PhD Transition Report On-Demand

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses what is the real reason employers are not hiring you 
• Next, Isaiah reveals what tools PhDs have at their disposal to get employer’s attention
• Finally, Isaiah explains how can PhDs overcome invisibility to be hired in well paying roles

Employers can only hire you if you are visible to them. The number one reason employers are not hiring you in industry is because you are invisible to them. This is an attention economy. As a PhD who has spent their entire life in academia, you are attention poor. Your job candidate profile is not adept. Resume is being ignored due to obscurity, not a lack of technical skills. 

Technical skills are not what gets you hired. Most companies care very little about technical skills. They can teach you technical skills. You can learn on the job. Besides, their techniques are likely proprietary. Lightyears ahead of the underfunded techniques PhDs master in academia.  Companies have automated machines to do the tedious tasks done by PhDs in academia. They don’t need PhDs to perform such tasks. 

 Again, industry employers are not hiring you because you do not exist to them. You are invisible. That is the major reason. Every other excuse is a waste of time and a cover for unorganized, inactive job search. It is so much easier to blame lack of success in job search on the lack of some skill, certification, or degree. While the hard truth is you can’t get hired because you refuse to reach out to meet employers or employees. 

It is your refusal to have challenging conversations with people in industry that is keeping you from transitioning. 

Reach out. Network with professionals. Think of all the tools you have at your disposal today for getting an employer’s attention. All information is available on the website. Some websites have a careers page that gives you specific information on how to get in touch with them. You can find these employers on LinkedIn too. Email them. Or simply pick the phone up and call their office. Ask to speak to someone in the hiring department. Let’s not pretend like you can’t get an employer’s attention. Instead, let’s admit the truth – you are invisible by choice. 

As PhDs, we have been trained for years and years to keep to ourselves. Over time, we have become isolated in our ivory towers. In our isolation, we tell ourselves stories that fit our situation. Shifting blame off of ourselves and onto imaginary forces. We imagine that we are not being contacted by industry employers because our PhD has made us overqualified. Or we imagine that our PhD background is too niche.

In reality, however, we just don’t want to reach out to anyone because it’s too uncomfortable. 

Nobody in the industry knows you. They won’t unless you put yourself out there. Having the best resume in the world will not get you hired. Merely uploading resume to a Global 500 company’s job site will not help. They get 2,000 resumes per day per open position. And filter out 90% of them automatically based on applicant tracking system (ATS) software metrics. 

But spending time to complete every section of your LinkedIn profile can increase your visibility on LinkedIn Recruiter. Don’t waste your time by failing to correctly reply to the recruiters who reach out to you. There is a cost to playing the attention game incorrectly. Many hiring managers and recruiters will never come back to a job candidate’s LinkedIn profile if they decide that you lack industry credibility. 

Some top employers have a mandatory six to twelve month waiting period before they will consider you for any other position at their company. Take your job search seriously. Create a strategy. Your industry job search is not a trial-and-error affair. 

Don’t do a poor and sloppy job search. It will burn bridges. 

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post The Real Reason Employers Aren’t Hiring You appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses why it is important for PhDs to know what they are chasing
• Next, Isaiah reveals why PhDs must ask the right questions
• Finally, Isaiah explains why professional lifestyle of choice is important for PhDs

Chasing a career?Ask yourself. What is important to you in life? What are you chasing? And why? Can’t answer these questions? You’re in trouble because without these answers you have no idea what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. Everyone is chasing happiness of some kind. 

The problem is it’s not defined. Define what happiness means for you. Or what will bring happiness in your life. Happiness is just a feeling. That makes figuring out what will make you happy right now incredibly simple. Figure out which actions will give you the feeling you’re chasing the most frequently. Put this in the context of your career. Which activities do you want to spend most of your time doing throughout the day? 

Not the overly simplistic, hedonistic happiness like overeating pizza, drinking too much wine, or binge watching shows on Netflix or Amazon Prime. Rather the deeper, more complex fulfillment. 

