Why Do So Many Brilliant Scientists Struggle When They Leave Academia?

Introduction

Over the past 15 years, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with scientists trying to navigate careers outside academia. One observation kept repeating itself—and it eventually led to the founding of SciPhD.

The SciPhD Philosophy is built upon a simple observation: scientific excellence alone does not fully prepare scientists for success in every professional environment.

Traditional graduate and postdoctoral training develops exceptional scientific expertise and prepares scientists to advance knowledge through rigorous research. SciPhD complements that training by helping scientists develop the professional competencies and entrepreneurial mindset that enable them to maximize the value they create throughout their careers.

This is the first essay in a new series exploring the philosophy behind our work.

During my career I’ve had the privilege of working as an NIH scientist, leading teams in industry, and, for the past fifteen years, helping thousands of PhDs transition into professional careers.  One observation has remained remarkably consistent.

Some of the most brilliant scientists I’ve ever met struggled when pursuing careers outside academia, sometimes struggling to land interviews, let alone receive job offers.  And it wasn’t because they lacked intelligence, or scientific rigor- but because they were entering organizations that rewarded a different set of competencies.

These gifted experts had the technical expertise, creativity, resilience, and problem-solving abilities necessary to perform top-level scientific research.

Their challenges rarely involved science.

Instead, they often involved organizational communication, influencing without authority, embracing cross-functional collaboration, understanding organizational priorities, thinking entrepreneurially, managing projects, and leading people.

Why?

Academic research laboratories and non-academic professional organizations pursue different missions.

As a result, they often define and reward success differently. Academic scientists are typically recognized for their individual scientific contributions—publications in high-impact journals, grants, and advancing knowledge. Professional organizations certainly value scientific expertise, but they also evaluate how individuals contribute to organizational objectives through communication, collaboration, leadership, and execution. Neither system is inherently better. They simply prepare scientists for different environments.

This distinction is subtle, but important. Academic laboratories are designed to generate new knowledge. Professional organizations are designed to accomplish organizational missions, whether those missions involve developing therapies, advancing public health, commercializing discoveries, advising clients, or supporting government initiatives. Scientific expertise remains essential in all of these environments, but success also depends on how effectively individuals work with others to advance shared organizational goals.

What Academia Does Exceptionally Well

Universities perform an extraordinary service to science and society.

They teach scientists how to think critically, become subject matter experts in their chosen field, conduct rigorous research, solve difficult technical problems, and generate new knowledge.  But that isn’t the same as preparing someone to lead teams or operate effectively inside complex organizations. Academic science has been extraordinarily successful at expanding humanity’s understanding of the natural world. That success should be celebrated, not diminished. SciPhD was never created because academia was failing. It was created because scientific careers have diversified.

Why SciPhD Was Created

That realization changed the trajectory of my own career.

SciPhD was founded on a simple premise: scientific expertise and professional effectiveness are complementary competencies. Academia is not broken.  Universities do an outstanding job preparing scientists to conduct research and provide the environment for them to do so.  As such, academia plays a critical role in establishing the body of knowledge that underpins virtually every advance in human health. SciPhD was created because professional effectiveness depends upon a complementary set of business and social competencies that extends beyond scientific expertise which are rarely taught in graduate or postdoctoral programs.  SciPhD helps scientists develop those additional competencies that enable them to apply that expertise effectively in professional organizations. Scientists deserve the opportunity to develop both scientific excellence and professional effectiveness. That belief has guided every decision we’ve made at SciPhD.

Over the coming weeks I’ll share the principles that have shaped SciPhD’s approach to developing scientists- not just to obtain jobs, but to maximize the value they create throughout their careers.

Key Takeaways

• Academic and professional organizations often reward different competencies.
• Scientific excellence remains essential in every career path.
• Professional effectiveness complements—not replaces—scientific expertise.
• Developing both broadens career opportunities and increases long-term impact.

The SciPhD Philosophy

Part 1 of 12

Next: Scientific Excellence and Professional Effectiveness Are Different Competencies.

Scientific Excellence and Professional Effectiveness Are Different Competencies

In the first essay, I argued that scientific excellence alone does not always prepare scientists for success in professional organizations.  Why is that?  One of the most common assumptions I encounter when speaking with PhD students and postdocs and even faculty members is that becoming an exceptional scientist naturally prepares someone for professional success. It doesn’t!  Not because scientific excellence isn’t valuable- it absolutely is- but because professional effectiveness is a distinct set of competencies that must also be developed. That distinction became the foundation upon which SciPhD was built.

