A while ago Christopher Buddle posted a blog on SciLogs about what you needed to know before becoming a professor. Many of those skills are the ones in demand outside of academia.
It got me thinking generally what skills I have amassed over a Ph.D, Post-doc and faculty position. For any other "recovering scientists" reading this please feel free to steal this list, add to it or perfect it. Any comments or critique would be welcome.
- Project management- over my academic career I managed to publish several papers in top journals. Some required precise planning of tasks and experiments on a short deadlines against competition. This requires ensuring that each set of experiments is finishes with a high quality deliverable.
- Human resource- as a professor I had to hire, fire and develop staff. This included students and early career professionals where you are balancing what they are capableof today, with their career goals. I picked projects for them that they matched their skills.
- Project planning- a PhD is a set of projects, that need to be planned out, with a full timeline, deliverables and costs set out. In addition a key part of a successful PhD or post-doc is knowing when to kill a project.
- Stakeholder relationship- each stage of a PhD requires you to set out goals with your faculty advisory committee. These people will provide guidance and advice for where you should spend your time. Part of success is ensuring that you cogent show progress toward each of the members ideas ofyour success. The stakes get higher as you move to a post-doc where you are expected to manage the project and manage the expectations of your boss.
- Budget building- as a professor I needed to build RFPs, prioritize purchases based on project needs-as well as the long term strategy of the lab, source infrastructure, mange vendors and raise funds.
- Publications- part of a scientists job is to communicate results to the community. This includes typical writing skills but also graphic design, matching the presentation visualizations to the message and audience.
- Data management- all aspects of data management including ensuring high quality data recording metadata, designing database considerations. Build database querying, integrating public and owned data into a complete set.
- Analytics- a key part of my PhD was defying how to quantitate behavior and images. This requires a clear analytic method that allows reproducibility through clear, logical rubric for scoring purposes.
- Web based research-not just the query but also the decision on good sources and bad ones.
- Public speaking- I have given hundreds of lectures to all sizes of groups both lay groups and expert groups. This gives me a large set of tools to fall back on for presentation design
- Individual drive- to do a PhD you need to an internal drive to do what must be done.
- Intellectual flexibility- as part of my PhD I learned at least 12 different technical skills at a high enough level to use them in peer reviewed publications and teach them to others. I learned these through reading and just dpingi didn't need to be walk through them multiple times.
- Records management- my laboratory work in a high demand, high competition environment. We needed to have all experiments documented in a way that would stand up to legal review and could be used as part of a patent process.
- Understanding of several healthcare related regulations- part of my work was related to drug discovery and some of it was in collaboration with clinicians. Meaning that we ensured that all documents and protocols met the required standards.
- Graphic design- genetics is a hard area to explain without pictures. I designed many successful visualizations using Photoshop, powepoint and old matte photography techniqies.
- Process design- my laboratory was at the bleeding edge of genetics. This meant that we were constantly building new processes and testing resources that would be best for that process.
- Process optimization- due to the unique methods we constantly needed to set production standards and build analytics that allowed us to evaluate and optimize process and make changes that reduced cost and increased reproducibility and accuracy.
- Contract negotiations-as part of my job, I have negotiated service contracts, terms of employment
- Fund raising- academic labs are also look for new sources of funding and interacting with potential investors/funders
- Strategic product planning -a key part of success is understanding where government priorities are now and the next five years to develop a funding strategy. Successful scientists also have a understanding of the competitive landscape and position their employees and infrastructure to keep up.