Lasting happiness comes with meaningful achievement. Think what daily professional actions can lead you to the most meaningful achievement? Which characteristics of your career could lead to this fulfillment? Ask the right questions to find out what is important to you. Simple questions that probably you’ve never asked yourself.  

Questions like, Do you want to work with a large team or in a small team daily? Or, perhaps no team? Want to work with numbers or large data sets? Or do you prefer smaller data sets? Do you collect and analyze quantitative data like the user metrics or qualitative data like survey responses sent in from a company funded focus group? Or, both? Does reading and writing appeal to you? Are writing intensive positions ambient for you?

Would you prefer to work at the company’s headquarters or at one of their smaller, remote satellite locations? Does field work excite you? Or, do you want to work at a home office entirely? Are you willing to travel and, if so, how frequently? Most importantly, when it comes to a company’s operations, where on the spectrum of innovation and commercialization do you want to be? 

These questions can help you understand the situation better.

Everyone has a unique set of professional lifestyle characteristics they consider most important to them. Define these characteristics. Then consider them before starting a job search. Those who did have got hired more quickly. They got paid higher salaries and enjoyed their work more. Then, create your own list of characteristics. 

These are the top 12 most popular characteristics. These 12 are listed below in random order. Write these 12 characteristics down and then rank them in order of importance to you. The ranking is highly individualistic. Hence, you must rank them in terms of order of priority for you and your ideal professional lifestyle, not someone else’s ideal. The characteristics are: High salary position, Remote position, In-house position, Innovation position, Commercialization position, Management position, Entry-level position, Writing-intensive position, Numbers-heavy position, Travel time >30% position, Customer-facing position, Highly technical position.

Once you have your characteristics ranked, you can chase your target job. 

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post What Career Are You Chasing? appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses why it is important for PhDs to set specific target 
• Next, Isaiah reveals why chasing job titles will not PhDs hired into the industry
• Finally, Isaiah explains why professional profile is important for PhDs

Industry job titles are a lot different than those in academia. There are several job titles. But you must decide what you want your professional lifestyle to look like first. Understand what you want. Set your career goals. Only then start fitting job titles to it. Choose the right career based on what would give you a sense of fulfillment. Do you know which career is right for you? Probably not.

Most PhDs never set professional goals. They don’t set a target. They just fall forward into whatever position happens to come next. Without a target they get into any position. Only a few PhDs start searching for a job outside of academia. They do the research necessary to start understanding the industry landscape, sectors and job titles. But start chasing some title that sounds impressive. 

This would never lead them to the professional lifestyle they truly want. 

Chasing job titles is a losing strategy. Realize the pitfalls of not considering the professional lifestyle you were chasing. Don’t chase titles. Rather choose the career that will give you fulfillment. “Medical Science Liaison” may be trending but you don’t like to travel and hate giving presentations. “Management Consultant” demands respect and recognition. But that doesn’t matter if you hate Microsoft Excel or your personal situation would never allow working eighteen hours a day, five days a week on site in a different city every week for 52 weeks a year?

Becoming a PhD and being called “doctor” will not automatically result in a tenured, untouchable position filled with respect, rewarding work, and resources you need to excel. But it doesn’t work that way. How is it working out for your advisor or for the majority of lifetime academics? Would you have done things differently when it came to planning your career? Would you have created a better target for yourself to chase? 

Job titles can be rat poison to your job search. Titles can distract you from the professional lifestyle that gives you the sense of achievement and fulfillment. PhDs look for these in their career. Job titles can also be used against you. Either to compensate for a lower salary offer or refusal to promote you in terms of salary. Or used to lure you into a job that is not the right fit for you. Performance is the most valuable resource to employers. Not titles. Not experience either. 

Your ability to drive the right results is what matters. Companies spend the majority of their budgets on hiring, onboarding, and developing performance-based talent. You are the talent in this equation. Companies will do whatever they can to find, influence, poach, and retain talent. Their goal is to keep as much of the best talent as possible. Even invent job titles to get talent. Hire recruiters to take talent from their competitors. They will spend billions of dollars to send you and everyone like you advertisements about how great it is to work at their company. Or how impressed your friends would be if you were called a Senior XYZ versus a Junior XYZ, even though both pay the same amount. The only way for you to avoid letting anyone – in academia or industry – from implanting their career goals into your head, is to actively set your own career goals. 

