Mr. Larry Petcovic, MS2 and Mr. Randall Ribaudo, PhD are co-founders of the SciPhD program, tailored to help young scientists transition into careers outside academia. With a combined background of graduate school, academic and industry research, entrepreneurship, and communications, the two co-founders offer a wide range of experiences and perspectives with which to guide fledgling scientists attempting to dodge unemployment in today’s job market. When Rutgers University applied for the NIH Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training (BEST) program, the SciPhD was one of the training points emphasized in the application. It was this NIH grant that allowed our iJOBS program to be brought to life, and in February/March of 2015, Larry and Randy made the 5-hour drive to Busch Campus on 8 different occasions in order to take us through SciPhD.
Some simple questions first:
1)How and why did you and Randy conceive the SciPhD program?
A collection of industry and academic experiences of mine, Randy’s and Todd’s (an original SciPhD member now in industry). For me, the career change from Health Physicist to Behavioral Coaching in industry was a surprise in that everything I learned in physical sciences was also a concept in social sciences – just with different names. After being a Training and Development VP and HR VP, I came to realize that scientists in general greatly undervalue their education as a “process” and so many would be great leaders – they just don’t get it!
Randy and Todd got into this based on their experience with industry and academic science. Why do industry scientists focus on the context and solution to help the client and academic scientists focus on their personal contribution and value to science? Something is different in the focus and purpose of the research effort.
The name SciPhD popped out as a joint venture project between myself and Randy’s company Human Workflows, LLC.
2) Can you give a brief summary, from your viewpoint, of what you perceive the program’s purpose to be?
The program’s purpose is to enable the academic researcher to discover the total value they bring to an organization that requires ALL their talent: technical, business and social. To allow them to take ownership of their career using all their talent dimensions. Stop being a lamb and be the lion (lioness). The world needs smarter and more socially oriented business and governmental leaders; scientist should fill 33% of those jobs. A recent study of the top 100 public global company CEOs had about 25% Engineers and 25% MBAs with just a few PhDs.
Bottom line: you will discover ALL your talent, learn how to effectively compete for a job and be a team player in an organization within hours – not months – and you will be a future leader if you so choose. All in 36 hours of training!
Now about the program itself:
3) You seem to heavily favor practical exercises and group discussion over lectures. How do you come up with and test out exercises such as the fruit tossing/innovation simulation or the PostDocs Inc industry exercise?
First, we treat PhD’s as adults and not school children. We practice the basic principles of Adult Learning; build on their experiences and let them discover the content. We reinforce learning points many ways and multiple times. We are big practitioners of Peer Coaching – and PhDs are really good at coaching each other.
The exercises are derived from much of my industry training experience. Between various certifications and opportunities to work with the General Electric’s of the world, plus Randy’s Project Management training, we design and execute as much experiential learning as we can. We would do 0% lecture if possible.
Our goal is go beyond knowledge and create the opportunity for affective engagement, shared ownership of outcomes and let the groups experience the power of mutual support to help each other succeed!
4) You’ve managed to distill your and Randy’s combined experiences into a 40-hour program. What are some things you would have loved to include if the program was longer?
I would love to have 80 PhDs for 2 weeks at an Army base. I would include much more leadership of small teams; rope courses, orienteering, total dependence on your team. We would simulate much more finance training and they would have Projects to complete using Project Management techniques. Lots more assessments. Videotaping of staged social interactions to persuade and develop trust. I think each candidate would be highly desired by industry!
5) Can you give me a brief breakdown of other programs/training you offer online and in the form of workshops?
We just started the Virtual Career Center that will serve two purposes: reach PhDs that do not have institutional support and help that at a low cost via remote resources; and, reinforce training we do in the face-to-face workshops so our clients can practice and improve their skill level toward mastery.
Subjects will be basic until we build our base and can learn from our users where to go next.
6) What are the behind-the-scenes requirements of being a cofounder of SciPhD? How do you keep your program current and relevant?
Behind the scene is a lot of Randy marketing, coordinating, collecting our payments and managing the cash flow. We constantly ask ourselves “If I just did this course, what can I now do better than when I started?” Support material – the books – and the PowerPoints – require never-ending updates. Each program has anywhere from 10 to 30% customization based on what the institution wants emphasized, and what stimulates each audience. Students often comment that we seem to have fun doing this work. You bet!!! The workshop is our favorite time to play – actually – our only time to play!
Relevance is our second law of business. What we did today will not be good enough tomorrow. Relevance is constant learning and making it better. We have never done the same workshop twice. And for review; First law of business is to make a profit.
Finally, on your general outlook on the graduate student’s world:
7) What else do you think universities can do to their graduate programs to help their budding science PhDs out?
More process, less content. The current purpose of the PhD is to create a researcher that can only live in academia. Institutions would have to restructure their programs in order to shape graduate school into a sort of incubator for future leaders that can survive in whatever career they choose. The PhD experience needs to show you that you can gain and master a certain knowledge base, but at the same time learn to earn public trust, manage a project, and lead a team.
I did design and support several different (online and other) workshops for new MBA graduates on advancing into leadership positions. Interestingly, they suffer from the same lack of appreciation for their work and education experiences. Professional disciplines simply fail at providing any “process orientation” to the world.
8) What advice do you have for anyone who wants to get involved in something like the SciPhD or other training roles in the future?
First, take some courses in adult learning, adult decision making, basic neurosciences, and instructional systems design. Play with all the learning modalities you can beyond lecturing. Ask yourself, how will this client base be learning 5 years from now? How can I use social media with neurosciences and group process to get results faster, better and simpler? You have to bring together at least 3 fields of study that may not be currently practiced into something of value to a client base. And you have to be passionate about your purpose: my job as Larry Petcovic is to get you exceeding our own expectations! Ready???
For more information on the status of alternative and academic science careers, as well as useful information on how to market yourself using the skills ingrained in you by your PhD training, you can visit the SciPhD blog here:
http://sciphd.com/blog/
And the SciPhD Virtual Career Center here:
http://sciphd.com/virtual-career-center-2/