Julie Gould 00:02
Hello and welcome to Working scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. I’m Julie Gould.
This is the first episode of our career planning series. Each episode concludes with a sponsored slot from the International Science Council, with support of the China Association for Science and Technology.
The ISC is exploring how early and mid-career researchers can navigate their careers in a constantly evolving scientific landscape through conversations with emerging and established scientists.
Julie Gould 00:31
Do you ever feel lost? I don’t mean in the literal sense, but in a way that you’re not quite sure what you’re doing with your career, and you don’t know what to do next, or how to move on to the next bit.
Trust me, if this is the case, you’re not the only one.
Many, many people today feel a bit like that.
They’re often focused on the project that’s right in front of them at the time, and then they worry about the next step when that’s finished.
And this is the advice that a lot of young researchers get too, as I discovered when I spoke to a group of early career researchers at the Humboldt Meets Leibniz conference in Hanover in Germany in September 2024.
Francesca Tivano 01:09
I’m Francesca Tivano from Italy. And I’m ending my PhD, actually. So at the beginning, it was like
I had my plans for my career in academia and so on.
But actually you realize during the years that it’s a difficult path. So you see all the difficulties of instability in your life.
Julie Gould 01:31
Do you get advice from your supervisors about career planning? Do they talk to you about it?
Francesca Tivano 01:46
Maybe at the end of your PhD, your supervisor starts wondering what you want to do next, but it’s like small time plans.
Julie Gould 01:46
The question is: why are people getting lost in their careers?
Fatimah Williams 01:49
People get lost because we’re not trained on either how to design a career or how to, in some ways, keep up with moving our career forward in a way that we want.
Julie Gould 01:59
This is Fatimah Williams, an executive careers coach at Professional Pathways and an author based in the US.
Fatimah Williams 02:05
So even if that doesn’t mean advancement, as in promotion. But really like being an agent and how you want to move your life. Where do you want your skills to be utilized?
Julie Gould 02:15
For young researchers in particular, it’s very easy to fall into the academic career path without thinking too much, because it’s so prescribed and obviously laid out.
But even though this seems easy, it’s also where the getting lost happens most frequently.
Fatimah Williams 02:30
So people get lost because they’re either just kind of getting head down, getting the work done, and 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?”
Really being intentional about: “What do I want to do? How do I want to use my skills? Where do I want to apply these skills?”
Julie Gould: 02:52
Now, what Fatimah is not saying is that working in academia is a bad idea or an easy option. It definitely isn’t either of those.
But what she is suggesting is people need to be intentional about their careers. And that is exactly what we hope you’ll be able to do after you’ve heard this series about career planning from the Working Scientist podcast, supported by the International Science Council.
And I think the first part of this is to understand what career planning really is.
Because what it isn’t is you just saying “I want to be a professor of x at university y in 10 years time.” And then hoping for the best, as Fatimah said, you need to be intentional.
So what is career planning? Well, career planning has a lot of theories and definitions underpinning it, says Holly Prescott, a career guidance practitioner and the careers advisor for postgraduate researchers at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
She describes career planning as…
Holly Prescott 03:51
…having some kind of systematic way to have experiences, understand what those experiences are telling you, evaluate that information, and then take actions accordingly.
Some kind of form of experiential learning, really.
Julie Gould 04:11
When Holly works with clients, she makes sure that she understands what experiences they’ve had and what cultures they’ve come from, as she thinks that this might have an influence on how they make their career choices.
Holly Prescott 04:23
As a careers advisor, I need to acknowledge that I’m trained in a model that is very western-centric and is quite individualist.
Where we think of person-centred career guidance, for example, putting the person at the centre, understanding their interests, what they enjoy, and then kind of supporting career decision-making in line with that.
However, it really depends on your cultural background, what things might be a priority for you in career decision-making.
So I always go back to an example when I was training, where I had an international student come to me.
And when I asked her why she was interested in the company she was interested in, she said, “because my friends like them,” which was a really important learning experience for me, because for her, for the culture that she came from, moving into a career that was well respected by others, well respected by her community, was of paramount importance.
Julie Gould 05:22
So once you’re ready to do some career planning and ready to learn from your own experiences in the most efficient way possible, many career coaches advise that you apply a strategy to your learning.
Sarah Blackford, an academic careers coach, says that when she works with scientists on their career planning, she often finds that they’re engrossed in their current project, whether it’s finishing an experiment, writing a paper, publishing results.
And so the strategy Sarah uses with her young researchers is one that they are already familiar with.
She likens career planning to planning experiments.
