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Networking is a skill that needs to be practiced. Here’s how to overcome the self-imposed barriers that may be standing in the way of becoming good at it.

Published May 1, 2020

By Srikant Iyer, PhD

No one knows who first coined the popular saying “It’s not what you know that counts so much as who you know …” although there is some evidence it was first used in 1914 in The Electrical Worker, a publication of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union. Origins aside, there is a good deal of truth behind these words, and most career guidance experts will agree that the most effective way to advance one’s career is by leveraging a network of contacts.

Networking helps cultivate relationships that pave the path for our future. However, many STEM professionals just starting out find the idea of networking daunting. Thoughts like “I don’t feel comfortable asking for help”, “I don’t want to bother people”, “My research is very niche and I can’t dumb it down” become self-imposed barriers towards shaping one’s career journey and often prevent individuals from exploring new career opportunities and connecting to potential colleagues.

Make It Easy for People to Remember You

Networking is defined as the exchange of information and ideas among people with a common profession or special interest, usually in an informal social setting. Shruti Sharma, Program Manager at Stony Brook University moved from India to the U.S. for her Ph.D.

“In the U.S. the culture of being a self-promoter felt foreign to me,” she said. “I was raised in a culture where one’s work is supposed to speak for itself.”

She identified networks like the Academy’s Science Alliance Leadership Training (SALT) where she found the safe space to navigate the cultural differences.

“I realized that for my work to speak, I needed to communicate my skills and achievements to build a community of allies and advocates,” adds Sharma. This helped her leverage both the individualistic and community-based cultures to her advantage.

Satish Rajaram (SALT Alum), Engineer and Scientist at TRI Austin, says, “It is important to articulate your story for your personality to show, and to separate yourself from others with similar backgrounds.” As a Graduate Writing Consultant and mentor to undergraduate students, Rajaram recommends the value of being specific about one’s experience — it provides context to conversations and makes you more marketable — an important trait when applying for a job.

Success Takes Time and Effort

Effective networking requires strategic preparation and being mindful of leveraging assertive ways to succeed when building relationships. Arthee Jahangir, Assistant Director, Postdoctoral Affairs at New York University School of Medicine, believed that by being a consistent high performer the merit based system would reward her, and her gender would not be a hindrance. But despite being a lead entrepreneur, Jahangir, like many women in science, experienced systemic barriers of being overlooked in favor of her male colleagues at networking events and pitches.

“I started to become [aware of] unconscious bias and micro-aggression that permeated the bubble I lived in, and learned strategies to counteract it by controlling my own narrative,” says Jahangir.

Getting others to talk about their own career path facilitates conversations and builds relationships. Monika Buczek (SALT Alum), Business Development Manager and Scientific Project Leader at Champions Oncology Inc., used the “identify common ground approach” to connect with, and cold contact, individuals on LinkedIn. In her informational conversations Monika would ask such questions as: “If you could change anything about your path what would you change?” and “What would you tell yourself at the beginning of your journey?” to cultivate relationships.

Networking is a skill that needs to be practiced. Regardless if you are an introvert or an extrovert, practicing talking to your immediate circle, e.g. friends, colleagues, supervisors and even vendors, is a first step to building your network.

Join professional associations and attend conferences to build a portfolio of people you’d like to meet. Cultivate your narrative to feel confident about approaching people. Email leaders in your field you admire and request a meeting. You may not always get a positive response, but it’s a “no” if you don’t ask!

Today’s employers want workers who have “soft skills,” such as being a good listener or thinking critically.

Published October 1, 2019

By Pinelopi Kyriazi

According to a new report from Cengage, an educational technology and services company, employers want college graduates who have “soft skills,” such as being a good listener or thinking critically, but they have difficulty finding such candidates.

Such so-called “soft” skills are highly sought after by employers, yet they tend to be given short shrift in academic settings. As a result, while science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) professionals receive extensive training on technical skills, their non-STEM skills tend to be underdeveloped.

