By Shawn Rumrill
Welcome back to the 3rd and final piece of the Rutgers iJOBS SciPhD Leadership and Business Skills for Scientists workshop series, 2021! If you missed part 1 you can check it out here. If you missed part 2, also check that out here. Throughout the week, this intensive workshop afforded PhD students the soft skills necessary to help them achieve their career goals after graduation. Part 1 focused largely on helping graduates build their resume to land an interview; part 2 developed human-centric soft skills; and part 3 instilled uncommon skills among academics, including business and negotiation techniques.
Day 4 – Business Performance
Scientists in academia may not always consider the business factors that are important for an industrial position. Fortunately, as academics we are typically given free reign by our PIs to perform experiments as we see fit, with some exceptions, and minimal considerations for budgeting and deadlines beyond our own. SciPhD co-founders Dr. Ribaudo and Mr. Petcovic note that by tax code definitions, businesses must make a profit. In order to do this, projects must be completed on-time and under-budget ideally. Furthermore, to stay in business, company’s products and services must remain competitive. As such, the day four SciPhD sessions focused largely on team performance and the basic tools of business.
In small groups, workshop attendees were tasked with developing a company and a product or service for commercialization, then preparing a product pitch for a lay audience, as well as defining a two-year goal. My group, composed of bench researchers, computer scientists, and nutritionists, came up with a company called AI Nutrition. The goal of this mock company was to produce an algorithm that designs custom meal and diet regimens for individuals based on their dietary restrictions (lactose or gluten sensitivity, vegetarianism or veganism, etc). We also wanted the algorithm to make ethical considerations for things like environmentally friendly or cruelty free food production. At the end of two years, our hope was to license this technology to companies like Amazon who might implement it as a nutritional consulting service on their website or in Whole Foods stores. This SciPhD exercise was useful in helping us and other workshop attendees to consider problems or concepts that real businesses contend with when designing their product or service. Moreover, it made us appreciate the detailed planning of resources that business startups need, as well as setting of timelines and goals.
Groups in the SciPhD workshop continued exploring their mock companies and services for the remainder of the day. Participants learned about techniques such as process mapping to layout the steps required to develop a product/service from conception all the way through testing, validation, and benchmarking for success before final marketing. Through this process, groups were also asked to keep in mind business aspects such as revenue, expenses, profit and loss. Other factors participants considered were return on investment and how to adjust if you were to lose project funding or have an unexpectedly truncated timeline. These are all real-world considerations that businesses have to make and exposing SciPhD workshop participants to these concepts was hugely beneficial. Again, the business aspect of science is not considered as much in academia as in industry. For academics with an industry career in mind, becoming aware of the business of science makes them all the more attractive as a job candidate.
Day 5 – Project Management
The final day of the SciPhD workshop wrapped up a week of leadership and business skills with considerations for project management and negotiation skills, topped off an evening networking reception. Personally, I found the project management session to be quite a bit more valuable than I was anticipating. While we all utilize some degree of project management for our PhD studies, it is interesting to think how these skills translate into real-life industrial jobs and the systematic nature of project management. This part of the workshop defined a project as a set of activities with a defined endpoint. Projects managers typically have to consider what is called the “iron triangle” meaning the time, cost, and scope of a project, which can be graphically depicted as an equilateral triangle. When one of these variables changes you can still adjust other parameters to meet your goals. For example, if your timeline variable shortens, you can increase your expense output variable to get more done faster to compensate. But what questions should project managers be asking while keeping in mind these parameters?
There are four key questions SciPhD suggests asking when designing a project. The first is what are you trying to accomplish and why? In PhD research, this has inevitably been done – your thesis has a defined goal to accomplish and typically to serve some purpose like understanding novel biomolecular mechanisms or developing more efficient carbon-carbon coupling reactions. The second question is how do you know when you are successful? Defining a goal is important, but one must implement criteria to identify when they goal has been met or completed to satisfaction. Thirdly, what conditions exist out of your control that might delay or alter your project? If one uses a core facility for example, they must consider what happens if that core facility shuts down (i.e. during a pandemic) or can’t actually perform the experiment you need to do. Fourth, one must consider how they are going to carry out achieving their goal – what sorts of experiments need to be conducted to collect data that meets your criteria for success? A tool SciPhD suggested to address this fourth question is developing a process map specific enough to estimate a project’s timeline and the cost of resources.
Logical and organized progression of tasks in project management has many advantages. Some of these include ensuring the work done is relevant, necessary and satisfies the project’s objectives in a logical structure. Other advantages include, determining if a project should continue or terminate and providing sufficient detail to accurately estimate project time, costs, and priorities. Overall, these skills are valuable in both academia and industry. If you’re going to transition from academia to industry, you should also keep in mind that you may not want to be in the lab forever. Incorporating project management skills into your repertoire affords qualifications that will eventually help you to progress into senior managerial positions in industry and enjoy the ability to lead a team. Another benefit is that managerial positions typically reap greater salaries!
Finally, SciPhD covered negotiations as a scientist. Negotiations become important when starting a new job and securing benefits and compensation, but also in departing your lab as a postdoc or working with your advisor to determine a thesis defense date. With this in mind, Larry noted that negotiation can take either distributive or integrative strategies. Distributive negotiation, or hard bargaining, argues over a fixed item with finite distribution such as the expense for a car or house, and tends to take negative undertones. In contrast, integrative negotiation attempts to seek a common interest and create a “win-win” scenario. This type of negotiation can be more positive and is applicable to negotiating things like starting salary. The take-home message from Larry is that you should always strive to move conversations toward integrative negotiation. To do this, one should seek to find optimistic and attainable common ground. If the conversation seems more distributive in nature, it is often helpful to switch to a “learner” role and ask questions to help find common ground (see part 1). Most importantly, you should always be able to provide examples of your qualifications and work outcomes as evidence of why you deserve greater reward for your efforts. To end this part of the workshop Larry reminds us that when asked “do you want to make money?” your answer is not simply “yes.” Your answer should be “I want to make MORE money!”
After 5 days and nearly 20 hours of informative lectures, mock interviews, and group activities, the Rutgers iJOBS SciPhD Leadership and Business Skills for Scientists came to a close. Reflecting on the activities of the past week, I can honestly say it is one of the most valuable workshops I have attended via iJOBS. While the experience this year was different as Dr. Ribaudo and Mr. Petcovic had never presented the workshop in a digital format, every activity went as if it had been rehearsed. As scientists, we often focus too heavily on our technical skills and assets at the bench and too infrequently on both soft skills to help us land jobs, but also tools to advocate for our own success such as building targeted resumes, communicating with our audience, and negotiating. SciPhD’s program enabled attendees to learn these additional skills and feel much more confident in their prospects, whether they are in the job market now or several years from now. Besides the topics reviewed in Part 1 and part 2 of the SciPhD iJOBS blog posts, many other skills were covered via the workshop. I’d encourage each of you reading to see for yourself and take part in the SciPhD Leadership and Business Skills for Scientists workshop because remember, we don’t just want to make money, we want to make more money!
This article was edited by Junior Editor, Rukia Henry, Junior Editor, Natalie Losada, and Senior Editor, Samantha Avina.