Sarah Blackford 06:05
You know, you’re trying to achieve something, and it involves different elements, different smaller processes that may all be going on at the same time.
And as much as you can plan experiments and think about, you know, and reflect on what’s already been done, and refer to other people’s work, and you have to make decisions, you have to draw upon information, and then you do your work, and at the end of it, you hope to achieve your aims.
And in the same way, it’s important to reflect on you, and where you are now, and to use resources and information in order to achieve your aims as well. So that you know at the end of your contract or when your PhD finishes, you can then move on to the next experiment, which will be the transition into your next role.
Julie Gould 06:53
Sarah’s work with young researchers is based on many different theories of career planning, some with a psychological perspective, some with a social perspective, and others with an organizational perspective.
Sarah Blackford 07:05
It’s about how your social background and your environment, and even, you know, your family and your genetics, and how, you know, these things might have influenced you in the past.
Julie Gould 07:16
And one model that Sarah and a lot of other career coaches use to guide their clients was first proposed in 1977 by Law and Watts. And is called the DOTS model.
Sarah Blackford 07:27
…which stands for decisions, opportunities, transition and self.
And those are those kind of elements that I think if you’re trying to plan your career, they’re the four elements you should really be focusing on. But in that we overlay planned happenstance. So that’s Mitchell and Krumboltz, and that came back 20 years later.
And that is where you harness behaviours such as being proactive, being positive, being flexible, taking a bit of a risk, coming out of your comfort zone, and, you know, networking and engaging with people. So, you know, that is where you make your own luck. Luck just doesn’t happen out of the blue.
Julie Gould 08:11
We’ll actually have a whole episode in the series about planned happenstance career stories in a couple of weeks.
Sarah Blackford 08:16
And then Holland’s theory of vocational personalities, which is the RIASEC model.
Julie Gould 08:23
Holland’s RIASEC model, first formally developed in the late 1950s, is one of the most influential frameworks in career theory.
It classifies both people and their working environments into six personality types, and the idea is that the people are more satisfied and successful when they work in the environments that match their personality type.
Sarah Blackford 08:44
I have just transformed it a little bit. I’ve adapted it, and I’ve turned it into my PhD Career Choice Indicator.
And you have six categories of functional, investigative, artistic, social, management and enterprise. And what you do is you use it as a tool to enable people, especially researchers, and I use it a lot with researchers, to reflect on the work they do, and then to try to figure out what they enjoy doing most. Because it’s the enjoyment that you want to take forward. And then, you know, maybe improve on things. Look at it for personal development. Look at it for career choice or jobseeking.
And you know, there’s various ways you can use that.
And then finally, one that I do refer to is Patton and McMahon, and theirs is all about, you know, all the different influences, communities influencing you, you influencing, things beyond your control as well.
So to sort of put that in the mix, because I think there’s a danger sometimes that people focus in on just skills or just interests, or just their subject knowledge, and you need to really take it as a whole as much as you can without overwhelming yourself.
Julie Gould 09:59
So when it comes to putting these theories into practice and actually sitting down to do some career planning, the literature suggests that you do things in a certain order.
Cynthia Fuhrmann, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, and leader and director of the Professional Development Hub, an initiative in the USA to help early career scientists, puts career planning into three phases, where phase one is the assessment phase.
And here you ask yourself the hard questions like…
Cynthia Fuhrmann. 10:28
…what are my own personal you know, strongest skills and strengths? What do I most enjoy doing? What are the values that are especially important to me? What are the needs or preferences that I have, you know, in my, certain things in my life that I that I need to address in my next career, maybe a certain geographic location, or a certain salary, or whatever it is for me to be successful.
And so the assessment phase is what the literature calls that phase, which is really building awareness of yourself and considering what’s most important to you.
Julie Gould 11:01
When you’ve worked that out, you can move on to phase two, the investigation phase.
Cynthia Fuhrmann 11:05
You might be doing things like setting up conversations with people to learn about their different role and how they made their own career decisions.
And we call those informational interviews, of course, right?
Or you might be setting other goals and taking actions towards reading about careers, or attending career panel events.
Julie Gould 11:23
Finally, you can start phase three, the preparation phase.
Cynthia Fuhrmann 11:27
Prepare or take steps, like to develop the skills or get the extra experience you might need for the types of roles you’re interested in.
So when I think about career planning, I think of especially those three phases, building awareness of yourself, investigating different types of career paths, and then taking steps to actually prepare for the types of roles you’re realizing you might be interested in.
Julie Gould 11:49
Here’s the thing, though, when I look back at my career, this is definitely not how I did it.
And this is what organizational psychology professor Julia Yates from the City St George’s University in London in the UK, found too.
