Job Skills "They" Don't (Really) Tell You Abou

[juilletmercredi]

Hey all,

After a somewhat disastrous presentation I saw at my job the other day, I started reflecting on the importance of job skills that professors don't really teach you or even discuss when you're in doctoral program, particularly if you want to be a non-academic researcher and/or are interested in having one foot (or toe) outside of academia.

The one I was specifically thinking about in this case is ability to present and translate your findings for a non-scientific audience. I'm a non-academic researcher who spends the majority of my time working and talking with non-scientists - software developers, game designers, producers, program managers, marketers, artists, etc. When I do research, it's so important for me to be able to translate my research and explain research concepts in plain English. It's also important for me to be able to assess what my audience cares about and what they don't. Developers don't really care about the nitty-gritty details or the theoretical foundation for my work; what they care about are the results and how they fit into a framework that will affect their work. They especially want some recommendations for what they should do with my findings. I actually spend a significant amount of time teaching my co-workers about basic scientific principles, how to interpret findings, how to not contaminate research, etc - but all in language and concepts that's easy for them to understand without a PhD.

Ironically, that actually makes them trust me more, not less. In academic science it may be more important to speak the jargon, but in non-academic science it's important to be able to speak their language. It helps them understand I'm not doing any funny stuff just to make myself look better. I saw the flip of this in the presentation I mentioned above - the person in question is also a researcher, and was presenting some results, but this person did not adequately define how they were measuring an important construct, and they used a lot of jargon of their field (one that intersects with mine) when they were explaining the results. Even I had a hard time parsing what they did and I knew how to perform the analysis they did. The rest of the people in the room drilled down, and it was painful.

So how to develop these skills? I found that teaching was probably one of the best ways to do it. When you teach - especially when you teach introductory courses in your field - you have to get really good at boiling down concepts (sometimes sophisticated ones) to a group of bright but uneducated students. Teaching at different levels teaches you how to scale up or down based on your audience. So get some teaching experience if you can, because it can translate really well! Freelancing as a corporate trainer or consultant can also give you similar experience - I worked as a statistical consultant for four years in graduate school, and in that case I was more often working with other doctoral students and professors/researchers who I had to explain statistical concepts to. And practicing grant-writing can help, too...that's kind of an in-between area, because there is some academic language, but I've found that writing NIH grants especially is a lot more simple and jargon-free than most scientific papers.

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What about you other graduates - folks who have finished your PhDs and are now postdocs or professionals? Any skills that you've found indispensable to your careers? And how do you suggest current PhD students develop those skills?

Or PhD students? Are there any skills that your professors are pushing you to learn but you don't know if they're actually that important? Or do you want suggestions on how to sharpen a skill?

Edited November 21, 2017 by juilletmercredi

[TakeruK]

As a student, I attended a few talks on applying to jobs outside of academia. Many of them were given by those who used to be in academia, but there were some given by someone who regularly hires academics but had not completed any graduate work.

I am now a postdoc and I am not applying to jobs this year (thankfully). But in the future, at the next cycle, I expect to be applying to both academic and non-academic positions, mostly because I want to remain in my current geographical location and there's only so many academic jobs.

In these previous seminars, I heard a lot about framing your research in a way that is interesting to non-academic hiring committees. One speaker showed an example academic describing their work on a CV-like document and compared it to how it should appear for one specific tech job (in this case, it was software development). The academic version was focussed on the scientific question and result. The version formatted for the tech job was all about skills and techniques.

So for now, I would plan on using the advice I got to reframe all of my research work as techniques and skills I developed (programming languages, statistical techniques etc.) But I still worry about how this looks when employers will see a ~7 year period of time where I basically highlight skills that would only take 1-2 years for someone who wasn't completing a graduate program to learn and master. Am I wrong to think about trying to indicate the scale/scope of my graduate work? Or should I take this advice at face value and trust that those looking to hire "former" academics will know that we're coming from a different system. Would really like to hear your thoughts!

(P.S. To clarify, there will be no subject content overlap between the research and the industry job(s) I would apply to, because I don't think there are very many companies that would make decisions based on our understanding of planet orbits or how many planets are out there! But the algorithms and computational techniques I use does overlap with what companies may want to hire).

[juilletmercredi]

When I applied for non-academic jobs, I framed my time as a PhD student like a job in and of itself. I had a section titled "Graduate Researcher" or "Research Assistant" or something like that, and I described the skills and accomplishments in that section like I would any other job. The fact that it's 7 years won't make employers think "They took 7 years to learn what everyone else does in 1-2." If framed correctly, it should be more like "This person has been using and improving these skills for the past 7 years." So yes, it should be focused much more on skills and techniques used - and accomplishments made in a way that non-academics care about.

I don't think it's necessarily wrong to refer to the scope of your research, as long as it makes sense in context. A lot of the jobs I was applying to weren't in my specific subfield but they were in the social sciences, so I talked about my research more broadly to exemplify the kind of social science research experience I had. But I didn't do it in my resume - I did it in cover letters and/or in interviews themselves where it made sense.

 

[GreenEyedTrombonist]

I work as a writer of pop culture content right now so I'm always switching between academic voice for school and conversational voice for work. Ultimately, I'm of the mindset that you need to know your audience and cater to them. That does not mean dumbing down your work or only saying what they want to hear. As mentioned above, it's about explaining yourself in a way that is engaging and understood. My work has definitely helped me hone my skills for identifying my audience and presenting the information in the best way for them. 

 

[TakeruK]

Thanks @juilletmercredi!

[eternallyephemeral]

I completely agree that getting any experience consulting is really helpful for eventually making it into industry. Consulting has taught me so much about communicating the business or policy impact, understanding how to reframe non-scientific questions into scientific terms, but also (of course) how to reframe scientific terms into the jargon that fits the situation best.

Consulting can help (though so can other things) by showing researchers that they do have valuable skills. Because it takes a lot of confidence to tell someone much more senior and more experienced than you what they should do, it can bring our sense of our own skill better in line with our actual ability. We know this can be very skewed, in the case of impostor syndrome, generally low self-esteem, and on the opposite end, in the case of arrogance and narcissism.