Here's why scientists need more than bench expertise to find work in…

Here's why scientists need more than bench expertise to find work in industry.                                     Page 1 of 3




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                                                                                                       Focus On Europe:
                                                                                                       Research by the
                                 Taken for Granted: Fitting the Job Market                             Numbers?
                                 to a T                                                                11 July 2008
                                 Beryl Lieff Benderly
                                 United States                                                         Industrial Postdocs: The
                                 5 September 2008                                                      Road Less Traveled
                                                                                                       13 June 2008

                                 Hardly anyone knows more about postdocs than Laure Haak.              Packaging Yourself for
                                 She has been a postdoc --at the U.S. National Institutes of           Product Companies
                                 Health (NIH). She has written authoritatively about postdocs          23 May 2008
                                 (as manager of Science's Next Wave's Postdoc Network, a
                                                                                                       More
                                 precursor of Science Careers, and as staff director of a study
                                 of scientists at the National Academy of Sciences). She has
                                 received a service award from the National Postdoctoral
                                  Association and serves on its advisory board. But the               CAREER TOOLS AND
                                  subject of postdocs can still surprise her.                         RESOURCES
    "If you want a job,
   you've got to go and           It happened recently when she looked at postdocs from a             Current Employers
   develop the skills for         whole new angle--as an industrial employer eager to hire             Learn more about the
    your next job. The            some. What she calls a "frustrating" attempt ended with no
                                                                                                       employers advertising
  science is important,"          job offers, she says in an interview, even though she                positions on our site.
     but "you have to             carefully sought out and interviewed 10 people she thought
                                  were excellent prospects. To her dismay, those smart, well-
    demonstrate to me             trained scientists lacked skills crucial to success in industry--
                                                                                                      Science Careers Forum
  that you can exist in a         skills she was initially sure they'd possess.                        Post a question, get an
   wider world." --Laure                                                                               answer on our online
           Haak                   The experience taught her a lot about what scientists need           community
                                  to make the jump from academe to industry, "where there
are so many job opportunities" waiting for those with the right combination of abilities, she         Graduate Programs
says. As if to confirm Haak's anecdotal observations, a new report from her old employer, the
U.S. National Academies, emphasizes the widespread need for scientists who have the very               Browse our database of
things that Haak was seeking: "deep scientific knowledge as well as skills to apply that               program profiles
knowledge in innovative ways," in the words of study chair and former National Science
Foundation director Rita Colwell.                                                                     How-To Guides

                                                                                                       Writing a resume/CV
THINKING OUTSIDE THE BENCH
                                                                                                       Beating the interview

A perfect illustration of this amalgam is Haak's own                                                   Getting funding
current position as science director at Discovery
Logic, a Rockville, Maryland, company that provides                                                    Managing a lab and staff
information technology (IT) services to governmental
                                                                                                       Building your network




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Here's why scientists need more than bench expertise to find work in industry.                                      Page 2 of 3



and private clients. Her job may seem a long way
from the lab bench, but the knowledge gained there is                                                Salary Tools
the basis of what she does now. Under contract with
                                                                                                      Find out how much you're
NIH, for example, Discovery Logic provides IT
                                                                                                      worth with our salary
services that are helping to streamline the grant-                                                    calculator
approval process. Haak plays a pivotal role in this and
other projects as mediator between life scientists and
IT experts, explaining to the computer experts how                                                   To Advertise   Find Products
life science and research administration work and
explaining to the life scientists and research
administrators what computers can do for them.

Haak needed a program manager to handle the NIH                Laure Haak
project day to day and thought a postdoc would be
perfect--"somebody who had experience writing a grant, somebody who knew about the grant-
review process, who knows the science [and] could be involved in managing this project on the
client side, ... working with the client to decide the requirements and then bringing those back
to the IT people."

She also thought a postdoc would be perfect to help with another of her responsibilities,
business development, the process of finding new situations for which the company's
capabilities could meet the needs of established or new clients. This person would keep
abreast of current scientific, business, bureaucratic, and policy developments in bioscience and
spot opportunities. Then he or she would explore these possibilities, meeting with relevant
people, figuring out what services Discovery Logic could provide and how they would fit into
the potential client's goals, then preparing plans, proposals, and presentations to persuade
agencies and firms to hire the company. Haak sought "a gaggle of postdocs who had
biomedical experience, understand NIH, understand the grants process, understand the milieu
of biomedical science in this country."

