Chapter 1: Introduction Free

The availability of good career advice for STEM students is highly dependent on where you go to school (both secondary and university) and how actively you feel, or felt, you can pursue that advice. Not everyone loves going to career days, and not everyone is great at navigating institutional systems to find help. But everyone deserves good career advice and help that will enable them to work out what they want from their career and how to navigate forward. We hope this book allows STEM people who are early in their career to navigate quickly to a job that is a great fit for them.

Everyone’s situation is different, though. So in this book, instead of telling you what to do, we help you understand the employment environment that you are already within or that you are headed to. When we say work “environment”, this is a combination of the influences from your discipline, where in the world you want to work and the industry you are considering. All these come together to form what we can call workplace culture. It is strongly influenced by the culture of the country the organisation is set in, but there is much more than that. Some environments are more or less causal, some will give you more independence, some will give you more training, others need a lot of technical skills, or you might need more transferrable skills. We will help you work through all these considerations and many, many more. At the end, you will understand the environment (or environments) you might work in.

But we will not just talk about work environments in this book. The book starts by helping you understand how to think about different types of skills you have, how to develop them, and, very importantly, how to articulate them so others can understand what you are capable of. The first specific skill we cover is commercial awareness. Commercial awareness isn’t normally an obvious part of STEM education, although courses vary a lot. We will talk about why commercial awareness is important for everyone, even if your role is not directly commercial. Then we will look at networking, a key aspect of being connected to other professionals. Networking often has a bad reputation. We will take you through how to work out how to network in a way that works for you (Figure 1.1).

Chapter 5: Portfolio Building gives you the tools to start developing your career right from the first year of university. Portfolios are still applicable as you graduate and even after graduation. Portfolios can help you keep track of what you have achieved and plan what you want to do next and how. Next, we have Chapter 6: Resumes and Cover Letters and Chapter 7: Addressing Key Selection Criteria and Interviews. Chapters 6 and 7 help very directly with how you prepare to apply for a job, how you write your documents and how to get ready for an interview once your application gets you to the next step.

Finally, we look at the additional considerations when you have completed a research master’s or a PhD. How does the process change for you? Or how might it change for you if you are thinking of doing a research degree? If you are in this group, all the other chapters are just as applicable as for people without a research degree. But in building the book, we wanted to specifically cover the process of getting a job after a research degree.

Because we aren’t magic, we don’t know where you will be interested in working and the exact question you might have about a specific company or workplace norm. So we try to help guide you through how to get advice from local sources that do know that information. Or, at the very least, these sources can help you work out how to find it out.

Before we look at how this book can be used, please understand that this is a resource to help your career development and there is no one way to either progress through the book or to engage in any of the activities. There is no one way to progress your career. Every career is unique and development of your career should take in what you want, what your skills and attributes are, how you can develop them further, where you want to work, what qualifications you have (or are getting), and what your financial and family circumstances are. And then, at every life stage (about 5–10 years), any or all of those points may change.

The saying “everyone is different” couldn’t be truer when it comes to careers and what you want out of your career. The next sections provide an orientation to how you might use the book based on the stage you are at within your student-professional journey. But you may be more or less progressed in a certain area. You might find a particular area challenging or already have experience with it. Move through the book purposefully, but in your own way.

Students early in degrees can use this book to plan out and better understand future experiences. For example, you might become interested in completing an internship, which can take time to plan, you might get a different part-time job to build a skill or decide that adding a different minor to your degree would help you expand a desired technical or transferable skill.

Chapter 5: Portfolio Building is particularly useful for new students as it guides students through building experiences inside and outside your degree so that when you reach the end of your degree, you have a collection of experiences that have helped build you as a professional. This means you have generally built a sense of what you might want, and you have built some experience that helped you understand the workplace and build your resume.

By understanding concepts like transferrable skills and the need for commercial awareness early, you will be able to better understand some learning experiences your educators give you. You will see “the point” where others might not. For example, group projects might not just be a burden, they might be an occasion to develop organisational and leadership skills and have an interesting anecdote for your resume in a couple of years (Figure 1.2).

Higher year level students can still use all parts of the book but will likely want to make sure they get up to speed on Chapter 2: Transferrable Skills and Reflection, Chapter 4: Networking and Chapter 5: Portfolio Building a little more rapidly so they have time to act on any realisations before graduation. At this point in your studies, you have possibly had some experience that you could use to start your portfolio, therefore it’s not just a case of planning future learning experiences.

You can spend time reflecting and working out what you have learnt so far, how you learnt it, what it means to you, and why. Understanding these points can help you direct the rest of your studies. For example, fine tune your elective choice, select a particular project topic around something you want to learn more about, or find a job that adds or expands on a skill. If it does not make sense how this will help, it is all explained in Chapters 2 and 5.

As you read and go through the activities, you will tend to see “the point” in more of the activities and learning that you are being given in class. It is easier to appreciate the skills you are being taught once you understand how those skills work and why they are important in career development.

Returning students or those redirecting their career will likely come in with more background knowledge than new students due to prior work experience. This book can be useful in a few ways. Many of us go on to a career without learning deeply about what we want from our career and how to best learn, develop ourselves, and communicate our skills and achievements to the world. That was certainly the experience of all the authors of this book. Now that you have had some career experience, you have a lot of skills and achievements that you can work on articulating. Those same experiences mean that you might have lots of thoughts about careers but may not have ways of moving forward in your thinking, working out what you want, why you want it, and how to make a plan for moving forward.

By working through this book, you can develop as a professional and gain a deeper level of understanding of where you might have knowledge gaps about how to manage your career. You might find that in some places you will skim through aspects that you are already comfortable with and feel a sense of achievement around. Hopefully, when this happens, you can take a moment to appreciate how far you have come since you were an undergraduate. In other areas, there might be more to work through. For example, you have more to communicate when applying for a job. This is a good thing, but it can take time to work methodically through what you are including in which job applications and why.