Throughout our scientific training—from undergraduate education through graduate school and postdoctoral training—we develop deep expertise in a highly focused area of science. We learn to think critically, design rigorous experiments, interpret complex data, and distinguish correlation from causation. These competencies are the foundation of scientific excellence and are often the first qualities evaluated when organizations recruit scientific talent.

Scientific excellence determines what you know and what you can discover.  Professional effectiveness determines how successfully that expertise creates value within an organization. 

What constitutes professional effectiveness?  An ability to effectively communicate in cross-functional and cross-cultural teams, where not everyone has the same technical background.  It’s the ability to build rapport with team members, and when leading a team, demonstrating empathy to build trust, and understanding how to motivate your team to succeed through encouraging mastery, autonomy, and a shared purpose.  It’s applying the principles of project management that emphasize delivering the agreed objectives on time and on budget, and applying entrepreneurial thinking that asks not simply “what is it possible to do?”, but “what should we do to create the greatest value?”.

None of these competencies replace scientific excellence.  They amplify it. In that sense, professional effectiveness becomes a scientific force multiplier.  Scientific excellence is the foundation.  Professional effectiveness determines how far that excellence can reach.  In Essay 4, we’ll explore why and how professional effectiveness acts as a scientific force multiplier.

Graduate education develops exceptional scientists.  Professional organizations depend upon scientists who combine scientific excellence with professional effectiveness.  The most successful scientists develop both. Helping scientists do exactly that has been SciPhD’s mission from the beginning.

Different Organizations Reward Different Behaviors

One of the most important lessons I learned moving between academia and industry was that organizations naturally reward the behaviors that help them accomplish their mission.  People generally respond to the incentives created by the systems in which they work. When I first transitioned from academia into industry, I realized that the behaviors that had been rewarded throughout my academic career were no longer the only behaviors that determined success.

The primary mission of an academic research laboratory is to generate new knowledge. Success within that system is largely measured by publications in high-impact journals, securing competitive grant funding, and establishing scientific reputation. Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars play an essential role in that enterprise while simultaneously developing the technical competencies required to become independent scientists.

Professional organizations pursue a different primary mission. In the context of SciPhD, we’re talking about biotechnology, pharmaceutical companies, consulting firms, government, nonprofits, and startups. They focus on solving organizational and societal problems by developing products and services that improve health and create value. In this case, success is typically measured by:

• Achieving organizational objectives
• Successful team outcomes
• Delivering products or services
• Creating value for customers, patients, or stakeholders

Because organizations pursue different missions, they naturally reward different behaviors. That does not make one environment superior to another. It simply means that scientists transitioning between environments must recognize that the competencies most valued in one setting may not be the same as those emphasized in another.

Graduate students and postdocs become extraordinarily well-trained scientifically.  And this is because the academic research enterprise is optimized for producing scientific discovery.  It is not optimized for delivering products or services.  Understanding that distinction allows scientists to intentionally prepare for the environments in which they want to make their greatest contribution.

As we said above, organizations naturally reward the behaviors that help them accomplish their primary mission. For example, leadership development is essential for long-term success in many professional organizations. However it is generally not among the primary criteria by which academic research programs evaluate scientific success.  This distinction explains why some exceptionally accomplished scientists find career transitions surprisingly challenging. They’re not being asked to become different scientists. They’re being asked to demonstrate additional competencies that support a different organizational mission.

Recognizing that different organizations reward different behaviors is not about choosing one career path over another. It’s about understanding how success is defined in different environments so that scientists can contribute at their highest level wherever they choose to work.

Professional Effectiveness Is a Scientific Force Multiplier

One of the most important transitions in my own career had nothing to do with science.  It happened when I took over a multidisciplinary project team in one of my most significant industry positions.  Initially, my own self-confidence and security was challenged when trying to grasp the roles and responsibilities of other team members whose technical backgrounds were very different from my own. But once I learned to become a “learner” and not just an “expert” and built rapport with my team members, a whole new world opened up where the combined skills and experiences of the team led to new products that were developed and released far more efficiently than I could ever have done on my own.  As I learned to communicate more clearly, collaborate intentionally, and manage my work with discipline, my work output didn’t just increase— it multiplied.  Opportunities emerged that had previously been invisible.  Science didn’t change, I changed, and that shift amplified everything around me.

I recognized that in addition to my individual role as a scientist, I also had a team role. I watched how one person’s effectiveness could lift everyone else. When I shared information proactively, others did too. When I clarified expectations, confusion evaporated. When I invited collaboration, breakthroughs happened that none of us could have achieved alone. The multiplier expanded beyond my own work and became a shared engine of progress.

