From Scientist to CSO: Experiencing the Scientific Method as your Guide to Career Success

Session Descriptions

Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Session I: The Business of Science

Designing scientific projects, planning the work, assembling and leading a team to execute that work, monitoring progress, reporting the results and iterating that process is the hallmark of the scientific method.  Whether this process is performed in industry, academia, or government settings, there are essential business best practices that maximize performance and success. The desire of many academic institutions to apply their research efforts more directly to impacting treatment of human disease through translational research increases the importance of mastering these business and social skills.

Students will be introduced to the SciPhD 24 core business and social competencies that are valued by industry for entry level positions, and that will help them get the most out of their research team regardless of whether they pursue a career in industry, academia or government.  We will look at the significant breadth of job types that can lead to leadership positions in the future and the core competencies necessary to excel in these positions. Students will also learn to use an online self-assessment instrument to determine their own abilities in each of these areas and how to identify the specific combinations of skills necessary for specific kinds of jobs.  Based on the results of the self-assessment, students will learn how to relate their own scientific and life experiences to those critical competencies and turn perceived liabilities into a competitive advantage by expressing these experiences in appropriate business language in developing a targeted resume.

At the end of this session, students should be able to analyze a job ad, map the essential scientific, business and social skills to their own experiences and express those skills in a compelling targeted resume.  This process serves to differentiate the candidate from their competition.

Saturday, November 7, 2015
Session 2:  Successful Communications as a Scientist

Recent PhD graduates learn and adapt communication skills mostly experientially in an academic and research environment.  They learn from peers, faculty, their PI and from their social experiences.  The result is a communications focus that is typically content and “science group”  oriented.

Successfully working in industry requires a much higher communication skill level with an orientation beyond content and focused on building relationships with diverse functional groups (e.g. marketing, finance, legal), style groups (e.g. Introvert, Extrovert, Judging, Intuitive) and socially identifiable groups (e.g. non-profit, capitalist, academic, shareholders).  Science communications should always be both personal and global, advocate and non-advocate, content and relationship oriented.

In this 7 hour experience, participant behavior will accomplish the following:

1. Using the content, affective and social components of a communication message, deliver a scientific findings statement in an advocacy and then non-advocacy style.
2. Construct a scientific message for each class of public audience communication styles to include: Introvert, Extrovert, Sensing, Intuitive, Logical, Affective, Judging and Perceptive.
3. Defuse and reframe an attack on one’s science credibility using the skills of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence.
4. Develop an elevator pitch to a variety of audiences including:
   1. a technical audience
   2. a public audience with no specific science knowledge
   3. a doubtful audience to begin a fostering and trusting relationship

1. Apply newly learned communications skills in following scenarios:
   1. Networking
   2. Validating job ads
   3. Interviewing

Saturday, November 21, 2015
Session 3: Building Effective Teams

The new PhD graduate entering any professional workforce can accelerate their career by demonstrating their ability as an attentive team member AND by demonstrating their capacity to LEAD a small team. Previous academic experience with teams (if any) will be the starting point to launch this set of six (6) additional front line tools to help make team performance more efficient and effective.

Successfully working in industry requires flexible and adaptive behaviors that can pull from a variety of proven performance management tools.  Based on the participant’s previous experiences with teamwork, six (6) new team management tools will be integrated into the natural leadership style of the participant that will enable the participant to both play a more comprehensive team member role as well as take responsibility as a team leader of a small group. These same six (6) tools can be applied to an academic/research environment.

In this 6 hour experience, participant behavior will accomplish the following:

1. Apply each of the 6 tools to a current work opportunity as a team member and/or as a leader
2. Select 3 of these 6 tools which will be the participant’s key deployable first line enhancement opportunities: Process Mapping and Value Added Analysis, Benchmarking, Continuous Improvement, Brainstorming, Priority Matrix, and SWOT Analysis.
3. Provide an experiential example for use on a resume that would demonstrate the ability to enable a small team to improve efficiency and/or effectiveness as a team member and/or as a team leader.