She was trying to find the theory that summed up how young people actually made their career choices in the real world.
Julia Yates: 12:09
And I kept reading and reading and reading, and I just couldn’t find anything out there. And there’s quite a lot of prescriptive career theory, so a lot of career support, which is kind of saying “this is how you ought to make a career decision.”
But actually, when I talked to, when I thought about my own career choices, when I thought about all the career choices of everybody I’ve ever met, people don’t conform to that.
So I was looking in the literature to find out, well, what do people actually do, because I thought that’s where you need to start. You need to start with what people actually do, and then support them to do what they’re doing, but a bit better.
And it turned out there was nothing in the literature about that.
So I did a research project. I looked at, I got hold of about 30 recent graduates. These were all graduates who are currently working. And I asked them to talk me through the stages of career decision-making.
So I asked them to think back to a time in their lives when they didn’t know what they wanted to do, and talk me through the steps that they took in order to be here where they are today, working in a job..
Julie Gould 13:12
The graduates Julia spoke to in her research were in all sorts of different fields, scientists, psychologists, musicians, teachers. All sorts of people from all different backgrounds, and broadly speaking, they all took the same steps.
Julia Yates 13:25
So they didn’t start with the self-awareness bit, because I think that’s just too hard. It’s just too difficult to do that in the abstract.
Where they started was by just picking a job, and it would be any job, it would be a job that sounded vaguely okay.
Maybe it was their work experience. Maybe it was something their dad suggested. Maybe they were at a party and somebody said, “Why don’t you do this?”
And the next thing they did is they explored it some more, so they found out a bit about what was the job like, maybe they did a bit of, you know, research on the internet. Maybe they found a couple of people to speak to,
And then, if it still sounded okay, that was the point where they started doing a bit of self-awareness.
So they were doing the self-awareness in the context of a particular idea, so not a blank sheet of paper.
Julie Gould 14:13
For example, they might have picked the position of a research scientist, maybe an optics-lab based physics one, and had spent some time reading about what it’s really like to work at an optics bench, to work in a dark room where the smallest movements could interfere with the experiments.
They might have taken some time to speak to the people who do this already and found out how much time they spend in the lab compared to at a computer, doing data analysis and writing papers.
And maybe after doing some of this due diligence, they might have decided that this wasn’t quite for them,
Julia Yates 14:46
Or they might think it’s okay, and so they do a little bit more research, maybe a bit a work experience at that point, they’d go through that sort of iterative process, sometimes thinking about a few different jobs, and then they’d get to the point where they’d think, “Okay. this feels alright. I think I’m going to give it a go.”
Now, can I just add two other things to that? And one of them is that an awful lot of the graduates I spoke to did not feel that they had made a career choice. They were just doing something that sounded okay.
They weren’t at all sure they were going to stick with this forever. And I thought that was great. You know, I think maybe when you’re in your mid 20s, making a decision that you plan to stick with for the next 30 years is probably a bit ambitious.
So I really wholeheartedly respected the idea that they were kind of trying something. It seemed okay. They’d learn a lot, and maybe a few years down the line, they’d rethink.
The second thing that I thought was really interesting in what they talked about is that they use the application process as part of the exploration.
So traditionally, you would always have thought that people would make a career choice and then apply for a job.
But that’s not what these graduates did. These graduates use the application process as a way to find out more. So they applied, and then they made a choice.
Which is kind of putting that bit, a little bit the other way around from the way you’d normally think about it.
Julie Gould: 16:09
Really, this real-life model uses exactly the same phases as the ones Cynthia described earlier, but they’re in a different order, and they’re used in an iterative way. And as a result, this process does two things.
One, it helps give people a context within which to do the hard self-reflection stuff. And two, it actually helps people not get lost or stuck in the career decision-making process.
And actually, there is a theory called Career Inaction Theory, which is a relatively new framework that focuses on why people do not take career-related actions, even when they’re unhappy or uncertain about the path that they’re on.
And instead of assuming that people are always actively planning or progressing, the theory asks the question: why do people freeze or delay or avoid or stay still when making career decisions?
Julia Yates 17:01
So one of the main things that people get stuck around is cognitive overload. So, you know, there are just too many jobs out there to think about, and people get overwhelmed, and then they just can’t bear it anymore, so they stop thinking about it.
And actually, that makes perfect sense. If you think about all the numbers of jobs there are out there trying to narrow that down to one. I mean, no wonder people get overwhelmed.
But this process, the ones that the graduates told me about, they’re just sticking with one at a time. So actually, that’s much more, it’s much more possible to really think something through if you’re just thinking about it one at a time.
