I was blown away by the level of response to the survey I sent a few weeks ago. A huge THANK YOU to all who responded. This will help shape the blog content to best support your career challenges. Here’s a snapshot of the results:
Question 1 – What is your highest level of academic qualification?
95% of our community holds a master’s degree or above
Question 2 – How determined are you to progress with a career within academia?
No one responded that they were definitely (or even possibly) keen to progress with an academic career (Figure 1). The overwhelming majority (~80%) responded that they weren’t keen (probably not and definitely not), and the remaining ~20% were unsure (maybe/don’t know).
Figure 1: Responses to the question ‘how determined are you to progress a career within academia?’ Respondents had five pre-defined answers to choose from; definitely keen, probably keen, maybe keen/don’t know, probably not keen and definitely not keen. % of responses shown in legend.
I suspect these results are driven primarily by the convergence of more people seeking academic research posts and ever dwindling research funds. This leads to derivative problems involving life balance, stress, and the need to market (yourself and your work) above actually conducting research.
The lack of interest in progressing within academia also highlights the practical need to overcome the challenge of identifying alternative career options. And this type of information often doesn’t penetrate the academic bubble easily.
Question 3 – What are the biggest career challenges with your career?
The challenges cited can be grouped into three main categories, with the common examples listed below:
Challenges faced within academia: Funding uncertainty, temporary contracts, low pay, lack of a merit-based salary review system, judged by publications only
Challenges in sourcing careers outside academia: Identifying suitable non-academic careers, lack of experience, highlighting transferable skills for non-academic employment, lack of internships, successfully obtaining interviews, finding careers with job security, being overqualified
Individual (personal challenges): Unemployment for prolonged periods of time (>3 months), obtaining an entry-level role in a specific profession (e.g. medical science liaison or science writer opportunities), geographical restrictions
Figure 2: Wordcloud generated from responses to the question ‘what are the biggest challenges with your career?’ Wordcloud generated from the free text answers provided by respondents. WordClouds.com freeware used.
Question 4 – What help would you find most valuable to achieve your next career goal?
The top most prominent answers were; help with job searching, identifying careers and networking (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Responses to the question ‘what help would you find most valuable to achieve your next career goal?’ Respondents had 10 pre-defined answers to choose from and were able to tick all that apply; cover letter writing, effective networking, grant writing, identifying suitable career options, interview preparation, leveraging LinkedIn, salary negotiation, strategic job searching, other and don’t know. Top 8 most frequent answers shown.
Question 5 – Do you have a career plan to help you achieve professional success?
Whilst some of us have a well-defined plan (10.5%), the vast majority (89.5%) only have some sort of a plan or less (i.e. merely an idea or nothing).
Figure 4: Responses to the question ‘Do you have a career plan to help you achieve professional success?’ Respondents had four pre-defined answers to choose from; Yes – a well-defined plan, Yes – some sort of a plan, No – but have an idea, No – no plan. % of responses shown in legend.
These findings speak to the low priority on career development support at academic institutions for students and staff. It remains up to the individual to formulate their own career trajectory. In principle this is fine, but in practice, without the right resources available, each person must reinvent the wheel, which carries extreme time and energy costs with no guarantee of results, whilst fulfilling existing professional and personal obligations. It’s my hope that the resources provided in this blog will eliminate excess toil on this while significantly improving your prospects for success.
In Summary
- Most in our community are not keen to pursue an academic career in the long-term and are searching for viable alternatives
- You face shared challenges: temporary contracts, funding uncertainty, difficulty in identifying suitable non-academic career paths and lack of experience in non-academic roles.
- Top 5 areas of assistance needed were: Job searching, identifying career options, networking, cover letter writing and interview preparation. These will form focus topics for future posts
- 90% of the community lack a well-defined career plan. I’ll also cover this in future articles.
In this, I see reason to be optimistic – your skillset as a researcher enables you to troubleshoot anything and, therefore, do anything. Some simple frameworks and examples can help tremendously in focusing your skills and devising an actionable plan of how to get there.
Feel free to reach out to me directly at info@biomedbadass.com with questions, comments, feedback etc.
Thanks again for your input!
Vicky