There was another revelation.  For a long time, I presumed that this “breakthrough” of applying professionalism was non-existent when I was a graduate student or postdoc. But when I think back on my academic career, I now recognize that some of the biggest advancements and breakthroughs were a result of collaboration, informal communication, and strong rapport with other scientists, not just me on my own.  Professional effectiveness was actually multiplying my effectiveness as far back in my career as I can recall!

Looking back, I eventually realized what had happened.  Professional effectiveness had become a Scientific Force Multiplier. It hadn’t replaced my scientific expertise— it had amplified its impact.

Scientific expertise remains the foundation.  Without it, there would be nothing to multiply!  Academia is extraordinarily successful at producing scientific expertise.  Professional effectiveness can multiply scientific impact in many ways.

Together, these competencies increase the impact of scientific expertise.  Communication helped ideas influence decisions.  Leadership enabled the team to accomplish more than any individual could have achieved alone. Project management accelerated execution.  Entrepreneurial thinking focused our efforts on creating meaningful value.

The story is really quite simple: professional effectiveness multiplies scientific impact at the individual, and team levels. It starts with one person choosing to lead collaboratively, and it grows into something far larger— something capable of doubling, tripling, or even transforming the value of scientific discovery itself.  Professional effectiveness doesn’t replace scientific excellence— it multiplies its impact. That realization has shaped every SciPhD program we’ve developed since.

Leadership Begins Long Before You Have a Leadership Title

One of the more common misconceptions I encounter is that leadership begins the day someone becomes a manager, principal investigator, or executive. The thought is that leadership is bestowed as part of gaining formal authority.

I don’t believe that is true.

Leadership is not defined by the authority you have over others. It is demonstrated by the influence you have on what happens around you.

Some of the most effective leadership I have witnessed in my own career came from people without formal authority.  Authority comes from position.  Leadership comes from behavior, influence, and empathy—the willingness to understand the perspectives and concerns of others. A graduate student can demonstrate leadership, as can a postdoc and a staff scientist.  Doing so does not require a specific title or grant of authority.  Mentoring junior students, organizing collaborations, improving the interpersonal working environment in the lab, resolving conflicts in an empathetic way, sharing knowledge, creating trust, and helping others succeed are all examples of opportunities to demonstrate leadership without formal authority.  And these acts of leadership often have measurable outcomes.

Leadership experience should not be confused with management experience. Management usually comes with formal responsibility for people, resources, or deliverables. Leadership can occur without any of those things. Scientists frequently lead through influence long before anyone formally reports to them.

Throughout my career, somewhat paradoxically, I have seen some of the most effective leadership occur when someone shifted from being the “expert” to becoming the “learner.”  Effective leaders seek to understand before attempting to influence.  By demonstrating a genuine interest in the viewpoints and concerns of the people you are interacting with, you build rapport and trust, while sending an implicit message to the other person: “I value your opinion.”

That is leadership in practice.  It can help build consensus that may or may not align with everyone’s initial viewpoint but allows all parties to feel that they were heard and that the interests of the team were considered. It creates a shared sense of purpose, which can become a powerful motivating force. People want to work with leaders who make them feel valued and part of something larger than themselves.

Influencing without authority is a core competency in the SciPhD Philosophy.  Your effectiveness depends on your ability to influence people over whom you have no formal authority.  That’s leadership.  The experiences you gain during your scientific training can provide credible examples of ‘prior leadership experience’ when employers ask for it.

So take advantage of opportunities to lead without authority.  Don’t wait until someone makes you a leader to start behaving like one.  Leadership doesn’t begin when someone gives you authority.  It begins when you accept responsibility.

Entrepreneurial Thinking Is About Creating Value

Entrepreneurial thinking is not primarily about starting a company.  It is about recognizing opportunities to create value.  Professional effectiveness can multiply scientific impact. Leadership allows scientists to influence what happens around them, even without formal authority. Entrepreneurial thinking directs those capabilities toward another objective:  creating value.

In our case, we formed Human Workflows to address one problem—how to best leverage pioneering new translational science and bioinformatics capabilities towards improving the drug discovery process.  But in working on that problem, we began observing another. Scientists moving from academic research into other professional organizations were encountering expectations for which their scientific training had not necessarily prepared them. Rather than continuing to focus exclusively on the problem we originally set out to solve, we followed what we were learning. That observation ultimately led to SciPhD. That ability to continually observe, shift from “expert” to “learner,” recognize real problems, and develop solutions that create value is the essence of entrepreneurial thinking.

