It can be a daunting idea thinking about what your post-PhD career will be like and what career path you want to take. Based on our recruitment experience, you will typically fall into 1 of 2 mindsets:

1. Love the laboratory environment
2. Can’t bear the thought of spending 100% of your working life in the laboratory

What’s important to understand is that whatever your mindset, there are a multitude of career options available to you. As a PhD graduate you have developed scientific skills that will be attractive to many industrial employers for a broad range of scientific positions in your field, as well as being adaptable to other career paths.

In a recruitment company we are exposed to various types of jobs on a regular basis. Before I started working here, I was unaware of the majority of these positions! So, it’s a good idea to start your job search early, typically 3-6 months before you want to start your first industrial job, to give yourself the opportunity to fully research the job market, talk to recruiters, network with people in industry and get a good understanding of what career options are out there and interest you.

If you want to stay in the laboratory then your job search can be relatively straightforward, identifying positions that use the core techniques (e.g. LC-MS, ELISA, NMR) you have mastered during your PhD. A search of your specialist technique(s) on our website or other job boards will reveal the types of industrial laboratories that use these techniques, be it pharmaceutical, forensic, clinical, environmental etc. The beauty of a lab based position is that it can open the door to a variety of other career prospects once you have built up your industrial experience. These can include principal scientist/technical specialist roles, lab management, quality assurance and project management.

If you aspire to use your scientific and strong communication skills in a commercial setting then positions like technical sales could be for you! Everything within the scientific industry needs to be sold – from laboratory consumables through to capital equipment and even the lab’s services themselves! Scientific equipment and service providers today value a sales team that are technically astute and able to talk to customers at a highly technical level. Even in a sales position you will use your scientific understanding on a regular basis and keep up to date with industry trends and research.

Set between lab based and sales positions are positions termed “applications specialists/scientists”. These roles, based within an instrument manufacturer/vendor support the sales function of the company and encompass a mixture of hands on lab work with customer facing responsibilities, such as product training and demonstrations. They will typically involve an element of travel to customer sites and conferences in the UK and abroad so provide an exceptional opportunity to see the world and network with the scientific community. Also, they provide a strong grounding in the commercial side of scientific industry and will open career paths into product marketing, instrument development and sales in the future.

If you’ve spent a lot of your PhD fixing the instruments you’ve used (and enjoyed doing this!), then perhaps a technical support or service engineer position with an instrument manufacturer would be good for you. Whilst this role does involve a significant amount of travel, it does give the job holder a diverse working day as you are always visiting different customers and troubleshooting different instrument problems.

Having completed your PhD, you may have concluded that you’d like to pursue a career in an unrelated field. Scientific PhDs are held in high esteem across a range of different industries and so a career change into another industrial field is still open to you. You will have developed many soft skills during PhD that make you an excellent candidate for roles such as Data Analysts, Patent Attorneys, Accounting, Scientific Communication and Regulatory Affairs, to name but a few.

VRS are here to assist you with your job search and your career move into industry. If you would like to discuss your career options with us over the phone, then please give VRS a call!