This is a guest post by our former (integrated) PhD student Sabiha Majumder (2012-2018). After a two year postdoctoral research at ETH, Zurich, Sabiha moved onto to industry, taking a job as a financial risk analyst at ING, Amasterdam. 

In this article, Sabiha argues that skills learnt in PhD are enormously valuable for careers beyond traditional academia. I am very thankful to her for taking the time to write this very useful article. Sabiha tweets at @SabihaMajumder.

Why PhD? Where does it lead to?

Well, most of us think it is the first step for a research career in academia. It aims at creating experts of a research topic. Indeed, the current structure for PhD in most fields is designed keeping an academic career in mind. However, what we do not realize is that the rigorous training we undergo in graduate school also prepares us for a variety of careers outside academia.

How? 

We know we learn a lot of technical skills in our research which are transferable to industry. For example, programming, statistics, data analysis, lab experiments etc. These skills are extremely important depending on the kind of role you are applying for.

Apart from these technical or “hard” skills, we also learn a lot of “soft” skills in grad school; these soft-skills are unfortunately undervalued by PhDs when they apply for jobs in the industry. In fact, these skills are really some of the professional skills that industries look for. Since a large part of the industry interviews focuses on the soft or professional skills, these skills and experiences during PhD are highly marketable.

What are these professional skills? Here, I mention some of them:

1. Writing and editing skills: We know how important writing skills are for an academic career. What we do not realize is that the same applies to a career in the industry as well. Many technical jobs in industries include proper documentation of the projects and writing project reports. PhDs spend a lot of time writing manuscripts, theses, grant applications etc. and therefore, writing experience of PhD candidates can be highly valuable for industries.
2. Presentation skills: Most jobs in industries require you to give workshops, present the progress of projects in group meetings and present ideas to stakeholders. In short, they require good presentation skills. Academic conferences and symposia during PhD offer many opportunities to develop your presentation skills.
3. Teaching and supervising skills: Although many of us believe that teaching skills are needed only for an academic career,  the truth is, however, the contrary. Teaching and training are an important part of a corporate career. It is common for PhDs to supervise undergrad students. This experience is highly valued, especially for management positions.
4. Collaboration and team-work: Usually, any project in the industry involves working with team members or with other teams within or outside the organization. It requires skills of finding good collaborations and good communication skills for working with them more efficiently. Collaborations and team-work are indeed common for many PhDs. In academic career, there is a tendency, even to this day in some programs, to emphasize only individual contributions of research work. However, collaborations and team-work are highly valued in industries.
5. Conflict Management: As mentioned in the previous point, PhDs often work in groups, which also brings conflicts about ideas, credits, decisions. Often, there are conflicts with supervisors about research topics, approach etc. These experiences of resolving those conflicts can come very valuable for in a career in the industry as well. In fact, it is often asked in the interviews if you have had any conflicts in professional life, and the good answer is always a story about how you resolved it.
6. Project Management: Along with working in collaboration, PhD students lead their research projects. They take primary decisions about experiment design, modelling, data analysis and interpreting the results. These skills are very important for leadership roles even in industries.

Apart from these, there are many skills we learn during PhD and are often taken for granted. For example, organizing a conference, critical thinking, peer-reviewing, or training on research ethics. All of these carry a value in professional life.

Therefore, in my opinion, it doesn’t matter if academia is your plan A or plan B or not in the plan for a future career, a PhD trains you to take control of your career, whichever path you choose.

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