Career Planning in the Sciences, 1st Edition
Author: Denise Best
Reviewer: Dr Kathy Barrett
Group: Research Skills 2
Published: 23/02/08
Cat. number: RS 008
Length: 90 minutes

This course is an introduction for all those in the Sciences. It will help researchers become more aware of the key factors in their decision making, how they might be attractive to different types of employers, and some alternative career options.

Syllabus

  • Understanding your motivations and constraints
  • Why did you do research?
  • What do you want from a job?
  • What is your style?
  • What do employers want from you?
  • Identifying skills
  • Have you got the ingredients to give you career choices?
  • How to expand your skills portfolio
  • Commercial awareness
  • Enterprise, entrepreneurship or self-employment
  • Identify your career path
  • Develop your action plan
  • What the experts say
  • The hidden job market
  • CV hints
  • How to STAR quality

Author - Denise Best, Oxford University

Denise Best is currently a careers advisor for postgraduate research students at Oxford University. She has been actively involved in designing and organising skills training for researchers, as well as developing an electronic personal development planning system and web-based resources. One of her other areas of interest is graduate and postgraduate labour market intelligence. She advises on, and co-ordinates, this type of information at national and university level.

Before moving into careers, Denise was a researcher in the pharmacology department at Oxford University and funded by the British Heart Foundation to study signalling in platelets. Although she really enjoyed her research and the buzz of publication, she felt she needed a different challenge. To enable her transition from research, she followed a very similar process to the one she outlines in this course. Her previous career change had been more straightforward, as she had worked in clinical haematology and blood transfusion laboratories in the National Health Service for several years. She finds her present career endlessly fascinating and varied but doesn't rule out a change in the future.

Expert Reviewer - Dr Kathy Barrett, UCL

Kathy Barrett started her research career with a PhD in Immunology from the University of London. Having a curiosity about other countries, she then moved to Boston for five years for a postdoctoral fellowship. On returning to London, she set up her own research lab at University College London with a University Research Fellowship from the Royal Society, where she stayed for seven years. During this time she supervised PhD students and postdocs and enjoyed the process of helping them on to the next stage of their lives so much that she opted to take up this latter role full-time. She is now working with students and research staff at UCL and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in her role as a careers advisor with The Careers Group.

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