Julie Gould 17:38
At the end of our conversation, Julia told me that she hopes that young people can understand from this that sometimes jobs don’t work out, but that this is okay.
Julia Yates 17:47
I think it can feel so utterly overwhelming and daunting that actually things work out. And even if a job doesn’t work out, it’s still incredibly useful as a process.
My first job, when I left university, was a complete disaster. I was so ill-suited, I was so unhappy, and I was so incompetent. And actually that was just awful, you know, I was deeply unhappy.
But then I left, and with retrospect, it was such a useful process to have been through.
So I suppose the message is: even career disasters are not disastrous. Unpleasant at the time, but you learn from them, and that means the next time around, you do it better.
So I would say you’re in your working life for a long time, and it’s really lovely to be able to reinvent yourself as you go through.
So when you’re starting out, don’t think this is the job I’m going to have to do for the next 40 years. It’s not your last step you’re thinking about. It’s your first step.
Julie Gould 18:44
So to help you with your first step, or seventh or umpteenth career step, in the next episode of this series, we’ll be sharing some practical tips on how to get started with your career planning.
But before you go, here’s our sponsored slot from the International Science Council on career development for early and mid-career researchers in an ever-evolving scientific landscape.
Thanks for listening. I’m Julie Gould.
Izzie Clarke: 19:14
Hello and welcome. I’m science journalist Izzie Clarke and in this podcast series, presented in partnership with the International Science Council, with the support of the China Association for Science and Technology, we’ll be exploring the changing scientific landscape for early- and mid-career researchers – and how best to navigate it.
Today, I’m joined by Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf, a theoretical physicist and the President-elect of the International Science Council.
Robbert Dijkgraaf: 19:45
Hello.
Izzie Clarke: 19:46
And Baojing Gu from Zhejiang University, Professor of Environmental and Resource Management.
Baojing Gu: 19:51
Hello everyone.
Izzie Clarke: 19:52
Thank you both so much for joining me. Robbert, let’s start with you. You’ve spoken about how the scientific landscape is undergoing major change – that’s what this episode is about. So, from your perspective, what are the biggest shifts in scientific careers today, particularly for early- and mid-career researchers?
Robbert Dijkgraaf: 20:12
We are in a dramatic change in the whole academic enterprise. We see this acceleration of new technologies, of the larger community growing. But also the demands on the research community becomes much more intense. We want researchers not just to be excellent in doing research. We want them to work in interdisciplinary teams, we want them to connect to society, we want them to have policy advice. So, if you’re an early-career researcher, you might feel overwhelmed about how are you going to navigate indeed that landscape if it’s changing so rapidly.
Baojing Gu: 20:57
Nowadays, we have fast transformation for the new technology, such as AI and big data. We need it to use in multiple languages from different research areas, and I think that’s the big challenge for the younger generations trying to understand the new global world and using more comprehensive angles.
Izzie Clarke: 21:21
And that fast transformation, these new technologies and that acceleration… yes, those are challenges but they’ll provide new opportunities, too. So, what would you advise early- and mid-career researchers who are facing that?
Robbert Dijkgraaf: 21:35
There are terrific opportunities, not only to do great work but to redesign the abstract academic building in which they are operating. There are really opportunities for the next generation to shift the way we do science, to think differently about career paths, think differently about teamwork. For many decades, we had a static research enterprise, and we’re now living in a time where we feel this is no longer the appropriate way to position ourselves. And we will be disappointing society, disappointing policymakers, we’ll be disappointing ourselves if we not also restructure the academic enterprise.
Baojing Gu: 22:23
Yes, I think we have the new challenges and the new opportunities. And especially we have big data. We have new technology, especially for AI. They are not only focusing in one area. Actually, it’s interdisciplinary. So, I think that is nowadays the innovation added by the new technology. We can actually solving more issues or more difficult issues for the younger generations. If you look into solving issues from very different angles, that can easily actually solve many very difficult questions. I think that’s also the chance for the younger generations.
Izzie Clarke: 23:07
And it opens up, I suppose, that accessibility and the communication as well. How can those early-career researchers, I guess, feel empowered to start some of that change?
Robbert Dijkgraaf: 23:20
I think one of the great pleasures to be a scientist is that you’re part of a worldwide community. So, I’m a physicist and I talk to physicists around the world. If you talk about how should you shape careers, how should you change the way in which we collaborate, how should you structure the academic institutions, often that is a discussion you only have nationally. I will have the conversation in the Netherlands and Baojing will have the conversation in China, and these are separate conversations. But actually, they’re again the same common issues because they are driven by the big, I would say, societal forces that attack science. So, the wonderful thing that ISC can do is to have these conversations. And then facilitating conversations like this works empowering because many young people have terrific ideas. But I think part of the role ISC has is to exchange these best practices.