Nevertheless, a growing body of evidence shows that soft skills are an indicator for future employment and earnings compared to technical and manual skills. Hence, a gap has been created between which skills employers are looking for, and which skills STEM job candidates provide. From running a productive lab to leading a research team, a successful career for scientists hinges on their ability to communicate and collaborate, often with teams that may be in other departments, other institutions or even other countries.

Developing Skills in Persuasive Writing, Management

Take grant writing. Competition for a shrinking pool of funding is fierce, so academic scientists need to tell a cohesive and evidence-based story from complicated data to grab the attention of reviewers and secure funding.

Translating complex content in a simple and easy to understand manner is not a skill frequently practiced until scientists earn their first academic job. By this point, stress is high as job security often rests on their ability to earn grants to continue their research.

Similarly, managing a team of graduate students or post-doctoral trainees is a daunting task for a new professor. On top of all that, many have a heavy teaching load, making their time and project management skills essential to their productivity.

Technical Skills: The Great Decline

A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, explored the shifting demand for workforce skills from now until 2030. They found that technological advancements, including automation and artificial intelligence, are changing the types of tasks employees are performing.

As people increasingly interact with machines, there is a greater need for technological skills, social and emotional skills and higher cognitive skills. These include creativity, complex information processing, empathy, critical thinking and communication. People are still outperforming machines on such skills, but machines are generally much better at repetitive tasks with explicit rules requiring physical or manual labor.

The Impact of Automation

Historically, technological advancement has created new types of work while some occupations become outdated. According to the McKinsey report, while the internet eliminated many jobs, new positions emerged in computer programming, application development, social media marketing and search engine optimization.

Science is undergoing a similar pattern, with mundane tasks such as repetitive data collection and replication becoming more dependent on automation. Scientists are improving their technological skills such as coding complex algorithmic models, interpreting multi-dimensional data and managing big data sets.

Social skills are also becoming more prevalent as teamwork and communication required for intricate experiments is growing. Lab sizes are increasing and scientists at various training levels — from undergraduate students to early career researchers — must work together to complete large scale projects.

Scientists in Academia and Industry Possess Many Non-STEM Skills

Graduate training for scientists is heavily focused on acquiring technical skills and scientific acumen. But a vital aspect of scientific research is sharing the knowledge acquired through experimentation in a meaningful and comprehensible manner. Hence communication of scientific data becomes the cornerstone of research.

Joseph Borrello, a PhD candidate and Prototyping Fellow at Sinai Bio-Design at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, highlights the need to attend scientific conferences and share his work.

“Part of communication is going to places where you can communicate,” he says, “and knowing that you have something to share even if it is not completed into a polished publication or presentation.”

Conferences are a great way to interact with other scientists, but also attending events for a broader audience can make you a better communicator.

“It is hard to condense everything down into an elevator pitch format,” says Borrello. But he emphasizes that “doing it once is not necessarily enough.” Building up to a confident elevator pitch takes practice and repetition, just like a good science experiment.

Skills in Effective Communication

Communication doesn’t only include oral presentations. Scientists must master communicating science through writing as well.

Nida Rehmani, who completed her PhD in Biochemistry and M.Ed. in STEM, worked on her writing skills after graduate school as a content/blog editor at Lotus STEMM, a non-profit organization for South Asian women in STEMM (the second M stands for medicine).

“Activities like writing scientific blogs is a great way to develop one of the soft skills and should be inculcated in the next STEM generation,” she says.

Academics are not the only scientists who need excellent communication skills. Those in industry require both scientific and business acumen to get ahead. Savitri Sharma, a biochemist leading the Apparel Research division of Nike Sport Research Lab, emphasizes that scientists need to develop their story-telling skills; especially when sharing results with team members of different backgrounds.

“Bottom line up front,” she says, “being able to connect your work straight to what is happening at the company will set you apart.”

It’s important to grab the audience’s attention and communicate why someone should care. Additionally, she underscores that what sets scientists apart in business, is that they can dive into the details when needed.

“Don’t shy away from being the expert that you are, don’t feel embarrassed or ashamed, be proud,” she says.

The Power of Networking

Another important non-STEM skill is networking. Regularly attending both external and internal conferences, receptions and symposia can help scientists improve their research by making new connections leading to collaborations. As Borrello explains, networking is a stochastic process and can feel awkward at first.

