Mind the gap - a career blog bridging the gap between academia and industry

How can you prepare for your next career step already during your PhD or postdoc time? Which skills are necessary and sought-after, and can you increase your chances by signing up for a relevant course? We asked the partner companies and collaborators of the PSI Career Center and the CONNECT program what they are looking for – and wrote this compilation based on inputs by ABB, APP, Axpo, Bain, cross-ING, Dectris, DETEC, Hilti, McKinsey, Sensirion, VDL and ZEISS

‘Can you share examples of the most important questions and answers from counseling sessions? What is it that you discuss with people? What if I find it hard to formulate my question? What can I expect from a counseling session? And what will I talk to you for an entire hour?’ 

Were you wondering about these, but have not yet found a good occasion to ask? – Well, thanks to others who did, you will find out in this blog post:

We are all excited about our first Joint PSI and Park Innovaare Career Fair, and looking forward to lots of fruitful interactions between companies and early career researchers. We cannot wait to hear your success stories. But how do you start the conversation?

The PSI Career Blog presents PSI alumni and their career paths, as well as the daily work and career perspectives at our partner companies. Today we get both combined: Dionysos Chionis joined Axpo after his PhD at PSI, and provides an insight into his current position as head of the Nuclear Physics Group at Axpo Group.

The PSI Career Blog presents PSI alumni and their career paths, as well as the daily work and career perspectives at our partner companies. Today we get both combined: Christian Bährle worked in different places after his time at PSI, and provides an insight into his current position at ZEISS.

‘It seemed so easy for all of you, but I have no idea where I want to go – how did you know?’ was a frequent comment after our Nonlinear Career Paths event in October. Why do careers seem so hard when it comes to deciding on the next step, when in retrospect, they seem to just have happened? ‘I met this person, and then one thing led to the other, and now I have my dream job’ or ‘I never imagined myself in this place but X happened, and got me interested in Y, so now I am here’, are frequent answers when asking people how they got to the position where they are today. Do you have to be lucky, or can you plan a career?

How can we use artificial intelligence in the application process? I gave it a try and had artificial intelligence write a motivation letter for my current position with the information that I am a physicist and a coach. Here is what came back (interestingly, the content and structure are different when asking in English vs German, so it is worth to read both translations):

Our partner companies are interested in attracting PSI's early career researchers, and we introduce scientists working at partner companies to showcase career perspectives. In today's post, meet Johanna Mehl, who did her PhD in biophysics at ETHZ and is currently an associate at McKinsey & Company. She tells us how she managed the transition away from academia, and what she is working on now.

This question showed up in my LinkedIn inbox a few days ago, out of the blue, asked by a person I had collaborated with a decade ago and not had any contact since. Clearly, my decision to leave academia made an impact. But what were the reasons, anyway?

The PSI Career Blog features PSI alumni and their career paths to highlight the versatility of the PSI community, and inspire the young generation. Today with Kathrin Ebner, who is telling us about her journey from a PhD at PSI to being a risk assessor at Munich Re.

‘Only those who are not successful in academia move to industry’, or ‘when I move to industry, I will earn a lot, but others tell me what to do, and I cannot develop myself any further’ on the one side, and ‘those scientists life in their own world, will we even be able to communicate with them?’ on the other – these are some myths and prejudices challenging those looking for their next job. How can you deal with these?

The PSI Career Blog features PSI alumni and their career paths to highlight the versatility of the PSI community, and inspire the young generation. Today with Gesara Bimashofer, who is telling us about her journey from a PhD at PSI to being a consultant at APP Unternehmensberatung AG in Bern.

The PSI Career Blog features PSI alumni and their career paths to highlight the versatility of the PSI community, and inspire the young generation. Today with Eric Wasson Burns, who is telling us about his PhD experience at PSI, and the transition to his current job as associate in the climate team of Deep Science Ventures.

‘If I change to industry or the public administration, does that mean I have to start all over again?’ is a question that is often asked in career counseling sessions one way or another. Clearly, after having invested so much time and energy in your education and your research project, the last thing you would want is starting from scratch. But do you really have to start all over again when you change career direction? And what is so bad about a fresh start?

Do you sometimes get frustrated when you scroll through social media and see the new positions your contacts are about to start and the grants or prizes they are awarded? Do others’ success stories make you feel small and incapable? Is it true that everyone else is super-successful while you are struggling, or what is behind the others’ success?

The PSI Career Blog features PSI alumni and their career paths to highlight the versatility of the PSI community, and inspire the young generation. Today with Marco Taddei, who is telling us about his postdoc experience at PSI, and the transition to his current job as associate professor at the University of Pisa, Italy.

Happy New Year! I hope you are having a good start to 2023, and that this will be an exciting, successful and happy year for you. At this time of the year, many of us like to think about everything we have to do, or everything we should do better than last year. But is there a better approach?

Do you know this feeling of sitting in the lab, totally bored because you are just doing the same measurement for the umpteenth time, thinking that nobody needs to study for 5+ years to do what you are doing right now? What about the feeling of having put a huge amount of effort into your paper writing, working late to get everything ready in time – only to get it back all red from your supervisor’s corrections? Or having a reviewer (who clearly doesn’t understand your study) state it is not new or original enough, or not getting any response for ages? Add to this an instrument that breaks down just before your last measurement, a PC that crashes just before the model finished calculating, and you have a great recipe to frustrate a scientist. This blog post helps you get rid of the frustration and be happier at and with your work.

‘What are you going to do with me now?’ or ‘I didn’t really know what to expect’ are sentences I often hear at the beginning of a counseling session. Not knowing what will happen can make us quite nervous, and for some this nervousness is even a reason to say ‘my questions are not that important, I don’t need counseling’. I congratulate each and every one of you who had the courage to come to a counseling session. It does take courage to expose yourself, not knowing what will come. For those who were secretly wondering what happens behind closed doors in my counseling room, let’s have a look at what career counseling is about.

You are good at your job, you are successful, you have achieved what most of us are aiming for, you are inspiring the new generation. How can you think about doing something else? What would the community do without you? Who will take care of the lab?

People having opinions about our career choices is inevitable. How do you deal with it? And what happens when you decide to follow a path that others think is crazy?

While we ask ourselves every now and then whether we are still happy in our private lives, we often hesitate to do the same in our professional lives. Why this should be necessary?

Taking the time to assess your own professional situation is very valuable. Especially because nowadays a career is almost never straightforward, it is often helpful to be aware of certain points.  

Kelsey Inouye's job search has given her panic attacks and dented her self-esteem. But she has learned to deal with rejection. This blog post originally appeared as such on Nature's website and was adapted almost 1:1 from there. What Kelsey learned from her time after her PhD confirms what is taught in career counselling sessions at PSI: Focusing only on finding a job ends up being counterproductive.

Plan a career, visualise your future job and set yourself precise goals. This is often the sort of good and well-intentioned advice given by friends, relatives and career counsellors when it comes to planning one's professional future. There is no recipe with a guarantee of success and, above all, one particular ingredient should never be forgotten: Happenstance.