Preface Free

This book is designed to help STEM students and graduates (recent and not so recent) to build their career in professions where they use their STEM training. The world generally has a specific idea of what a STEM career looks like (white coats, people coding, people in high-vis clothing with large equipment, etc.). In reality, people who have studied STEM subjects go on to roles in all sectors and work in all sorts of environments. This can make navigating a STEM career effectively more difficult than professions where there is a straight line between training and workplace (e.g., nursing, teaching, architecture, etc.). A student or graduate has more options. This is a great thing, but requires more decisions and maybe more planning.

This book grew out of the recognition that, while there are some great career subjects at many universities, not everyone had access to those subjects. That could be because their university doesn’t offer a career unit, they had no room in their course, they just didn’t know about the value of such a unit until too late in their studies, or possibly the offering was extracurricular with the student needing to work to support themselves rather than being able to do an optional extra class. With this book, students and graduates can work to build their career independent of timing or university offerings. The authors are all passionate about providing a resource that is easy to work through, supportive and useable by a large range of students. The authors are also very conscious that they all wish they could have had this sort of resource when they were students or graduates. While everyone will make the odd career development mistake, some of the stories in the book where the authors made mistakes would have been prevented by a book like this.

The authors would like to thank the many dozens of interviewees that they talked to during the preparation of this book. Your thoughts are a priceless addition, helping the reader to gain further insight into your specific workplace or situation. Please know that even if you don’t see a lot of quotes from your interviews in the book (we wanted to feature some from everyone), each interview helped inform and develop the book. The authors would also like to thank the student groups from Deakin University who helped collect interview data in 2022 and 2023. The work that you did processing and transcribing the interviews meant that we could have representation from more people, countries and sectors. You will note that location is not listed with the quotes. This is for a few reasons. Firstly, the insights from these quotes are not dependent on the country people were in when they had the experience. This book is designed more generally that that. Secondly, many of our interviewees have live/worked in multiple countries, so listing one country wouldn’t have made a lot of sense. We hope that through the interview quotes, we have provided a little window into the world of work that helped you build your career in STEM too.

Angela Ziebell

Rebecca Yee