“All the rules of chemistry and chemical reactions that apply to solutions, apply to people also,” he says. “Sometimes the randomness in networking can enable positive relationships to develop. The only way to meet a new collaborator or connect with a potential employer is by attending many networking opportunities and speaking up.”

In industry, networking plays an important role in advancing your career. Sharma leveraged this skill to land her current role as a researcher at Nike. Further she emphasized this as one of the essential skills for her mentees during her tenure as Chair of Women of STEM network at Nike.

After working in various business functions, she declared her intent to pursue a career in research and development at one of the events. As a result of a connection she made, one of the other attendees helped her apply for the position. Navigating large organizations is difficult, but effective networking skills can ameliorate the stress and propel your scientific career forward.

Other “Soft” Skills

Other soft skills include time and project management, team work, listening and social skills. Many of these are often underestimated, but they are all important elements in today’s work environment and can give you an edge to land the job of your dreams.

“Understanding your own potential and skills is important in time management,” says Rehmani.

Knowing and articulating your value can make a difference in the productivity of a lab or a team setting. Scientists already possess many of these skills — continually refining and practicing them will help researchers to become more valued employees, and, as a result, advance their careers.

Automation and Artificial Intelligence Will Accelerate the Shift in Skills that the Workforce Needs

Also read: So, You Want to Publish a Scientific Paper?

Four different sciences and engineers share their experiences of transitioning from academia into research-focused private sector positions.

Published October 1, 2019

By Ann Delfaro

As a doctoral student, microbiologist Natasha Frank was known for challenging assumptions. Her scientific skepticism and technical skills steered more than one experiment to safety when it threatened to tank, and classmates routinely approached her for advice.

Few were surprised, then, when Frank accepted a postdoctoral position at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and started down the path of a traditional academic career. Later, as a research scientist at Washington State University, she divided her days between teaching, bench work and grant applications.

It’s not that Frank particularly wanted to become a professor — that’s simply the path graduate students are steered down, she says.

“I’d heard of a few alternate careers in science but they seemed out of reach,” says Frank. “I always thought, how do you get into those things?”

She eventually accepted a microbiologist position at Clorox, reasoning that industry was basically science with added job stability.

But that wasn’t quite true, as she discovered when her department was dissolved. While scanning LinkedIn for new opportunities, she noticed that she met all the qualifications for a position unlike any other on her CV.

She landed the job. Now she works as a patent agent for a large molecular diagnostics company, using her science training to gauge whether new products or services might infringe on existing patents.

“I went from thinking alternative careers were out of reach to having one,” she says.

If Frank’s story seems familiar, that’s because it is. More and more students are graduating from PhD programs — a 41 percent increase between 2003 and 2013 — but ultimately, only 26 percent move into tenured or tenure-track positions in the United States. Others migrate to jobs in business, government or industry.

And still others leave science entirely. Sort of.

Define ‘Anomaly’

Joseph Brown, a senior data scientist, holds a PhD in biomedical sciences and was working for Thermo Fisher Scientific — writing software to analyze peptide behavior in different conditions — when a friend mentioned the strong culture and benefits at nearby Netflix.

On a whim, Brown went online and scanned the company’s job listings. He noticed one for a data scientist to do anomaly detection; that is, to pinpoint a small number of problematic servers among the company’s hundreds of thousands of servers.

“And I thought, you know — it’s kind of similar to my past work, identifying individual peptides or genes that are behaving unusually in a huge swath of the proteome or transcriptome,” Brown says.

Video streaming might seem a far reach from molecular biology, but for Brown the shift was a natural progression of his lifelong interests in statistics and computer programming.

“The math is what really tied everything together,” he says.

Now he works alongside other scientists, most holding doctorates in physics, economics, mathematics or computer science. While few have a life sciences background, it isn’t unheard of, according to Brown.

Rebranding the PhD

As it turns out, math isn’t the most critical common denominator. According to David Cox, director of the MIT-IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab at the Cambridge Research Center.

