Why moving from academia to industry?
You just joined a great institution. You started your Ph.D. program. You expect to finish in 3–4 years. You want to become a Professor someday.
Soon, you begin to realize that even your best colleagues struggle to find a good Postdoc. Being even harder to become a group leader. Becoming a Professor looks a further and further dream. And it is: less than 0.5% of the Ph.D. graduates will become a Professor [1] (page 14)
From [1]: This diagram illustrates the transition points in typical academic scientific careers following a Ph.D. and shows the flow of scientifically-trained people into other sectors.
Just look around your group, five, maybe ten, even more, great colleagues, all in the same field as you. They are your colleagues but also competitors, even worse, there are dozen, or hundreds of other groups in the world, each one also with great researchers, each one of them, with big expectations and dreams.
There are studies about the growing number of Ph.D. graduates against the number of opening positions in academia [2]. There is also comments about reducing the number of Ph.D. students [3], which I believe that it is unlikely due to the need for a cheap and specialized workforce in the laboratories around the world.
So, you finished (or in my case, almost finishing) your Ph.D., and you have to think about your future. Looking for a Postdoc can be your first option, but take care of not being trap in the Postdoc spiral [4]. I will not tell you to not go there. Go where your heart beats stronger but know your goals, your limitations, and the environment. In short: be realistic about your expectations. Also, know about the options.
One of the options is going to the industry. I have heard researchers talking repulsively about moving to the industry. These who speak badly about this options are usually older researchers and Professors which grew in a different environment from now or naive young researchers who still believe that they can overcome all real problems and climb to the top of the academic career easily.
Another common comment is that academic skills are not valuable in the industry, such as we spend years in theoretical problems, distant from the real-world issues, we write papers, but we do not find solutions, and so on. Honestly, some of these comments may have a valuable ground, but they forget what we learn during a good Ph.D. program: we study problems deeply. We learn how to extract and extrapolate ideas. We build experiments for obtaining data with limited human and financial resources. We developed the courage in ourselves, much of us introverted by nature, to discuss our ideas and finding with our peers, in writing or speaking ways. We also analyze our peers finding, focusing on ideas and concepts.
Also, one of the main lessons in a Ph.D. is: we are going to fail. A lot. Our experiments will not work, our manuscripts will not be accepted, and many times, our ideas will be wrong. But we keep learning and improving from these failures. We learn how to deal with failures and improve ourselves from them.
n short, technical skills are just a facade of what we develop during a Ph.D. program, where the called soft skills are one of the most significant benefits of doing a Ph.D.
Industries need these skills: the hard skills based on the knowledge acquired during the Ph.D. and the previous listed soft abilities. In the fast pace innovative world, people with abilities to solve complex problems and communicate their findings are valuable. In industries to chances of having a decent salary and growing career are much higher than in academia. Together, the life-work balance can be better managed in a 9–5 job, with real vacation time, and well-defined tasks and goals. But we must be prepared to be in a highly competitive place. I am sure that you can manage, but are you ready for this?
References:
[1] The Royal Society, The Scientific Century securing our future prosperity https://royalsociety.org/~/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2010/4294970126.pdf
[2] Larson, R.C., Ghaffarzadegan, N. and Xue, Y., 2014. Too many PhD graduates or too few academic job openings: the basic reproductive number R0 in academia. Systems research and behavioral science, 31(6), pp.745–750.
[3] Croucher, G., 2019. It’s time to reduce the number of PhD students, or rethink how doctoral programs work https://theconversation.com/its-time-to-reduce-the-number-of-phd-students-or-rethink-how-doctoral-programs-work-68972 (Accessed on July 8th, 2019)
[4] Nature 550, 429 (26 October 2017) https://www.nature.com/news/many-junior-scientists-need-to-take-a-hard-look-at-their-job-prospects-1.22879 doi:10.1038/550429a (Accessed on July 8th, 2019)
[5] Why earning a PhD is an advantage in today’s industry job market https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00097-x doi: 10.1038/d41586–019–00097-x
