Skills for neuroscience PhD interested in industry

[Butterfly_effect]

I'm starting to consider non-academic career options and am early enough in my PhD that I have substantial time to develop some skills outside of my research (or within it). Do any of you have suggestions for what kind of skills are useful in neuroscience industry? I'm still undecided on the particular type of industry (e.g. pharma vs. biotech), but my research will involve the genetic and developmental sides of neuroscience. Statistics, programming, etc.? 

[biotechie]

15 minutes ago, Butterfly_effect said:

I'm starting to consider non-academic career options and am early enough in my PhD that I have substantial time to develop some skills outside of my research (or within it). Do any of you have suggestions for what kind of skills are useful in neuroscience industry? I'm still undecided on the particular type of industry (e.g. pharma vs. biotech), but my research will involve the genetic and developmental sides of neuroscience. Statistics, programming, etc.? 

This is not specific to neuroscience, but still hopefully helpful! Programming and data mining is becoming a highly sought after skill no matter what aspect of research you end up in. Being able to take huge data sets and find useful data is going to help you in the long run. I highly recommend taking some coding classes and if possible classes specific to data mining and organizing biological data like sequencing.

In addition, if you get the chance to play with CRISPR, do it. That's a question a lot of my friends that are applying for jobs are getting, right now. Everyone wants their new hires to be experienced in the hot, new, tool!

[Edotdl]

Yeah programming experience is useful in general, so you should definitely get some experience. However, unless your lab is very computation heavy, it's unlikely you'll be at the level of a software/machine learning engineer. 

In general, I find the two areas in industry where a neuro PhD could be applied is AI and pharma/biotech. The former would be suited for computational labs and the latter for more experimental wet lab. 

I'm not the familiar with the specific skills needed for the second option but I'd assume it would be along the lines of specific techniques (eg. Crispr as mentioned above.)