“A lot of it is training you how to think, how to solve problems, how to be resilient,” Cox says

During his years as a Harvard professor of engineering, computer science, and molecular and cell biology, Cox saw many PhD graduates apply their critical thinking skills to successful careers in consulting. In particular, he says, the routine practice of “analyzing data” is now called “data science” — and it’s in high demand.

“Scientists have been doing that for a long time and didn’t think anything of it, but industry has woken up to the idea that this is an interesting thing to do with business data,” Cox says. “If you know how to wrangle data, run statistically valid and rigorous tests to understand it, that’s a marketable and valuable skill.”

It’s obvious how computer science graduates might leverage that skill, but scientists in fields such as neurology can bank on that, too. The combination of data analysis and specialized knowledge — for example, how the brain and intelligence work — is especially transferable.

“Those skills are often transferable to thinking about AI and structuring experiments to understand what is happening in an artificial system,” Cox says.

Emphasizing Marketable Skills

Sometimes PhDs need help rebranding themselves to emphasize these marketable skills. That’s where physicist Alejandro de la Puente comes in.

“Nowadays, there are fewer options in academia and more options elsewhere,” says de la Puente, who completed a postdoc in physics and now offers career and professional development for STEM graduates at the New York Academy of Sciences.

The pressures that discourage recent STEM graduates from entering academia are cyclical, de la Puente notes. Few tenure positions exist because scientists who land those positions tend to stay a long time and retire late in life. At the same time, university enrollment is up. To deal with the demand, institutions are hiring more adjuncts or non-tenure track professors than in years past.

“When you join as an adjunct, most of your responsibility is teaching,” de la Puente explains. “So it’s a circular thing: You want to stay in academia, but most positions are not tenure track. And if you’re not tenure track, you’re doing more teaching and less research. That limits your chances of getting grants and gives you no chance at tenure.”

Through the Academy’s Science Alliance Initiative, de la Puente teaches scientists how to transfer their skills to nonacademic jobs, how to broaden their reach — and most importantly, how to communicate the technicalities of their work to a broader audience, including job recruiters. The program fills an unmet need for graduate students like Frank, who may hear about alternate careers but have no idea how to pursue one.

Counter Culture

How does one land quite so far from the lab, though?

Chacko Sonny, executive producer and vice president at Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the game Overwatch, knew he wanted to be an engineer years before enrolling in Stanford’s undergraduate and master’s electrical engineering programs. But what he didn’t count on was eventually applying that training to the video game industry.

Strategic by nature, Sonny was working as a consultant for the international strategy firm McKinsey & Company when he realized he craved a change of pace. Specifically, he wanted to use his training in electrical engineering and economics to build and market things, and he wanted those things to be fun and creative. He saw two options: the visual effects industry or the video game industry.

Sonny began applying to every game company he could think of, finally landing an interview with Los Angeles-based Activision. He noticed a “massive” culture divide between the engineering and video game industries.

A Heterogeneous Blend Of Talent

Whereas both his McKinsey and video game colleagues were exceptionally smart, his game industry colleagues were talented across more different dimensions that is typically found in consulting companies. Teams of 200 people, consisting of a third each of artists, designers and engineers, collaborated on projects that demanded a heterogeneous blend of talent.

For one thing, debugging problems becomes a massive ordeal for video games built on millions of lines of code.

“If a character behaves oddly on screen or doesn’t display an expected behavior, you need a structured problem-solving approach to figure out why,” he says.

Games can take hundreds of hours to play to completion, so Sonny used his engineering mindset to hone in on small yet critical errors in the code. The consistent challenge and excitement of the game industry propelled him forward, and before long he’d made a career of it.

Forward Momentum

Like Sonny, Frank has gained valuable, diverse skills since leaving the traditional academic route.

“I get exposed to business development and even finance, regulatory, marketing, communications,” she says.

She’s learned how to calculate prospective revenue and determine if the company can afford a certain license. These challenges keep her engaged, but she hasn’t ruled out a future career shift.

“This experience has created opportunities to do different things, should I decide later on that I might take a different turn.”

Also read: So, You Want to Publish a Scientific Paper? and Legendary Labs: Secrets for Scientific Excellence.