What do you want to be when you grow up?
This is a question we rarely escape in our youth and, if we are being honest with ourselves, something most adults grapple with from time to time. The 21st Century world of work is evolving quickly and the concept of a "linear" career is quickly coming to an end. What this means is that deciding what someone wants to do with their life has become an increasingly complex choice.
Photo credit: Johannes Plenio
There is rarely a single, straightforward path to most careers and the options for employment continue to grow. Freelance work abounds and employment sectors such as data science and software engineering didn't even exist as recently as a few decades ago. With a multitude of options, where should post-Ph.D. and early career scientists turn to start their career search?
Career Exploration - Find Your Reason for Being
Career exploration involves thinking about how your skills and interests intersect with something the world needs and will pay you to do. This process helps you find your reason for being, or ikigai in Japanese.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=Zxj3P0enJNQ
Ikigai is what most people search for in their lives. It is a hard thing to obtain fully as it involves aligning:
Photo credit: Science in HD
what you love (your interests), and
your skills (what you’re good at)
with
something the world needs, and
something you can be paid to do.
Where is someone supposed to start on this journey, especially in the aftermath of a Ph.D.? In this article, I will focus on some online resources that are marketed toward graduate students and postdocs. However, these tools and their initial approach of skills, interests, and values assessments can apply to anyone thinking of a career transition. Best of all, they are all available online and free to use.
Career Exploration Resources for Ph.D.s
One great career exploration resource is ImaginePhD, developed by the Graduate Career Consortium.
ImaginePhD and other online resources are used to create what we in the career development field call "individual development plans" - IDPs. Specifically, these resources focus around the concept of aligning your skills, interests, and values with potential careers. Taking online skills and interests assessments through ImaginePhD, myIDP, ChemIDP, or myPath, among others, is the first step in the career exploration process.
Photo credit: Estee Janssens
Once you have these results, your interests and skills then map on to potential job families which you need to further explore to determine which careers in those families may fit your values and other parameters important to you - work/life balance, salary, autonomy, work travel requirements, etc.
For myIDP, career paths are focused on science-related careers but also touch on how your skills and interests map on to careers in science policy, science writing, and sales/marketing. For more on getting the most out of myIDP, see a series of articles that appeared in Science Careers.
What does an IDP look like?
I’ll use my own as an example. From ImaginePhD, my top interests include helping others, connecting ideas from different fields, and meeting and connecting people. My top skills include working with limited supervision, working as part of a team, and contributing to an institution.
These map on to the job families of Higher Education Administration (which I am in now), Communications, Public Relations, & Marketing, and Training.
An important additional point here is that your skills are more than just your technical ability and know-how. Think carefully about the transferable skills you have obtained during your graduate training or postdoc.
These transferable skills may include (see some good verbiage here):
Communication (written & oral)
Project Management (managing multiple projects & deadlines)
Teamwork & leadership
Problem solving (being able to assess an issue and determine a solution)
And more!
ImaginePhD also has a nice career exploration worksheet you can print out and hang somewhere prominent to remind you of potential careers that align with your skills, interests, and values. It also, importantly, emphasizes the next steps required in your career exploration process.
The skills acquired during a Ph.D. are not simply technical; they can be useful in project management, communication, and much more. Don’t sell yourself short. Photo credit: Austin Distel
Digging Deeper Into Potential Careers
After you have identified some job families you are interested in learning more about, ImaginePhD allows you to explore potential career fields further through a variety of resources including lists of common job titles in the field, sample job descriptions, job simulation information from InterSECT Job Simulations, profiles/interviews from people working in the field, and more.
Photo credit: LinkedIn
ImaginePhD also offers for each job family a list of resources to allow you to connect with professionals in that field. These include links to online groups (from LinkedIn) as well as national organizations that may have local chapters in your area. The connection step is critical as it allows you to begin the important process of meeting people who work in the field, learning about the typical tasks they focus on in their work, company culture, etc...this is informational interviewing (& see).
As you get to know these individuals working in a career field of interest to you they can be powerful advocates for you when/if you begin to look into employment at their organization. This is how you build a network - meet like-minded people and get to know them and through your interaction with them and, in the process, show your value.
There are a ton of tips sheets available through ImaginePhD, such as Informational Interviewing Tips, Networking Tips, and LinkedIn Tips. Check them all out on the General Resources section of the ImaginePhD site.
There are also sections for each job family from ImaginePhD focused on skill building - how to get the experiences and expertise needed to be competitive for jobs in that family. These resources include links to webinars and online courses, publications, and more.
When it comes time to apply for jobs, ImaginePhD has example application documents for each job family, links to job boards, and articles with valuable tips on making a great impression with your application materials.
Photo credit: Lee Scott
The Importance of Self-Reflection
Tools such as ImaginePhD can help you begin to map out your career prospects, but the process of finding a career fit that is right for you also takes some deep self-reflection.
You often need to listen to your gut and not overly rationalize a career choice. If you have some internal feeling of doubt/concern about a potential career path, it could be nerves, but it could also be your body telling you it might not be the best fit. Really, you need to integrate the rationale side of you with your emotions and "instincts" to make smart career decisions.
For Ph.D.s, it is hard to dismiss the "typical" path of pursuing a faculty career. However, you really need to decide if you want the lifestyle that comes with a faculty career. There are obviously many forms of faculty careers from primarily doing research and writing grants to primarily teaching. Irregardless, if you find it difficult to envision yourself as being happy in the role, you shouldn't pursue this path just because you have been "trained" to do it.
Personally, this happened with me. I was applying for faculty jobs at large, research-intensive universities but had this lingering doubt that I didn't really want to spend my time conceptualizing projects, working on grant proposals, and writing papers all day.
Only late in my postdoc did I start shifting my focus to other career options. You can read a bit about that career journey here, here, and here. I am happy in my current choice and feel like it nicely fits my personality while giving me a good work-life balance.
Final Thoughts
There are plenty of career options for Ph.D.-trained researchers. Tools like ImaginePhD and other IDP-planning resources can help you begin to discover what those other career options are. While the focus on this article has been on tools for Ph.D.-trained individuals, there are many general career exploration tools out there. Check some out, below.
I believe everyone has a unique set of skills that contribute value to the world. The key is discovering how they map onto your interests and values and can lead to meaningful and fulfilling work.
-Chris
Photo credit: Clark Tibbs
Other Online Career Exploration Tools:
For General Audiences
https://www.careeronestop.org/ExploreCareers/explore-careers.aspx
For K-12 Students