For different types of organizations, “value” can mean different things.  It can mean creating products or services that address an important societal need such as therapeutics and diagnostics, and generate the revenue necessary to sustain a for-profit company, or it can be improving public health by a government agency to fulfill its mission, or advancing the mission of a non-profit.  And for an academic research lab, value may mean generating important new knowledge, developing an approach that enables previously unanswered questions to be addressed, or producing discoveries that advance a scientific field. Publications, funding, reputation, and the ability to recruit talented scientists may follow from that impact. This brings up an important distinction.  Scientists are extraordinarily good at solving problems. Entrepreneurial thinking adds another important consideration: “Is this the right problem to solve?  Will solving it advance our mission or purpose?”

Within a company, shifting from “expert” to “learner” can help you recognize inefficiencies, unmet needs, and emerging technologies that could improve how the organization accomplishes its mission. Recognizing those opportunities—and determining which are worth pursuing—is entrepreneurial thinking in action.

Entrepreneurial thinking, however, cannot become an end unto itself.  Creativity and innovation create value only when they are connected to a meaningful objective. New ideas consume time and resources, so opportunities must be evaluated against organizational priorities, available resources, and the value they are expected to create. The value of an entrepreneurial idea should ultimately be judged by whether it helps the organization achieve its objectives—on time, on budget, and with the highest possible quality outcome.

There is another important consideration for scientists entering a new professional organization. Scientific training rewards expertise, and that expertise can create tremendous value. But entrepreneurial thinking also requires the humility to recognize that you may not yet understand all of the organization’s priorities, history, constraints, or reasons for doing things the way they do. Before advocating for a better solution, first seek to understand the problem from the organization’s perspective. An idea creates little value if it solves the wrong problem—or advances an individual’s priorities at the expense of the team’s objectives.

As a scientist, apply your experience and entrepreneurial thinking to identify opportunities others overlook. But don’t just ask what you’re capable of doing. Ask what is worth doing—and for whom.

Communication Is a Scientific Competency

Communication is not something scientists do in addition to science.  It is one of the ways science creates impact.  A brilliant idea that cannot be understood, evaluated, challenged, adopted, or acted upon has limited impact.  And communication isn’t simply transmitting information accurately.  It’s understanding who needs the information, what they need from it, and what needs to happen as a result.

Scientists communicate throughout their training. They write papers and grant proposals, present seminars and posters, defend dissertations, participate in lab meetings, and explain their work to other scientists. Scientific training therefore develops important communication skills. But much of that communication occurs within scientific communities where participants share technical knowledge, vocabulary, and expectations. Professional organizations dramatically expand both the audiences and the objectives of those conversations.

Effective communication begins not with what you want to say, but with what the other person needs to understand. Communication isn’t simply explaining.  Communication is a two-way conversation in which listening may be even more important than speaking. Unlike many communication techniques that vary with the audience and situation, listening is universally valuable. It helps us understand perspectives other than our own and is an exercise in both humility and empathy. Listening builds rapport and trust, while also conveying a simple but powerful message to the other person: “I value what you have to say.” Shifting from “expert” to “learner” helps you understand who you are speaking with, their roles and responsibilities, what matters to them, and how the information you provide can help them succeed.  Professional organizations depend heavily on teams and cross-functional relationships to achieve their required outcomes.

Scientists are trained to value completeness and precision—and rightly so. But effective professional communication doesn’t mean telling everyone everything you know.

It means determining:

“Who is my audience? What do they already know? What do they need to know? Why do they care? What behavioral objective am I trying to accomplish?”

Ideas need to cross disciplinary and organizational boundaries before other people can evaluate, adopt, fund, develop, manufacture, regulate, or otherwise act on them.

The same scientific result may need to be communicated very differently to a peer scientist, a project manager, an executive, a regulator, or a patient. Each has a different background, level of technical knowledge, role, and reason for participating in the conversation. Effective communication takes those differences—and your behavioral objective—into account. Your scientific expertise determines what you can contribute. Your communication competency strongly influences whether other people can understand that contribution and act on it. Communication competency is never fully mastered because every new audience, relationship, and professional challenge requires us to listen, learn, and adapt.

The underlying science doesn’t change. The communication does.

Adapting the communication isn’t “dumbing down the science.” It’s professional effectiveness. The goal of professional communication is not simply to demonstrate what you know. It is to create the understanding necessary for people to accomplish a defined objective together.

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