“Scientists are leaders. They just don’t know it!”
-Larry Petcovic, MS, co-founder, SciPhD
SciPhD provides training for scientists who want to transition from academia to non-academic careers. Our on-site and online workshops, boot camps and certificate programs are designed to offer practical resources and hands-on training to identify and develop highly valued skills in communication, leadership, negotiation, team building, networking, and project management. Workshops introduce job opportunities in industry (What Can You Be With A PhD?), and how to identify and evaluate the critical required technical, business, and social skills, and relate those to the students own experiences and accomplishments. Additionally, our web application Flamingo® facilitates job description analysis to develop targeted resumes with interview preparation. SciPhD also mentors scientists in critical networking skills and helps participants to design an individual career action plan. Numerous universities, medical schools, science academies and societies in the US and abroad have hosted SciPhD training programs.
SciPhD is technically a program of Human Workflows, LLC. At its founding, Human Workflows founders, Drs. Randall Ribaudo and Todd Pihl, combined their academic and biotechnology industry experience to provide consulting services to biotech and pharmaceutical companies focused on improving their drug discovery process. Specifically, the new approaches pioneered at Celera Genomics during the Human Genome Revolution, of which both founders were a part, established a model for the integration of diverse information (e.g. genomic, proteomic, clinical) relevant to drug discovery.
Human Workflows participation in the successful execution of consulting projects such as biomarker data mining systems, biologics registration systems, and integrated web delivery systems, provided a unique opportunity to work with top scientists who had long experience in the corporate world. It was immediately apparent how collaboratively and professionally scientists in well-run organizations behave. A willingness to negotiate, debate and even defer to colleagues to the benefit of the team project’s success, focus on team goals rather than personal ambition, and a drive to stay focused and succeed for the team was inspiring and effective.
SciPhD programs were born from these observations. As critical as these skills are for success in professional organizations, most PhD and postdoctoral programs provided little formal training to gain these experiences. The majority focus is typically on the scientist’s technical identity with less emphasis on their business and social identities despite how essential their associated behaviors are to success. The unique perspective of the founders of SciPhD programs includes graduate and postdoctoral experience, role as principal investigator, and many roles in the private sector for both startup and large organizations. These experiences are augmented with the executive-coaching, human resources, and behavioral sciences experiences of SciPhD’s third co-founder Larry Petcovic. This combined knowledge and experience-base was the nucleus in developing a unique suite of on-site and online experiential learning programs that bring this critical knowledge to outstanding academic scientists across the US.
As broad as the experiences of SciPhDs cofounders is, we continue to learn from our students and their program directors. 10+ years of interactions with deans, career development officers and program directors at such prestigious institutions as NYU, Rutgers, Emory, UC Irvine, Univ. Washington, Univ. Minnesota, NIH, NCI and so many others, continually educate us as to the real current-day challenges faced by academic PhDs in launching their professional careers, as well as the determination and drive, insight and creativity that these scientists possess. We are humbled to have the opportunity to work with these professionals and continually improve our own programs as a result of what they teach us. As Larry Petcovic famously said, “scientists truly are leaders. They just don’t know it!” It is our job to help them realize that, and help them effectively demonstrate that to future employers.
SciPhD graduates get excellent jobs, and advance quickly. Our most recent efforts to assist our SciPhD graduates land their first job is our talent acquisition services which provide a unique approach to finding, evaluating and hiring new PhD talent. Our approach is to present candidates who are not only technically superior scientists, but also have demonstrated success in their business and social skills. Hiring companies can be assured that SciPhD candidates understand the two rules of business, fit well in a team, and are business-ready. Through our Virtual Talent Showcases, companies meet pre-qualified PhD graduates and Postdocs from premier academic institutions in a private virtual setting after which they can pursue as many candidates as they require to meet their needs.
The SciPhD project is a passion of the founders, and is the 100 percent focus of the activities of Human Workflows, LLC now and into the future.