Baojing Gu: 24:22
We have one world, one house. We need the world to work together, especially for the climate-change issues. Each region have their own issues. And so, I think, ISC have a platform that allows us to discuss with each other. That helps the scientists to understand sustainability in different parts of the world. And finally, we unify as one world.
Robbert Dijkgraaf: 24:47
That’s a really very important point that Baojing made. We cannot solve these big issues if we are not collaborating globally.
Izzie Clarke: 24:56
Yes, absolutely. But with that international collaboration comes travel, communications, as well, and sometimes that can be difficult, especially if you are at the beginning or the middle of your career. So, Baojing, if I ask you, what challenges have you faced in international collaboration and how have you been able to adapt to that situation?
Baojing Gu: 25:18
I think as a very beginning, as a early-career, whether you can find the resource to support you to do the international collaboration, whether you have time, you have resource, to cover the cost, that’s quite important. Nowadays, we can search to see them online, but it works different if you really go to meet people, talk to people. The ideas come from their smile. Or they’re angry. You can really understand people and understand different parts of the world through the face-to-face communication.
Izzie Clarke: 25:53
Yeah, there’s no doubt that there’s something special about face-to-face communication. But that also relies on resources and that’s something to address – whether that’s funding, infrastructure or time – that affects scientists across the globe. So, what solutions or support structures do you think are the most effective for early- and mid-career researchers?
Robbert Dijkgraaf: 26:16
I think it’s very important to make this point that Baojing just made, that it’s so important to have these face-to-face personal interactions. But in an early phase of your career, you don’t realize that these people you meet might travel with you your whole career, and these are really lifelong contacts that will pay off. So, I think it’s incredibly important that people who organize conferences, schools, events, make sure that they have the means and the resources available to support young researchers from around the world, particularly the Global South, from areas where they are very restricted in resources. To achieve equity in science, it’s important that we do more for those who have less.
Baojing Gu: 27:09
Actually, I participate in several meetings hold by ISC and they cover all my costs. I think that’s… very grateful for that, and that I can travel to Kuala Lumpur and to Oman, and I think the place is more important. I think I agree with Robbert that such as we can have a meeting in Africa or in other regions that’s short of resources, but we can bring other parts of the world to that region that allow more people from that region to participate in such kind of activities.
Izzie Clarke: 27:46
So, let’s look ahead to the future. What are the biggest trends that you both see in terms of scientific careers for the future, and how can early- and mid-career researchers best prepare for them?
Robbert Dijkgraaf: 27:58
What I see happening is that the life of a scientist will be no longer one dimensional. You can go to other fields, you can be active in public outreach, in communication. And, of course, the other big trend is that we look at the collective because all those demands that are on science, not a single person can do as a single individual. We have to do it collectively within our institutions, within our nations, and I think also in the global community. And my biggest message to early-career scientists: feel free to explore that space. Keep that explorative attitude that you have in your research also for your own career, and find your own path in this vast space where you feel most at home.
Izzie Clarke: 28:48
Baojing, what do you think?
Baojing Gu: 28:51
I’m thinking the future is maybe more creative for the younger generation with the help of AI, and we can do more creative job. And we may not only change science, but also the world – how people connect to each other, how people talk to each other. And we build the high-technique facilities for the younger generation. Allow them to really create new framework or things that can lead our humankind for our next step. Another thing is critical thinking. When we read, whether we have critical thinking, whether personally we do wrong or we can do better. And I think the third most important part is see the world. We really go to field, see the world, talk to the citizens to understand their life, to understand the real world. And then we combine our critical thinking, readings and already known knowledge, and whether we can have new creative ideas for the sustainability in the future.
Izzie Clarke: 30:03
That’s a great point, it’s about listening and paying attention to both your data, as well as the real world and who that research impacts.
Robbert Dijkgraaf: 30:13
I would also say listen to your inner voice. It’s a really complex world which you’re navigating, this is vast ocean. But I think inside you you have a little compass that tells you where your passion is, what perhaps the very beginning of an idea is. But make sure to listen to this little voice inside you, because that will guide you through the future.
Izzie Clarke: 30:38
Great advice. Thank you both so much for joining me today.
If you’re an early- or mid-career researcher and you want to be part of the global community that Baojing and Robbert mentioned, then join the International Science Council forum for emerging scientists.
Visit the website council.science/forum. I’m Izzie Clarke, and next time we’ll be exploring the importance of careers within science policy. Until then.