The key, however, is to start by setting goals for your dream professional lifestyle, not your dream job title. 

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post You Can’t Hit A Target You Don’t Set appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses why it is important for PhDs to have a strong job candidate profile
• Next, Isaiah reveals how PhDs should manage job candidate profile
• Finally, Isaiah explains why a professional profile is important for PhDs

Many PhDs want to transition out of academia. To get hired in the industry, you need to craft your professional profile carefully and correctly. Your job candidate profile should communicate your PhD worth in the language of the industry. PhDs acquire many skills. Highlight the as the right keywords. Your professional profile includes your industry resume and your LinkedIn profile. 

These give the recruiter a comprehensive idea about your expertise and skills with respect to the job at hand. You can expand your profile to include other documents and other social media profiles. However, the most searched ones are resume and LinkedIn profiles. 

Spend very little time during your job search on your professional profile.

Regardless of background, PhDs are expert researchers. Highly trained in identifying problems and finding solutions to those problems. Create a profile compiling these skills. And then only slightly adjust it as needed based on the jobs you target. Applying to a new job online? Uploading a resume? Make the resume highly targeted to that position. Use appropriate keywords and connect them to your skills and expertise. Keywords should have every technical skill and transferable skill from the job posting inserted into the resume. 

If you do not have a particular skill on the job posting, find a way to insert the skill by mentioning it alongside the relevant skills. Or simply mention your ability to perform tasks related to the skill. Write “Experience using XYZ skill relevant to ABC skill required for the position” whereby ABC skill is the skill on the job posting that you would not have been able to mention without first mentioning the relevant skill you actually have. Or  write, “Ability to perform XYZ analysis on ABC instrument”. 

Professional profile is not only online or on paper, it’s also in person. Prepare to present yourself as a credible and viable solution. A solution to the problem an industry employer is facing. If there is a need. Job is posted. Find out that need. Learn why the job is open in the first place. Find out before you interview with the company. 

To get a job offer following any real-time interviewing interaction with an employer requires you to display a certain level of mastery. Not mastery over your skills alone or even over the job at hand. But mastery over yourself. Employers evaluate you on your self-mastery. During any industry interview. Most PhDs find this very hard to believe but it is absolutely true. Only a few employers will require anything from you beyond answering a few questions during an interview. Industry employers will pay you tens of thousands of dollars a month based on the answers you give during a few short meetings. So based on the short time interaction, why would they commit their money and resources? 

Industry employers must commit to hiring you based on very little information over a very short period of time. Therefore, they will carefully evaluate your behavior and response. How you master yourself even under stress. Hence, don’t study common interview questions or wait until you get an interview to prepare for an interview. This “cramming” is ineffective. You need to practice interacting with other professionals in a very professional way behaviorally and you need to start now. 

You can have the professional lifestyle you’ve always wanted. It’s waiting for you. 

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post Your Job Candidate Profile appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses why should  PhDs create a job search strategy
• Next, Isaiah reveals how PhDs can create a successful job search strategy 
• Finally, Isaiah explains what PhDs should do after creating a job search strategy

What does it take to get hired into rewarding industry careers? What must PhDs do to get hired into a fulfilling PhD level job? These questions are essential. PhDs think about getting hired without any actual execution. This leads to a sense of failure, rejection and frustration. PhDs need a PhD level job. A job where you can do meaningful work.

Industry job search needs a campaign. It has to be executed in the correct sequence. Start with understanding your career options. Then create a job search strategy for those options. An effective strategy needs the correct sequence. Don’t haphazardly execute different job search related activities at different times. Rather be organized and in order.

