Nick Riddiford
That a career in science is demanding is unsurprising. But alongside long hours spent in the lab grappling with abstract concepts, the number of years of education it takes to enter the professional ranks and the increasingly unstable nature of such employment, exists a further demand: money. It’s no secret that science costs money — building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and sequencing the human genome cost around €3 billion each — but what is less obvious is that entry to a career in science often requires considerable personal financial sacrifice.
Naturejobs career expo journalism competition winner Andy Tay
Negotiation is a powerful skill. And, whilst graduate education arms you with technical credentials for a career, it often misses out training for soft skills like negotiation. An ability to negotiate effectively can convince your counterparts to care for your interests, allowing you to maximise personal gains such as pay or career development.
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At the recent Naturejobs Career Expo, San Francisco, Doug Kalish shared some pieces of advice with the participants on the art of negotiating for one’s interests. Here’s some of his tips on negotiating job offers and salary. Continue reading
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Over the last month, as part of our regular Windback Wednesdays series, we’ve been taking a look through the Naturejobs archive for advice on how to negotiate a pay rise and make more money.
If you’re trying to tackle the tricky issue of asking for more cash, take a look at our advice in the links below. Let us know whether it’s been useful. Have you asked for a rise or negotiated a better starting salary recently? How did you approach it and how did it go down? Keep us posted in the comments section below, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for all our #WindbackWeds updates.
If you found this useful, our past Windback Wednesday series have looked at funding, and best practice for CVs and interviews. Click through the links below this blog post for more.
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Kicking things off this week, we take a look at how to get a pay rise in academia.
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Here’s a recap of what we’ve covered so far.
A survey of more than 7,500 PhD students from 12 European countries has highlighted the variety of doctoral experiences found across the continent.
There is significant variation in whether or not students receive a salary or scholarship while working on their PhD, with almost all respondents from Norway receiving funding compared with just over half of those in Austria.
The Eurodoc survey, published on 30 September, also reveals striking data related to gender issues and family life. Men were more likely than women to believe their gender would be a disadvantage in their academic career, while students in several supposedly ‘family-friendly’ countries reported strong pressure to delay having children, or to avoid taking parental leave if they do.
We’ve outlined some of the key findings below — have a read and let us know what you think.
The 12 countries featured in the survey were Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden, and the majority of respondents were aged between 26 and 35.
Funding
The proportion of PhD students receiving a salary or scholarship varied significantly: 54% received funding in Austria, compared with 76% in Germany and 82% in France. Norway scored highest, with 98% of female students and 96% of male students receiving an income. When asked whether the level of funding met living costs, over 40% of students in the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden said it did to a very high extent, compared with fewer than 10% in Croatia, Portugal and Spain.
Family life
PhD students in Austria, France, Germany and the Netherlands are more likely to be single or not living with their partner: one-third or more compared with around one-fifth in the other countries. In most countries, fewer than one-quarter of students have children — the exceptions were Norway, where 40% have children, Sweden (31%) and Finland (30%).
Awareness of the right to parental leave varied hugely across the countries surveyed — just 1% of female PhD students in Croatia said they didn’t know whether they had the right to maternity leave (99% said they did have the right), compared with 32% in Austria and 31% in Germany.
Surprisingly, some of the countries with reputations for being particularly ‘family-friendly’ did not score well on family-related issues. More than 50% of respondents in Sweden, Norway and Finland said they are strongly discouraged from taking parental leave, compared with 18% in Spain, 30% in Germany and 34% in France. The pressure to delay having children in the first place also seems to be particularly high in the Nordic countries polled: over 70% of men and 50% of women in Sweden, Norway and Finland said they felt a great deal of pressure to postpone having children, compared with 28% of men and 16% of women in Spain and 44% of men and 32% of women in Germany.
Impact of gender on career prospects
According to the survey, male students were more likely than female students to feel that their gender will hold them back in academia. The proportion of men who said they were very disadvantaged in their academic career because of their gender ranged from 77% to 91% across the countries surveyed, compared with 36% to 61% of women.
Work experience and employment status
The highest number of PhD students who said they had no contract was in Austria (25%), compared with 17% in Germany, 12% in France and just 1% in Norway.
Students also reported differing levels of work experience between their previous degree and the beginning of their doctoral research. Around 68% of PhD students in France have none, compared with just 25% in Norway.
Productivity
In Germany, 33% of respondents said they had published at least one peer-reviewed article in an international journal so far, compared with 64% in Croatia. In the latter country, 15% of respondents said they had published five or more articles, compared with 4% in France and 2% in Germany.
Although over 40% of respondents in all countries bar Slovenia said they spend more than 21 hours a week on research related to their thesis or dissertation, around one-quarter said they don’t spend any time actually writing it. Students in France reported the highest administrative burden, with almost half saying they spend more than 21 hours a week on admin, compared with 33% in Norway and 23% in Slovenia.
Students in Finland were most likely to have been involved in writing grant proposals, with 75% reporting they had contributed compared with 32% in the Netherlands and 35% in France.
Mobility
In the majority of countries surveyed, less than half of respondents had studied abroad before starting their doctorate. Researchers in Spain and France were most likely to continue their career abroad after finishing their doctorate, and the most common reason given for wanting to work abroad was improved career prospects.
Have your say
What do you think about these findings? How do they compare to your experience? Let us know your thoughts below.