After interviewing 10 likely prospects, however, she regretfully concluded that, though "well
trained to be a postdoc, [the candidates] have very little of other kinds of applicable job
experience. ... They couldn't think outside the box of their lab bench." None had "the concept of
working with the client, [that] the client is 'always right,' of how to communicate with them that
they're 'right' but they're wrong." Nor did they have crucial skills such as budgeting, project
management, running meetings, and writing effective nontechnical prose.

And possibly most surprising to Haak, they did not seem "able to think about the policy
implications of what they're doing. They don't understand how their research fits into the
grander scheme of things," for example, " 'I'm working on this channel, and this is how it may
have some public health implications.' " Furthermore, "they don't understand the whole politics
of funding for NIH, that there's a congressional appropriations process and how that works." In
short, most seemed "absolutely flummoxed by working someplace that's not a bench."

"That doesn't mean they can't learn," Haak says, "but it means that, in addition to training them
in" their specific responsibilities and "in interacting with the IT people, I'd also have to train
them to work with a client." That, she says, would make these candidates too costly for her to
hire.

"I-Shaped" versus "T-Shaped" scientists

Colwell has a name for the kind of researchers Haak interviewed: "I-shaped scientists," whose
knowledge is deep but narrow. Today's competitive industrial marketplace, she says, calls for
"T-shaped" technical people, who have skills both "broad and deep," she said at a July news
conference to launch the academies' new study on preparing workers for today's scientific job
market. In addition to being "deep problem solvers [with] expert problem-solving skills in their
home discipline," she said, "T-shaped" scientists are also entrepreneurial and good at
communicating with nonspecialists. This matches exactly the range of skills fostered by the
professional science master's degree programs proliferating around the country, she noted. "I
suspect many Ph.D. students might take this masters degree" to round out their résumés, she
added.

Haak, however, doesn't believe that Ph.D.s need two additional years of formal study to learn
how to succeed in industry. If they're alert and strategic, she says, they can develop the




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Here's why scientists need more than bench expertise to find work in industry.                        Page 3 of 3



necessary career knowledge and experience right where they are. Her first post-postdoc job,
editing and writing for Science's Next Wave, for example, came her way because of volunteer
work she had done as a postdoc, writing for a newsletter. This gave her a "whole portfolio of
newsletters showing that I knew how to [write and] how to get people to write stuff for me, that I
could work under time pressure, and that I could produce a newsletter on a quarterly basis."

Industry employers like herself want scientists who have "gone out of their regular lab work" to
build skills in communication, leadership, initiative, planning, budgeting, teamwork, and
maneuvering within an organization. They may have learned them serving in leading positions
on committees, writing for nontechnical publications, or doing a fellowship in science policy or
some other area related to life outside the lab, she says. As Colwell's comments suggest,
postdocs can also learn useful skills by taking or auditing courses, which universities often
permit their employees to do tuition-free, in fields such as management, budgeting, or science
policy. "If you want a job," Haak says, "you've got to go and develop the skills for your next job.
The science is important," but to get hired, "you have to demonstrate to me that you can exist
in a wider world."

She "highly recommends" that postdocs make time "to participate in some kind of
extracurricular activity" that will build and demonstrate those "extra" abilities that employers
seek. "You can, for example, serve as the head of the committee that does the speaker series.
I want the person who has actually organized it," not just a minor committee cog, she
emphasizes. She wants the proven record of making decisions and plans and carrying them
out. "What's the speaker series going to be? What are the important issues? Help identify the
speakers. Work with people to invite them; that shows that you can work with faculty members.
It shows that you have the chutzpah to go call people, that you can communicate effectively,
and you can meet deadlines." Another possibility, she suggests, is to serve "on the faculty-
hiring committee. Be the postdoc or grad student representative." Postdocs who look for such
opportunities will find them, she says, because they abound on every campus.

"I really, really wanted to hire a postdoc," she continues. "I tried so hard to give those people
every opportunity." But, she explains, a company "is not a charitable organization. ... I need to
see that somebody has the core group of skills so that I have a reasonable certainty that
they're going to succeed."

Haak agrees with Colwell that a wide range of challenging and interesting jobs await "T-
shaped" people with both technical expertise and an array of other abilities. The word
"opportunity," after all, culminates in the sound of "T."

Beryl Lieff Benderly writes from Washington, D.C.

DOI: 10.1126/science.caredit.a0800130


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