You have to design a campaign. Sketch a map out from start to finish. Trace the steps. Follow your sketch.  But plan for contingencies. Don’t wake up randomly and submit a few resumes, do nothing to make progress in your transition. Then reach out to a few contacts another day. And wait for magic. This sequence sounds absurd. As you read it, did you think to yourself “Ridiculous! No one searches for a job like this!”?

You need to record your progress. Make a spreadsheet with 5 columns. Mention Companies of Interest, Job Postings or Informational Interview Notes, Company Contacts, Date You Last Followed Up, Next Follow Up Date. These sections are imperative. Don’t just fly by the seat of your pants. If we catalogued your job search activities in a spreadsheet by the hour, what would the end result look like? Thinking about your job search does not count as an activity. Desire to transition doesn’t count. Nor does playing out various scenarios in your head like “If I apply to this job, will anyone get back to me?” or “Should I reach out to this person on LinkedIn, or shouldn’t I?”. Thinking, dreaming and considering the possibilities of your transition are not the same as executing a job search. Document your progress. Write down your plans for each day of the month.

 Do you have a plan? Are you following a protocol? If not, it’s time to start doing so.

Have a strategy in place? Good! Now, you must grow and engage (or reengage) your network. Do you want a job that pays well? You need referrals. Networking doesn’t have to be painful. Start by growing your network. Talk with the professionals. Ask them about the projects that they are working on. Get them to talk about the challenges. About how they got into those roles in the first place. Do informational interviews. The major component of your networking efforts is following up. Consistently following up with an ever-growing list of contacts at your companies of interest. 

You hate people? That’s bad. Talk to strangers. You can’t stay on government assistance programs for the rest of your life. If you want a job that pays well. And allows you to do the best possible work you can do. You must get comfortable with the process of seeking job referrals. 

At the heart of any effective job search strategy is an intelligent networking strategy. The time for you to start strategizing is now. 

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post Creating A Job Search Strategy appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses why PhDs are masters of learning
• Next, Isaiah reveals why PhDs  must communicate their ability to learn to employers
• Finally, Isaiah explains where can PhDs leverage their learning skill

PhDs are masters of learning. There is a huge difference between leaving graduate school with a Masters degree rather than a PhD. Masters degree are those who have mastered a field. PhD is much more. PhDs contribute to the field. They advance the field further. Less than 2% of the population has a PhD. Because adding to a field is hard. Anyone can regurgitate information. However, it’s much harder to create information.  It is difficult to bring new knowledge into existence for the very first time. But PhDs have done it. You are a creator of information.

This is one of your most valuable and most transferable skills. Don’t assume that everyone can create information. Most job candidates can’t even do a book report. You spend years creating information. Months putting it together into a hundred page thesis just so five other people can read it. You chase a hypothesis till you prove it. PhDs do research and substantiate the findings with evidence. You add new information to the field.

Innovation and tenacity is uncommon. Communicate to every employer you approach.

PhDs are fast learners. They learn faster than any other group of people. PhDs rigorously learn. The acronym “PhD” stands for a doctor of philosophy. Philosophy stands for knowledge and the ability to ascertain knowledge. This makes PhDs quite literally doctors of learning. Your ability to learn quickly, especially on the job, is incredibly valuable to employers. It’s also exceptionally rare. An average job candidate tries to learn a new software program or Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). Then watch a PhD learn how to use that same software program or SOP. On the contrary PhD learns at a much faster speed.  PhDs don’t need to be spoon fed every detail. Employers need autonomous learning.

Speed of learning is a competitive advantage that frightens other job candidates. This fear is often expressed through misinformation like, “You’re overqualified if you have a PhD” or “PhDs are lab rats and can’t understand business” or “You can’t get a job without industry experience”. Don’t believe these lies. Industry experience can often hurt your chances of getting a job. Truly because now the employer has to un-train you on the previous company’s culture and processes before they can re-train you on their culture and processes. Communicate your ability to learn quickly to employers. Leverage it to your advantage.

