SciPhD’s 3-Day Business of Science Webinar Series Focuses on the essential knowledge academic scientists need to find, apply for, and land their first real job.  This series of articles relates the webinar course content to five aspects of preparing for your professional career.

Day 1: Critical Skills- The Key to SciPhD’s Get A Job Philosophy

Day 1: Critical Skills- The Key to SciPhD’s Get A Job Philosophy

Anyone who follows SciPhD or has attended any of our on-site or online training programs for scientists knows our mantra-  You are more than your science.  You have three identities:

  • Your science/technical identity (what you do)
  • Your business identity (how you do it)
  • Your social identity (how you work with others)

Getting a leg up on your competition when you set out to get a job requires your ability to demonstrate all three of these identities with accomplishments.  Learn to do that, and you can move to the head of the class.  But that’s only half the battle.  The other half is to recognize that “who you know”- i.e. your network, is critical in getting noticed.  There are many really smart and accomplished scientists competing for jobs.  So your ability to network, build relationships and generate advocates who will get your resume to hiring managers is key.

So what are the critical skills that allow accomplished scientists to successfully compete for jobs?  At SciPhD we focus on six major competency areas that make up 23 core business and social behaviors that will get you an advantage.

Creating the Vision:  This encompasses the behaviors of Strategic thinking, Innovation, Risk Management, and Champion/Energy.

Developing Your People:  Here we focus on Collaboration, Enabling, Empathy, and Rapport.

Execution: This is all about careful planning to make sure everything you undertake is well managed.  The key behaviors here are Structuring, Control, Tactical planning and Delegation.

Achieving Results: The careful planning of Execution then leads to our fourth category.  This is all about not settling for the status quo, but rather always looking to improve.  It heralds the advanced skills of six sigma, and team performance.  The relevant behaviors in this category include Production, Focus, and Competition.

Communications: None of the behaviors described so far can be fully and successfully implemented without mastery of our fifth essential category.  Here, we look at four specific behaviors:

  1. Technical Literacy- the ability to adjust your technical language to that of your audience’s understanding.
  2. Style Flexibility- Recognition that different people have different ways that they interact and communicate with others.  If you can understand another’s preferred mode of communicating, and can adjust your own style to match theirs, you stand a better chance of building relationships, rapport, and trust.
  3. Emotional Intelligence- Staying positive and managing the emotion of relationships and communication to stay productive
  4. Social Intelligence- recognizing who you are speaking with, recognizing their social role, identifying how you can make their job/role easier, and using that knowledge to frame your conversation.  Essentially, “it’s not about me!”

is Financial Acumen is our sixth category, which covers, Return on Investment, Internal Rates of Return, Performance Metrics, and Reading a Balance Sheet.  Knowledge and incorporation of these behaviors promotes continuous improvement, delivering projects on time and within budget and are core assets for any project manager.

The key to being competitive is to identify which of these skills are essential for specific jobs of interest, and learning how to express your own experiences and accomplishments in terms of these skills, which are universally valued by employers.

SciPhD’s monthly webinar series “The Business of Science- How To Land Your First Job” ties all these concepts together to help scientists get a leg up on their career.  This series is offered the first full week of every month and includes a free permanent license to Flamingo, our companion web application.  Find out more at sciphd.com/online-programs-2.

Day 2: Student Questions: SciPhD Critical Skills- I Don’t Have Them!

Day 2: Student Questions: SciPhD Critical Skills- I Don’t Have Them!

Student question: “I have no industry experience, so I don’t have any business skills. How can I get a job?”

One of the biggest misconceptions we encounter is the notion by academic scientists that they don’t have any “business skills”, and therefore aren’t qualified for many industry jobs. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is, the scientific process and the business life cycle are virtually superimposable.

similarities between the scientific process (left) and business process (right)

Throughout your research career,

  1. you are developing hypotheses to test (aka Creating the Vision)
  2. you are identifying the various people who will help you do the work and making sure they are a coordinated team (aka Developing Your People)
  3. you design your experiments with appropriate controls, time courses, variables, and risk assessments and management strategies (aka Execution)
  4. you generate the data while always striving for excellent performance (aka Achieving Results)
  5. you publish or otherwise share your results (aka Communications)
  6. you determine the return on investment that could be in the form of grant awards, publications, getting your degree, or even a job (aka Financial acumen).

So the key is to learn the business life cycle language, and translate your research activities into that language. For example, when describing your planning of experiments in an interview with the head of the project management office, rather than

“…I purified the protein using gel filtration, alcohol precipitation and ion exchange chromatography, and evaluated the final product for endotoxin contamination…”,

try “… we evaluated a number of established protocols and applied performance metrics to identify an approach that had the lowest risk, and reasonable risk mitigation strategies. We determined our milestones to make sure we stayed on schedule, and met all deliverables on on time and on budget.”

Whether it is developing and executing science process, mentoring your colleagues, motivating others, empathetically providing constructive criticism, or brainstorming new ideas with a strategic mindset, and an eye on likelihood of success, scientists are consistently building an arsenal of business and social skills and accomplishments. You just have to learn the language and recognize which language to use with a given audience. Master that, and you can convince any interviewer that you do indeed have the business and social skills required. Now go out and get that job!

Want to learn more about how to get a leg up on your first job? Our three-webinar series on how to get your first job is offered the first full week of every month. For the rest of 2020, this also includes a permanent license for our web-application Flamingo® that will help you analyze job ads, create a targeted resume, and prepare for your interview. Check it out and sign up here.

