SPOTLIGHT ON POSTGRADUATE OPPORTUNITIES

Focus on skills

Broaden your horizons beyond research and hone skills for success outside academia.

Work out whatever it is you need to do to advance to the next level. But also make sure you have a Plan B. Robert Hardwick, BBSRC

WHEN ELIZABETH Duxbury completes her PhD in biology at the University of East Anglia, she hopes to find a faculty job to continue her studies on the role of genetics in ageing. She knows, however, that this might not be an option open to her.

“Realistically, when you read the statistics it's quite difficult to procure permanent positions in academia,” says Duxbury, who is in the fourth and final year of her programme. In the event that, like many other students working toward science doctorates, she can't find a faculty position, she's taking steps to explore other career possibilities and broaden her skillset.

Elizabeth Duxbury took advantage of work experience to help her decide what career path to take. Credit: ELIZABETH DUXBURY

There is a wide range of career opportunities outside academia open to people with a science master's or PhD. Plenty of those are research careers, in big pharmacology or small biotechnology companies, chemical companies, manufacturing and the healthcare industry. There are also many non-research jobs that draw on scientific skills and knowledge, in government and policy, regulatory areas, patents and intellectual property, marketing, science writing and education at various levels. Many universities have increased their efforts to inform students of those opportunities and to help them develop skills that will improve the prospects of those with a science degree for landing a job. “As a PhD student or post-doc researcher, you are highly employable,” says Robert Hardwick, programme manager for Doctoral Training Partnerships at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) in the UK.

Duxbury's participation in one of these BBSRC training partnerships is why her PhD programme lasts four years, instead of the typical three for the UK. The partnerships aim to provide students not only with scientific training, but a variety of professional development opportunities designed to make them more employable. Students are required, for example, to do a three-month professional internship. Duxbury spent hers, in the second year of her programme, at the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

Credit: THINKSTOCK

Her role was to write a brief summarizing the science behind genetically modified crops so that members of Parliament could consider the technology's policy implications. She had to research the issue by reading reports, talk to experts, and then translate the science into a relatively short report that would be comprehensible to non-scientists. Duxbury feels that the experience improved her communication skills, built her confidence and expanded her network of contacts. “I found it quite challenging writing that concisely,” she says. And she had no time to waste, with only three months for the whole project. “You're working to tighter deadlines that you're used to for PhD research.” which may come in handy in the future when she's considering job opportunities.

The BBSRC funds about 2000 PhD students every year. Approximately 40% of them stay in academia, Hardwick says. Whatever career path they chose however, he says it's important that young researchers develop skills beyond those required for bench work, including meeting the goals and deadlines common outside academic labs, and how to work with people with different training and backgrounds. “We wanted to really embody professional skills as a core component of our PhD programme,” Hardwick says.

Networking and a proactive attitude are what Iwan Roberts, founder of Puridify, advises postgraduates to focus on. Credit: IWAN ROBERTS

The council also exposes students to alternative work environments through its CASE studentships programme, which requires them to spend between three and 18 months working with an industrial partner. Partnerships have included pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer and GSK, the food company, Nestle, and Swiss agribusiness, Syngenta. A different route

Centres for Doctoral Training

University College London (UCL) runs several Centres for Doctoral Training (CDT), funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which cover everything from photonics to materials science to financial computing. Graduate students have a choice of about 200 courses in a variety of skills, such as statistical data analysis, experimental design, presentation skills, as well as scientific, grant proposal and CV writing. Each course is worth a certain number of points, and students must earn a minimum of 20 points each year.

Students are also required to take a professional skills course in their first term, developed in conjunction with Vitae, an international career development programme based in Cambridge, UK. The course covers ethics, responsible innovation, the role of professional bodies, the significance of professional registration and licensing, and other issues working engineers need to know about. The centre also invites alumni to speak to students about a wide variety of career paths, which can be eye-opening, says Gary Lye, director of UCL's Industrial Centre for Doctoral Training in Bioprocessing Engineering. “There are still some people who enter the PhD and think ‘I'm going to do earth-shattering research and go on to be a professor and nothing else matters,” he says. “When they hear from all the other alumni and realize that there are other, rewarding and important careers, they bend a bit.”

Beyond the UK

Outside the UK, there's also a growing emphasis on getting students to think about more than just professorships. “The trend now is to prepare the students for a wider setting, not only in an academic career, but in the real world of companies,” says Konstantina Yannakopoulou, head of CYCLON-HIT, a programme training young researchers to develop carriers for antimicrobial substances, and professor of chemistry at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the National Center of Scientific Research, “Demokritos,” in Athens, Greece.

The scheme is part of the Marie Curie Innovative Training Networks programme, in which universities, research centres and companies collaborate to train PhD students in academic settings and in industry. They also seek to get people working and studying in countries outside their own, which Yannakopoulou says not only exposes them to new career opportunities, but also gets them to learn to deal with different people, a useful life skill.

In the US, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) promotes career training through its Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training (BEST) awards, which support programmes to train graduate and doctoral students for biomedical research careers outside of academia. The BEST awards provided $13.7 million to fund postdoctoral offices at a number of US universities and medical schools, to offer career counseling and training services to their students. The awards last for up to five years, after which the institutions will report on what was successful and what didn't work, in the hope that other universities can implement similar programmes, says Patricia Labosky, the NIH Program Officer for BEST. Such services, she says, can be valuable even to students who stay in academia.

Young scientists should be thinking about possible career options as early as when they're deciding on which graduate school to attend, and should take into consideration the sort of career services and training offered by their potential schools, says Labosky. They should ask about the CV writing and job interview skills they teach, whether they hold networking events, and how they help their trainees explore career options. Many of the better schools now provide such information on their web pages for prospective students.

This emphasis on thinking about careers outside of academia is part of a culture shift that hasn't fully settled in, she says. “I don't think it was ever discussed when I went to grad school. It was just sort of assumed you would go become a principle investigator.”

Many students still feel that the most desirable path is to a full professorship, and Hardwick says there's no point in telling them they won't achieve that, just as long as they put some time into thinking about other options. “If that is your Plan A, absolutely fine. Work out whatever it is you need to do to advance to the next level,” he advises. “But also make sure you have a Plan B.”