PhDs can transition into all 11 sectors of business as defined by the S&P 500 index.  Positions involving information technology, healthcare, communication services, consumer discretionary, financials, industrial, consumer staples, utilities, real estate, materials, and energy. You want to be one of the highest paid R&D or Medical Directors in your field, or the most sought-after Data Scientist, Project Manager. Be it Product Manager, Principal Scientist, Senior Engineer or Clinical Research Associate in your business sector.

You need the learning skill. Methods learned over a decade will lead you to success. As a PhD, you have the value necessary to be sought after by industry employers throughout your career. 

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post PhDs Are Doctors Of Learning appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah explains why some PhDs fail to get hired in the industry
• Next, Isaiah reveals what PhDs fail to see in the industry hiring process
• Finally, Isaiah describes how understanding the industry hiring funnel can be leveraged to get hired in high paying positions

PhD job search is not easy. Understanding the expectations is crucial. Many PhD-level job candidates fail to get hired in industry. Just  because they incorrectly align their efforts with what the hiring funnel looks like from an employer’s perspective. The hiring funnel is the company’s increasingly stringent workflow. This is the selection process  that job candidates go through on their way to being hired. 

On an average, companies receive about 250 resumes per day. Larger companies receive more than that. But out of those resumes only 12 to 15 of the job candidates will be invited for the phone screen interview. Companies stop reading resumes after they’ve read 10% of them. An even  smaller percentage of candidates from the phone screen will proceed to the next step. Out of the 12 to 15 people the company does a phone screen with, only three or four will be called for a video interview. Finally, only one or two job aspirants will be invited  for a site visit. 

Industry hiring process is different and so are the expectations from candidates. Most job candidates only focus on resumes and interviews. PhDs start their job search with excitement. Updating their resume then uploading it to a job site. They feel accomplished. Because they worked towards their job search process. It is all they can see of the hiring process. 

However, they’re not looking at what needs to go on behind the scenes to disrupt this funnel. Not thinking about how they can accelerate themselves through the funnel. Or atleast skip certain parts of the funnel, or guarantee their progress from one stage to another. Instead, they only see the resume start of the funnel and the site visit interview end of the funnel.

Learn the industry hiring process. Ask a few questions. What if I could skip the resume stage of the funnel altogether and not be one of 525 resumes? Is that possible? Who could I talk with to schedule a phone screen today? Could I get hired without a site visit? Or get a job offer right after a video interview? How could I make myself the best job candidate?  Could I skip the funnel all together? How could I create my own funnel and get multiple companies to fight over me? 

All of these are possible. You can do all of these things. Have multiple job offers. Leverage one offer against the other. When you get a job offer from one company, you can go back to every company you have been talking to and ask them to push you all the way through their hiring funnel. You can ask them to give you a job offer so you can consider their offer before taking a position somewhere else.

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post Understanding The Industry Hiring Funnel appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah explains why PhD students should focus on their job search
• Next, Isaiah reveals how lack of specific goals that holds PhD students back in academia
• Finally, Isaiah describes how academia flips PhD job search strategy upside down

As a PhD student, you may have several questions regarding your future. A major question is: How soon should I start my job search? An industry job search is maddening. The reason that this is so challenging is because there’s so much uncertainty. The path has not been laid out before. Academia is vague on this on purpose. We are never trained rigorously on how to do it in academia. Most PhDs are never, ever trained on how to execute a job search at all. 

Knowing how to apply for a job is the limiting factor. It dictates how successful your industry job search and subsequent industry career will be. How successful your career is will be a major determinant in your personal level of achievement and fulfillment.  Especially after spending decades in academia. Where your career ends up dramatically affects how respected and impactful your life is. PhD students must focus on their job search at the earliest to avoid being unemployed after graduating. 

You may disagree depending on the country, culture or ideology you identify with. Your viewpoint, no matter how different or virtuous, does not change the fact that you want to transition out of industry. Get hired into an impactful industry job. 

A better job and a better career will increase your quality of life and sense of purpose. Regardless of your starting point and of how stuck you feel in academia right now.