Session 3: Networking Reception with CSO Alumni

Following the Building Effective Teams workshop, course participants will have the opportunity to meet and network with Alumni of the CSO course who are now working in exciting careers.   They will have the opportunity to apply their newfound communications skills and elevator pitches to initiate conversations and build relationships.  These Alumni will discuss how the SciPhD CSO course helped them land their current position and how the course has allowed them succeed in the first few months on the job.

Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Session 4: Developing Your People

The pedagogical environment of academia works well in a knowledge based culture. In industry, the emphasis is on putting knowledge to work where the measure of success is performance. New professionals in industry must be prepared to drive their own continued professional development AND drive the continued development of all people who they manage, supervise or lead.

This session will focus on helping the participant learn and implement one of the most accepted and utilized performance management methods used to develop people in industry.  The Situational Leadership Theory (SLT) of Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard will serve as a practical model to learn and apply methods to help other people succeed.

In this 3 hour experience, participant behavior will accomplish the following:

1. Experience the 4 stages of developing oneself to a high performing level
2. Design and implement a development plan for a coworker to bring them through the four stages of learning to become reliable and independent performers.
3. Provide an experiential example for use on a resume that would demonstrate the ability to enable others to succeed in a work environment.

Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Session 5: Strategic Project Management for Scientists

Students will learn the three cornerstones of project management: “time”, “cost” and “objectives”, and how to manage those three critical entities using combinations of the 24 core competencies introduced in the first session. In this experiential learning session students will form project teams based on the previous session’s team performance activities and experience the importance of tactical planning, communications, negotiation, and control in being an effective project manager.  Students will become familiar with the tools and language of project management so that they can more effectively function in cross-matrixed teams, and in some cases even assume the role of project manager.  Examples drawn from familiar scientific experiences will be used to demonstrate the various aspects of effective project management, the benefits of it being used properly, and the consequences when it is not. Upon completion participants will be able to:

1. Look at any project and immediately determine who is their customer (you can only have one!)
2. Identify the critical objectives.
3. Define goals, assumptions, success criteria, milestones and deliverables
4. Apply communications, leadership and delegation skills from previous sessions in an experiential learning exercise

Saturday, December 5, 2015
Session 6a:  Six Leadership Styles

Most established academic scientists have spent their entire careers in academia.  As a result, newly graduating science professionals learn about and experience leadership styles that are common within an academic setting. They learn primarily from, faculty, and their principal investigators.  We will focus on six leadership styles that drive culture, management and leadership that are common to professional settings.  The vast majority of failed employments in the first year of professionals are less about technical competence and more about aligning work practices with cultural and executive leadership expectations. The quicker the new professional can read the leadership style, the quicker they are valued for their technical competency AND their social integration with the TEAM.

In this 3 hour session, participants will accomplish the following:

1. Identify leadership behaviors that relate to one or more of the 6 primary leadership styles
2. Rank the comfort level of the participant to integrate with each of the 6 leadership styles
3. Demonstrate behaviors that the participant could perform that would align with the preferred leadership style of an institution

Session 6b:  Finance and Negotiating your Total Compensation Package

In this 3 hour session we will discuss basic concepts of business finance that will benefit you as a professional.  This will focus on understanding how money is put to work in your organization.  Through our “learn by doing” approach, students will experience running a multi-million dollar company, negotiating with investors and banks, establishing partnerships with other companies and navigating mergers and acquisitions. We will also discuss and experience how to apply the communications and leadership skills that you have learned in order to be effective at negotiating with team members, as well as when considering job offers, and negotiating benefits that include salary, stock options, performance review timetables, and career advancement opportunities.

Session 6c: Networking and Applying What You’ve Learned

In this final session we will demonstrate how to build an effective network by leveraging your professional and social contacts along a path to becoming a CSO. We will model the use of your network along with the business and social skills learned throughout this course to develop and execute a targeted interview strategy.  We’ll also review key learning points from each session and how they all tie together to enhance your performance whether in academia, government, research or industry. Each participant will leave this course with new knowledge in developing his or her short and long-term career plans.  In this final session we will accomplish the following:

1. Identify at least 3 key resources for building your business and social networks
2. Learn to leverage your network to validate job requirements
3. Leverage your network to get your resume on the hiring manager’s desk
4. Practice new communication and personality techniques in phone and onsite interviews.