Changing positions several times during our careers is the new working norm. You’ll likely face the ‘what next?’ question multiple times throughout your career.
To answer it, you need to drill down to several additional questions: What motivates me? What do I stand for? What am I good at? What are my strengths? And what do I want to do in the future?
Answering the first five questions in this list requires upfront introspective work. This means being open-minded, practicing self-awareness, and prioritizing learning about yourself as a guide in answering the all-important ‘what next?’ question.
At this point, you might be thinking, “Serious scientists don’t need to navel-gaze to figure things out.” I had the exact same feelings myself when I was first confronted the idea of introspection to assist my career transition from academia to the pharmaceutical (pharma) industry.
My initial temptation was to skip any introspective work and move straight to the job search. However, this would have been a big mistake for two reasons:
- It would have been very difficult to figure out career options that work for me. I would have had to take a chance on something that sounds like it might be right, but might not work out well – essentially gambling with my next career step.
- Industry employees know they need to take active ownership of their own careers. Anyone in industry who doesn’t have this ability is at a distinct disadvantage in the non-academic job market. Without understanding what motivates me and where my strengths lie, I would have had difficulty growing my pharma career.
Without upfront introspective work, I doubt I would have found my current career path in medical writing – a space where I’ve fortunately been able to grow. This is because my career enables me to play to my strengths and aligns with my career goals and personal values.
As a scientist, you have lots of skills to offer employers. Figuring out which of them you want to continue using as you move forward in your career will help you align your work with the things that are important to you.
Introspective Exercises to Guide Your Career:
- Identify your core values: Your core values (your strongest motivators) are a compass to help guide your decisions and ensure you’re living by your values. This sets you up for success. Living by your values enables you to be yourself in the workplace, make better decisions, and navigate non-linear career paths (the norm in industry).
Here’s a tool to help you anchor your work to your core values.
- Understand your skills: Undertake a skills audit. List out ALL your skills, taking time to dig around and make sure your list is comprehensive. The obvious ones related to your technical capabilities often come to the forefront of your mind. These are the skills you use in your research work (Python, cell culture, GCMS, etc.), but then think beyond these.
You’ll have skills in project management, communication, and people management. You may also have information management skills if you’ve worked with big data and programming, and potentially commercial acumen too if you’ve worked in the private sector.
Here’s a list of skills shared by scientific researchers to provide a little inspiration.
Once you’ve written down your list of skills, go through each one and ask yourself:
(i) Am I competent in this, or is this skill underdeveloped? Mark those you are competent in.
(ii) Do I enjoy using this skill? Mark those you answer ‘yes’ to.
Competent skills are the ones you can provide strong evidence for in your job applications and represent your transferable skills for jobs that require them.
The skills you enjoy using represent your motivated skills. Using motivated skills at work will boost your productivity and work quality.
- Identify your strengths: Your strengths come from the things you are naturally good at combined with the skills you’ve generated through your experience.
To find them, look at your list of competent, motivated skills (those you’ve marked twice). For each one, ask yourself the following three questions: Have you used this skill in more than one role? Have you used it within the last three months? Would someone else say it represents one of your strengths? If you answered yes to all three of these questions, these skills represent your strengths (the things you’re good at doing). Bring as many of your strengths to the work you’re doing, and you will find it easier to excel.
Once you understand your transferable skills, core values, and strengths, you can use this information to help you find career opportunities where you can leverage them. Use this knowledge as a guide to help you progress your career.
Keep revisiting this introspective work periodically during your career to help you grow. Personally, I tend to revisit it about once a year, around the time of my annual appraisal, to understand how I can align my own personal needs, strengths, and skillset with the company’s needs. Also, if a career-changing opportunity occurs like a promotion, or a tempting new job is advertised, I’ll revisit the exercises to ensure I’m using this information accurately to help me evaluate an opportunity.
I hope this helps! Let me know if this approach works for you too.