When it comes to executing an industry job search, most PhDs procrastinate.  They think about getting an industry job. Procrastinate more, upload an academic-style resume to hundreds of job sites. Hence fail to get a response and then give up. Sound familiar? If you have a PhD or are about to get one then take charge of your career. Move ahead. Learn about the process and the best practices. I have personally heard from thousands of PhDs from 152 countries that the above sequence encapsulates their current industry job search strategy or the strategy. They first tried before giving up and reaching out to me. So, why doesn’t this particular job search strategy work?

Because it’s flipped upside down. Academia and your own academic mindset flips this. Turn it right side up starting now.   

You are not crazy for wishing to advance your career. Neither is your desire to set a milestone, some actual goal or target is weird. The academic mindset is flawed. They’re making it vague and not giving you a target on purpose. So they don’t have to commit.  

Typically the PhD job search starts by uploading resumes and hoping for the best. Even smaller percentage of PhDs review interview questions. They imagine answering the questions correctly. Only a handful record their progress and connections during a job search. A rare few, if any, will devise a networking strategy. Build and reactivate their network, and seek job referrals. The problem is that everyone is executing their job search in the upside-down order that academia taught them: resumes, interviews, strategy, referrals. 

Due to lack of training, PhDs assume that an industry job search mirrors an academic job search. Or they believe it mirrors the peer-reviewed publication process. Write a document similar to an academic paper (resume) and send it off to reviewers (employers). And then if the reviewers like the work they will ask me to come in and defend in an interview similar to the way my thesis committee would. You couldn’t be more wrong.  The academic social norms you are following now will not get you hired in industry. 

This is why so many PhDs spend most of their time writing and rewriting their resumes, or LinkedIn profiles. Then fantasizing about a phone screen or interview. Spending very little time, if any, creating and recording a job search strategy. Or building and activating their job referral network. This is backwards. It’s upside down. If you want to get hired into the best possible job for you, you need to flip this sequence on its head. 

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post How Academia Flipped Your Job Search Strategy Upside Down appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses why PhDs should transition out of academia
• Next, Isaiah reveals the three much sought after skills 
• Finally, Isaiah explains why PhDs are valuable for industry employers

Many PhDs want to transition out of academia. They feel professionally unfulfilled in academic positions. Overworking in uninspiring roles is common. In academia PhDs are also underpaid. Marginal academic stipends or fellowships or wages. Numerous PhDs are unable to find any meaning or joy in their academic careers. This negatively impacts both their professional and personal lives. 

Information and strategy are key for transition. A major obstacle faced by PhDs is the lack of training on how to get a job outside of academia. You need to create a job search strategy and stick to it. Most PhDs have been in academia for the entirety of their professional careers. Therefore, learning the language of the industry becomes more crucial.  

Another major issue is imposter syndrome. Staying in academia for too long harms PhDs. Many PhDs get convinced that they can’t be successful in industry. They falsely believe that their lack of post-PhD industry experience negates them from consideration for top industry roles. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Communicating your PhD worth in the language of the industry is imperative. As PhDs we acquire many skills. Highlight these as the right keywords.  Surveys of Global 500 employers show that the top three desired skills for industry positions are critical thinking, complex problem solving, and correct decision-making. Employers need job candidates who can correctly identify problems. And then find the solution to that problem. 

PhDs like you excel in all three of these areas. Regardless of your PhD background, you are an expert researcher. Highly trained in identifying problems and finding solutions to those problems. Remember the uncountable hours, days, weeks, months, and years you’ve spent trying to find answers to the world’s toughest unknown questions. As a PhD, you know how to attack questions from every different angle. PhDs can follow a lead through academic journal articles, book references, and countless graphs, charts and plots. Even those obscure, barely readable figures published ten or more years ago. You know how to prove even the minute aspect of your overall hypothesis. 

Employers deeply value this for any industry role. Make sure they know you have these skills.

As a PhD you have dealt with uncertainty. You thrive in adverse situations and make a way out. The uncertainty of whether your next grant will be funded. You have no idea if your paper is going to get passed that third reviewer and get published. Or when your committee is going to give you the green light to defend your thesis. You don’t even know if the project you’re working on has an answer at all! 

