Tips and tricks to plan your career in science

Many junior researchers see career planning as a luxury item, feeling unable to spare time in their busy personal and professional lives to plan their next move or work out longer-term goals.

In the first episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about career planning in science, Fatimah Williams, founder of Professional Pathways, a training and coaching company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says: “People get lost because they’re either just kind of getting head down, getting the work done. They’re not popping up every so often to say: 'Am I where I want to be? Do I have the skills to get where I want to go? Do I have the relationships to get where I want to go next?' ”

Williams is joined by careers consultant Sarah Blackford. Blackford, whose clients include European universities and research institutes, describes some of the career planning frameworks that can help identify longer-term goals, including her own PhD Career Choice Indicator.

Cynthia Fuhrmann, who leads the Professional Development Hub, a US-based initiative to help early career scientists, says career planning falls into three phases. This involves building awareness of yourself and your needs and priorities, and then investigating different types of career paths, before finally preparing for roles you might be interested in.

The episode concludes with Julia Yates, an organizational psychologist at City St George’s University in London. Yates outlines her own research, which looked at less formal career planning strategies employed by recent graduates as they searched for jobs.

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