Day 3: SciPhD Critical Skills Case Study

Day 3: SciPhD Critical Skills Case Study

Initially, my thought was to provide a case study of one of our many SciPhD students who has successfully applied our critical skills philosophy to successfully complete their degree program, or postdoc, and get a job. After all, understanding and mastering these skills will help you build rapport, negotiate with your PI, develop your network, and increase your perceived value to hiring organizations.  We see it work with our students time after time.  But after some reflection, I thought it might be more useful to share my own experiences as a case study.

When I first left academia and entered the job market, I was a pretty self-confident; dare I say arrogant, scientist.  I was convinced I was good and was equally convinced that the company who hired me was really lucky to have me.  I brought that attitude and arrogance into my first couple of jobs, and it didn’t take long for my self-centered approach to collide with the behaviors that support being a part of a team.  That realization was a painful lesson as it took some “tough love” from management before I realized what it means to be part of a team.  But since that realization, I learned to embrace the behaviors we’ve been talking about this week, which are at the center of the SciPhD philosophy.  For me, this application of the SciPhD Core Behaviors resulted in:

  • Recognizing that technical knowledge gains significant value when you can use it to express the strategic value of your work and made me a more valued member of the team and the organization.
  • Understanding the keys to mentoring and motivation in developing and leading high performing teams provided the ability to deliver projects reliably and to rapidly advance within the organization.
  • Using emotional intelligence to manage difficult conversations and build rapport strengthened relationships with clients and also built stronger and healthier relationships in my own personal life
  • Using social intelligence to focus on the behavioral objectives of whoever I am speaking with also resulted in my better understanding what our students, and their career development officers need from us in best supporting their programs.

Finally, the best case study will be yours.  Embrace our philosophy.  Build and strengthen all three of your identities:  Technical/Scientific, Business, and Social.  By doing so, you will advance your own career, and more importantly, strengthen your relationships towards become a valued member of your teams.  Learn more about SciPhD and our programs at www.sciphd.com/online-programs-2/.

Day 4: How Critical Skills Impact the Interview

Day 4: How Critical Skills Impact The Interview

In this week’s series, we’ve looked at the critical skills valued by professional organizations, and how your awareness, experience and success in demonstrating those skills with accomplishments can give you a leg up on your competition.  There are two specific criteria that are always at the top of the list when hiring managers consider new candidates for scientific/technical positions:

  1. Can you do the science- Colleagues of mine who have held senior positions in biotech and pharmaceutical companies consistently tell me that the first (and often easiest) assessment is whether the candidate is fluent in the science.  You are recognized for your scientific accomplishments, and mastery in your area has taken years to develop.  Hiring managers recognize that this knowledge and mastery cannot be taught quickly, and so their first evaluation of a candidate is to ensure that mastery is there.  “I’ve got plenty of technical people who can teach my new hires an assay or technique.  But I don’t have the time to teach them the science” is a typical viewpoint.  As critical as this mastery is, the likelihood that your mastery will uniquely make you stand out compared to other PhDs with extensive experience in the same area is unlikely.  So that brings us to the second essential qualification:
  2.  Beyond scientific mastery, the next essential evaluation is, “will the candidate fit well with my team?” Universally, hiring managers comment on how proud they are of the teams they have assembled.  The ability of the team to work together, to put aside personal ambitions for the good of the team’s goals, demand high quality work, and be willing to give and accept constructive criticism are all essential ingredients.

In preparation for the interview, develop well-constructed brief examples of your scientific mastery and your business and social skills, all with accomplishments.  Use “STAR” as your guide in constructing your answers.  What was the Situation, what Task did you have to undertake, what Action did you take to address the challenge, and what was the Result.

So, during interviews for a technical position, in response to the question “Why should we hire you?” convey both your scientific mastery as well as your business and social skills and accomplishments.  The former will put you in the pool of candidates to be seriously considered.  The latter will get you the job!

Day 5: Critical Skills- Practical Tips for the Lab

Day 5: Critical Skills- Practical Tips For the Lab

Hopefully, the importance of embracing all three aspects of your identity- Technical, Business, and Social, in branding yourself as a high-value asset for any hiring manager is clear.  Your technical acumen will get you considered, and your business and social skills and accomplishments will get you the job.  But how can we use this knowledge right now, in our own lab?

  • Whether you are starting or finishing up your PhD, beginning or wrapping up your postdoc, utilizing these skills can make for smoother waters.  Mastering emotional intelligence can provide for more productive negotiations with your PI, whether it is agreeing on the success criteria for your project (i.e. when am I done), or building rapport that leads to strong endorsements and assistance in your job hunt.
  • Thinking about the strategic value of your projects can guide some of your experimental design, increasing the likely impact of your science, both locally, as well as outside your lab or even your institution.  That in turn can help your job prospects whether they lie within our outside academia.
  • Embracing risk management will allow you to better plan your experimental design, and, along with your PI, make better decisions on whether or not an investigative path is worth pursing, considering what could go wrong, vs the return on investment if it goes right.
  • Pursuing formal or informal collaborations with other labs, whether within your institution or beyond can bring additional insight, value and productivity to your PI’s laboratory program, and provide you with a bigger network, and more experience in working with others, developing rapport, and delegating responsibility.
  • Taking on mentoring opportunities could take some work load off your PI, provide you with valuable experience in enabling others, and reinforce your own self-confidence in your knowledge and expertise in your particular scientific area.  One of the best ways to truly understand the nuance and details of your scientific expertise is to have to explain it to others.  Mentoring provides that opportunity.

All of these opportunities will add to your own body of work, and the associated accomplishments will be demonstrations of your mastery in the three critical skill areas that are so valued by professional organizations, and that make up your brand.