How long has it been since your last pay rise? For almost half of current respondents to a recent Naturejobs poll, the answer is more than two years – and with ever-increasing inflation, that’s effectively a year-on-year pay cut. So is there anything you can do to improve your salary prospects, particularly in academia, where there is often a lack of flexibility in pay?
Know your opportunities
Setting your starting salary
At universities in the UK, where research positions are appointed at a particular grade, there is often a window of opportunity to negotiate the precise point within the grade after you have been offered the job. “That depends on your level of experience and what you’re earning already,” says Rob Hardwick, co-chair of the UK Research Staff Association (UKRSA) and a postdoc at the University of Leicester. It’s likely you will be able to match your current salary, and you may be able to move up one additional point. If you find yourself applying for a position at a lower grade due to the current economic climate, propose that you are appointed at the top of that grade’s scale. In Germany, where positions in public universities are also appointed at a set grade within each district, with defined increments every two years, there are fewer options to discuss the fine details. “The public wage agreements leave no space for negotiation,” says Ute Heckel, project leader for Kisswin, a career development and information platform for young researchers in Germany. “Scientists have fixed contracts, and the contracts have fixed wages.”
In the United States, PhD students can earn a few extra thousand dollars a year by becoming teaching assistants, but there is little else you can do to improve your pay at that stage. The starting salary for postdocs in academia depends on whether your university follows the National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines of a minimum stipend of just over $38,000 per year. If it does, there is not much negotiation to be had, says Zoe Fonseca-Kelly, chair of the US National Postdoc Association (NPA). “For the most part, to negotiate a higher salary you’re looking at a promotion,” she says.
Securing higher pay
Pay at UK universities usually increases by a small increment each year until you reach the top of your grade. If you’ve hit the ceiling, make the case to the university that you should be promoted up to the next grade — you’ll need a letter of support from your supervisor for this. Also ensure you double-check your contract — one of Hardwick’s fellow researchers was automatically promoted up a level as they were appointed at the top of a grade, but their contract still said they were entitled to annual increments.
In the US, if you’re getting paid less than the NIH minimum guideline, Fonseca-Kelly recommends that you try to secure your own funding: “A postdoc’s best way to make sure they get at least the NIH minimum is to apply for their own training grants and get their own money.” If you are able to secure funding that can also benefit your career in general by demonstrating early independence. Scientists in Germany searching for funding at a more senior level to develop their career should apply for several grants or prizes at the same time, says Heckel. “You will be more successful if you hand in more applications. That’s perfectly all right.” She also cautions against having a single narrow research focus. “We advise people to have at least two specialisations that they follow in order to increase their chances of getting funded.”
Gather evidence of your value
Whichever opportunity for a pay rise you pursue, you’ll need to justify why you should get more money. “Frame the request in terms of the value you bring to your employer,” says Deb Koen, president and chief executive of Career Development Services in Rochester, New York (see ‘Salary boost’ for more of Koen’s advice).
If there’s an appraisal system in place at your institute, make sure you use it. “People don’t really do that enough,” says Hardwick. He also recommends using self-help tools such as Vitae’s Researcher Developer Framework to self-assess and quantify your full range of skills. “The research things go without saying,” he says. “Aside from that, there are many [other skills] you can use to your advantage.”
The US NPA provides a similar resource called the Postdoctoral Core Competencies Toolkit. Fonseca-Kelly suggests using the toolkit to set a two- or five-year plan either by yourself or with the help of a mentor. “That gives you bargaining ground and a results-orientated output you can use as a negotiating tool to get a promotion,” she says. “The people that I’ve seen successfully get a promotion in academia have had a very good plan of what they want to do and have been able to market themselves to their PI. It takes a lot of planning and communication skills.”
As well as identifying your full range of skills, remember that your publication record is still one of the main ways your value is judged. “That’s always been the most important thing,” says Hardwick.
Do you have any other advice to add? Have you recently secured a pay rise or a promotion? Share your thoughts below.
Average faculty salaries in the United States increased at less than the rate of inflation for the second year in a row, according to a report released today by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) – but many college and university presidents saw substantial increases.
The overall increase in faculty salaries was 1.4% between 2009/10 and 2010/11, while the AAUP’s favoured measure of inflation, the consumer price index for urban consumers (CPI-U), increased by 1.5% during 2010.
The change in remuneration varied between categories of institutions, with faculty at public institutions receiving an average increase of just 0.9%, compared with 2.1% at private institutions. And, despite the recession, the average pay increase for presidents was twice that of faculty at public institutions and nearly three times higher at private institutions.
AAUP director of research and public policy John Curtis said he was particularly surprised that presidential pay continued to increase in real terms during the recession. “When other staff are required to take unpaid furloughs, salary and hiring freezes, and cuts to benefit programmes, it seems especially inappropriate for presidents to receive double-digit salary increases,” he told Naturejobs.
Curtis said presidential salaries seemed to be primarily driven by a type of prestige competition. “Each board justifies the president’s salary by paying more than a competitive institution,” he explained. “The cycle then just keeps repeating itself, ratcheting the salaries upward.”
The report, based on a survey of over 1,100 institutions, also showed that while the number of faculty members grew, most of the new appointments were in non-tenure-track positions.
What’s your reaction to the report? Should presidents get bigger pay increases than faculty? Are you considering a move to a private institution because of your pay? Share your thoughts below.