Your life’s work – could be proven untrue at any time. Despite such uncertainty you work relentlessly. You know that without uncertainty, discovery would be impossible. Innovation wouldn’t exist. While most people don’t understand the relationship between uncertainty and creation. But you do. Others want a sure thing and will spend their entire lives choosing unhappiness over uncertainty because of that. 

Use this to your advantage by leaning into your ability to work through uncertainty towards innovation. And communicate this to employers. Employers value your ability to wrangle uncertainty. You can transition into industry. Wake up excited for your career every day. Be respected by your peers and valued for your skills, training and education. 

You can have the professional lifestyle you’ve always wanted. It’s waiting for you.

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post Why PhDs Are Valuable To Industry Employers appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah explains the reason why PhDs need to communicate their value to the employers in the language of the industry
• Next, Isaiah reveals which skills are valued more by the employers while hiring
• Finally, Isaiah describes the powerful tools that PhDs can use to communicate their PhD value to the employers

PhDs aspire to get into a career where they can have an impact. A job that requires a PhD. Where they are compensated fairly. But there can be several reasons why PhDs don’t get hired. The biggest obstacle to transition into industry is the way that PhDs approach the job search. The challenge is to transition into an industry career that provides a PhD level impact and compensates fairly. 

It is all about communicating your PhD value to attract employers. How to reinvent your professional brand for industry using industry nomenclature? What makes your PhD and your experiences unique? Learn which job titles are good for you. Discover companies that are actively hiring PhDs with your background. Eliminate the distractions. Look for companies that fit you best. Ascertain how to properly read and understand an industry job description. You have to communicate your value in the language of the industry. 

Make it impossible for employers to be able to ignore you, make it impossible, to be invisible to them.

Technical skills are important. But not absolute. Reason? Those are not the only skills employers look for in their candidates. The top desired skills for industry positions would  not be some niche technical skill. Despite what they admit publicly, most companies care very little about your technical skills. They can teach you those skills. As a PhD, you naturally excel in your niche areas. Regardless of your background, you are an expert researcher. Your resume is being ignored due to obscurity. Industry employers are not hiring you because you’re invisible to them. Your technical skills will not give you visibility. 

Skills like critical thinking, complex problem solving and decision making are crucial. They want people who can correctly identify problems and then solve that problem. It’s the skills that are defined with their industry language that are key to hiring. What they speak day in and day out. Don’t use a cover for your unorganized inactive job search. This is where we have to bear some responsibility. Never use excuses as a lack of experience or skills because that gives us an out. Rather work harder. Change your approach and think differently. Go through that uncomfortable process of change of admitting that you have work to do. It’s much easier to be lazy. So much easier to blame the lack of some skills or certification, degree, or experience. The hard truth is you refuse to reach out to meet employers and employees. The reason is your refusal to have challenging conversations to do the new things required with people in industry that is keeping you from transitioning.

We don’t want to change and follow a new process. We don’t want to get off the top of our mountain peak of higher education and start at the bottom of another mountain. The mountain of an industry job search. But now you have lots of tools at your disposal to get the employer’s attention. You can find everything you need to know about an employer on their website. That gives you specific information about how to get in touch with them. You can find these employers on LinkedIn. Email the employers. Or pick up the phone to call their office to speak to someone in the hiring department. 

But this is uncomfortable. So you pretend like you can’t get an employer’s attention. Let’s admit the truth. You are invisible by choice. Nobody in the industry knows you. And nobody will know you. Start communicating your skills to an audience, speaking their language. Have the best resume in the world? 99% of all companies use applicant tracking system software to instantly filter out more than half of all applications. Make a robust application. It is going to stay with you throughout your entire job search process. The hiring committee is going to look at it. Do it correctly and communicate your value as a PhD value. 

** for the full podcast, check out the audio player above.

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post The Glaringly Obvious Reason You’re Not Getting Hired appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.