To the current postdoc, grad student, or recent graduate:

Most postdocs and PhDs have been “narrow and deep” in a small segment of an academic field for a long time. As a result, it is a very common career problem to not know what your marketable skills are or what they are worth outside of academia.

Let’s dig deeper on why this is true.

Currently you are part of a very small group (a lab or a section of an academic department often with 5-10? people) and have a very well defined task requiring obvious skills. Your task is to generate data and publish novel interpretations of that data in journals as defined by the requirements of a (usually) federal grant. Skills required are straightforward: articulate a hypothesis, design reliable experiments, generate and authenticate data, draw conclusions, and eventually write and publish results.

The skills required to be effective outside of academia are not so well defined, but here’s the good news: Organizations outside of academia don’t need you to create and write about data all by yourself. They need you to be a part of a larger team to use existing or proprietary scientific or technological knowledge to solve problems deemed important (or profitable) by a company’s leadership. Additionally, well-run organizations outside of academia have robust onboarding, training programs, and workflows/protocols that have been developed over long periods of time and are constantly upgraded and improved.

Essentially, they will teach you what you need to know and find the most effective fit for you as you develop.

Organizations outside of academia need people like you who are motivated and capable of helping solve well-defined problems even though they are not very good at describing what unique combinations of skills they need. My next comment will not be satisfying, I know, but they know what they want when they see it and they need people to fit well in a team of people.

What does this mean for you?

With a bit of research and learning why you can help solve a company’s important problems, you are actually a rather rare commodity. In fact, the employment market is so hot that companies we work with tell us it can take a whopping 13 months to hire PhD-level talent. One company we work with indicated one of the biggest threats to the viability of their organization is the ability to find rare PhD-level talents.

I know this is hard to believe, and as a career counselor I can’t say this to every population I have worked with, but PhDs can work pretty much anywhere there is a difficult problem to solve. In many cases, you are doing companies a favor just by being willing to think about their commercial problems.

So, if you are interested in a societal problem, or have been involved in an interesting technology, a good start to your career transition is to simply identify and engage the organizations that are also interested in these problems and ask them directly how you can be of assistance.

To make that process fun or more interesting, maybe think of the process as an experiment you are conducting just for you and follow your curiosity wherever it leads.

It is ProPhounD’s mission to help postdocs and PhDs find the problems they are interested in solving and helping them provide compelling reasons for why they should be involved. We also help companies with talent shortages meet people they have historically had significant difficulties meeting.

If you are a postdoc or recent PhD, engage with us to learn how to demonstrate your skills and to tell your story.

If you are a company or organization that needs rare PhD talent, please contact me directly to learn about how we bridge the gap between academic talent and the organizations that need them.

Finally, to the postdocs and PhDs reading this post, here’s a success story from one of your peers who is doing a fabulous job getting unstuck:

It lifted a weight from my shoulders just to know some of the key tips you gave me; basically ‘giving me permission’ to go ahead and apply to anything I thought I was interested. Also, letting me know it was ok to negotiate. At this stage with a PhD, one is able to ask — and even if not, one should be able to ask — for a balance of work / life and to customize the opportunity a bit.

At the end, this is where I’m at right now - hoping everything continues flowing and I can hone in all these wonderful opportunities in areas I’m actually good and excited about.

~ Katia

To see how ProPhounD’s founders (all former postdocs) got unstuck, come to an upcoming monthly Career Cafe or reach out to us directly on our website.