing her PhD, Jasveen Chugh still looks to her former mentor for advice. But the best she ever got from Bonnie Wallace, a protein crystallographer at Birkbeck College, University of London, was to leave. “Bonnie called me into my office and said ‘I know you want more and I’d encourage you to think about what might suit you better’,” recalls Chugh, now a life sciences and health care consultant at a London-based firm called PA Consulting. Continue reading →

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