Too late to change direction?

Can you postdoc for too long? It’s a question I’ve been asked many times by clients trying to negotiate their career path. You can break their concerns down in to two further questions: How many years should you postdoc before securing an academic job becomes unlikely? And: How many years can you postdoc before employers outside of academia are no longer interested in you?

I love a nice graph, so I’ve attempted to use one to represent the assumptions I think a lot of postdocs make about these questions:

 

 

We can probably agree that during the early part of your postdoc career, you need to take time to build your research track record and reputation in order to make yourself attractive for permanent academic positions, but after an unspecified period of time you might find it harder to get more independent positions as you become ineligible for early career fellowships or selection panels question why you haven’t yet obtained a permanent position. We’re also assuming that during this time you’re becoming increasingly unattractive to employers outside academia as you become so highly specialised. These are sweeping generalisations, of course, but the strategic question is valid: at what point do you know when to stop trying one path so you can maintain your ability to switch to a different one?

If you’re in the first few years of your postdoc career, then my message for you is ‘get planning’. If you’re a little way further along that t-axis, my message for you is ‘don’t panic’. In either case, we’re here to help you.

If you’ve got time on your hands and you can still see an upward trajectory for your academic career, keep up the good work, but don’t neglect your other options. At this stage, you don’t need to commit to any other career path, but if you have a bit of a sense of what you could do outside of academia, it will help mitigate the panic if things don’t work out quite the way you had planned, and it can help you make the most of your time by signposting you to useful activities and networks that could help you to access these roles in the future. Our previous blog posts about deciding your direction will help you with this.

If you’re a little further along the postdoc path, don’t worry, we have lots of examples of postdocs who have made a career change after several research contracts. They key to success here is creating a positive narrative about the change – what’s motivating you? It may well be that you’ve realised that academia isn’t going to work out, and you feel like this change is being forced on you, but an employer isn’t going to see that as a valid reason to recruit you. You need to demonstrate genuine enthusiasm for the role, and this means doing your research beforehand, finding out about the employer and the sector, and what the hot topics are. If you’ve taken the time to do this, through wider reading and speaking to people in the sector, you’ll convince employers that you really want to make this change.

Career change can be challenging at any stage; accepting you need to make a move and working out what you might do next takes some thought. The Postdoc Careers Service is here to help you with any aspect of that process – come and see us if you’d like to talk it over. We can absolutely reassure you that it’s never too late to change direction.

 

Liz Simmonds, Postdoc Careers Adviser

 

What are my career options?

It’s a question that comes up again and again here at the Postdoc Careers Service. The good news is that you have plenty of options, but they take a bit of time to navigate. In the spirit of a new year, let’s make a start….

Academia

Your experience in academia is the baseline against which all options will compare. I rarely meet postdocs who feel that their research is going as well as they’d like it to. But do you feel you are ‘sort-of’ on track to become a lecturer/PI? Not sure? Get feedback from academics in your field and find out what achievements postdocs who have recently got these positions had. If you don’t feel you are competitive, what can you do to make a difference? How realistic is that plan? Would you actually like being a lecturer/PI? Heck, you meet these people every day. Observe what they do for a while and imagine yourself in their shoes. Being a lecturer/PI may be the best known career option for postdocs, but it’s certainly not the only one. Are there other options in academia you would consider as an alternative? Support roles such as scientific facilities or being a long term postdoc, bearing in mind, you may have to move research groups and locations as required?

Research outside academia

OK, let’s say you love doing research but don’t have a burning, some would call it, er, dogged, desire to pursue your own research questions. At the same time you are sick of being a postdoc. How about doing research outside academia? You are, after all, a professional researcher. We have tons of postdocs getting great research jobs in what we often call ‘industry’ – scientific and technology based ones. The pharma/biotech sector is popular but there are many more. Interested?  Employers will look for relevant specialist skills or subject knowledge and a willingness to work towards what they, not always you, deem important. That normally involves teamwork, which many postdocs tell me they yearn for.

Non-research roles

Perhaps you’re done with niche techniques and digging deep into one area, y-a-w-n, but you realise that you enjoy parts of your job. Do you prefer analysing data to generating it? Yup! Got good feedback from a presentation? Like writing papers and reports and, in fact, right now, you have a line of people queuing for you to edit theirs? That’s just a few examples of how to identify your skills, you have many more. ‘So what’, you might say, these skills are ubiquitous in the job market. Actually, employers tell us that they find it hard to get people with many of the skills which you use day in, day out in research. But how do skills translate into actual jobs? Look at some of our examples of amazing jobs postdocs in your shoes have got.

It is healthy to be aware of your career options; there is enough pressure in academia without feeling your options are limited. They’re not.

Wishing you a good start to 2019, dear readers.

Anne Forde, Postdoc Careers Adviser

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