If you are also a returning student, you have the advantage of having professional experiences to reflect on and learn from, but you also have the advantage of being able to work out what you want to get from your current studies and how you will get it. You can use this book to work through both of those processes while building your general skills around networking, commercial awareness, and the job application and interview process. Again, some people in this position might not need some aspects of these chapters as much. When you get to a section that you are already comfortable with, it can still be good to read it to see if you can further improve. It is also worthwhile taking a moment to reflect on how much you have learnt since you were last a student and what that means for you and why.

Recent graduates and people already working can immediately use this book in their day-to-day life and will have examples that can be used in the activities most weeks, if not every week. To new graduates, I hope that working through our job application related Chapters 6 and 7 can help you get on top of any fears you might have about getting a good professional resume and cover letter together for a job application. If you are pressed for time, it would be very fair if you find yourself using just the application-related chapters initially until you find your first role. Then, with a first role worked out, you can come back and branch out to further developing your career using the other chapters.

Many young employees got their first job without having much of a plan or maybe not a lot of skill navigating the job “hunting” process. If this is you (and it was certainly me), this is your chance to observe while you are at work and improve your skills while working through the book. While being gainfully employed, you can explore what might be the next opportunity, whether that’s with your current employer or in a completely different field (Figure 1.3).

Graduate (research) students come in many forms: you might be a returning student or a continuing student. You might be extending your knowledge or redirecting your focus. For returning students, see the previous section too.

All STEM students and graduates can learn from any of the chapters. But, as we talk about in detail in Chapter 9: Higher Research Degree Considerations, those that do or have done a research degree tend to have a number of additional considerations. It’s rare to find this discussion in career books, so we thought it especially important to include it in our book. As a higher research degree (HDR) student (either master’s or PhD), there are a lot fewer people to talk to that have the same qualifications. Sometimes this matters, sometimes it doesn’t. For example, career professionals don’t normally have additional training to help HDR graduates specifically. You will likely find just as many helpful points in the other chapters as other science professionals, but we wanted to provide tailored support too (Figure 1.4).

Throughout the guidebook, career-related activities are labelled with skills ‘badges’. These are icons, which signal that the activities will also help you develop specific transferable skills (also known as employability skills, key skills, 21st century skills and many other names – see Chapter 2: Transferrable Skills and Reflection). Developing these skills is critical because they are needed to thrive and make a valuable contribution to any organisation. These transferable skills also underpin the successful application of your scientific and technical skills. For these reasons, employers value them highly. Transferable skills are powerful because they can be transferred from one job to another, from one employer to another, and across industries and professions. Examples include written and verbal communication skills, problem-solving skills, critical thinking, time management, organisation, independent learning, numeracy/data analysis, initiative, software/IT skills, adaptability, creativity/innovation and commercial awareness.

The skills badges (see Key to Skills Badges) were created in response to research into science undergraduates’ recognition of the transferable skills they were developing at university and those they wanted to develop. It became clear that students were focused on a narrow range of skills and were not conscious of some of the key skills desired by employers.¹ To address this, the badges were displayed on curriculum tasks (labs, workshop activities, assignments/projects) across various science subjects. Research confirmed that the badges helped students recognise a greater breadth of transferable skills development, feel more motivated and satisfied about their tasks, and identify examples they could share when applying or interviewing for jobs.² Therefore, we have included skills badges throughout this book in order for you to better understand and recognise where and when you are developing which skills.

Alongside recognising the skills you have developed and opportunities you sought to strengthen and broaden your skills, it’s important to reflect on your study and work-related experiences throughout your career. There is significant evidence that reflection enables us to learn more from the situations we experience – analysing and taking meaning from them, identifying what we have done well that we can repeat and what we could do differently in the future to improve (Chapter 2: Transferable Skills and Reflection). In other words, reflection helps us to keep learning and progressing as professionals. Reflection can also increase our ability to articulate our skills and attributes and our related professional development, a key skill for career development.³ Because of the power of reflection, you will be encouraged to reflect on many situations and aspects of your development as you progress through this guidebook.

Throughout the book you will find useful hints, summary quotes and activities to check/help with your understanding. Look out for the activities and how long to spend on them. Do return to these at time intervals as indicated. Use the icons to guide you in the skills you will learn by doing the activities.

Everyone has perceptions about themselves. These aren’t real measurable points. They are ideas we hold about ourselves. When it comes to careers and self-development, what you think about yourself is really important. This is because people tend to act on what they think or feel, not some measured reality and not other people’s opinion. Our first activity in the book is for you to look at your self-perceived employability⁴ and file this away for reference later in the book. You might want to use the results during a number of activities, but at the end of the book there will be an activity specifically to think about the difference in self-perceived employability before and after reading the book. We ask you to enter your email only so we can send you the results. If you are uncomfortable doing that, you can just screenshot your answers. Your email will never be used for any sort of advertising, and it is not held by the publisher. If you agree you want to be a candidate in one of our activities, however, we can keep your email and contact you if an opportunity comes up, for example, to talk to us about your employment journey for a new book.

This book is a tool to help you navigate the development of your STEM career. As I said at the start of this chapter, different people will use the book in different ways, travel through at different speeds, and revisit different sections at different times. This is totally normal. Most people won’t simply read this book from front to back.

All the authors of this book wish you luck with your journey of developing your STEM career, whether that is in data, the lab, fieldwork, as an educator, in research, policy, marketing, sales, consulting or anywhere else. There is no right way to “do” a STEM career. We hope this book can help you develop your understanding of your skills, how to develop and articulate them, as well as helping you understand workplaces and what you want from your career and why. We all wish you good luck with the journey.