Develop Your Career

To have multiple job offers is a position we all want to be in. I’m sure if you’re early in your job search, it seems like a dream to have more than one offer. So what happens if you do find yourself in this position? At first, you might be filled with elation at the choice you have. Then you may realise that you actually have to make quite a tough decision!

This situation presents it’s own challenges like FOMO (fear of missing out), wanting to avoid regret, and wanting to make the best decisio…

Covid-19 may have us all re-thinking our career paths and maybe even considering a career change. Whether you’ve been let go from your current position or are working from home, it can make you consider what you want from a career in the future. Even before this shift in our working lives, you might have felt the pull to make a change from academia for a while. Perhaps you have been in your research role for a long time and want to explore other options. Maybe working in industry is something yo…

We often hear that we should find a mentor to help us achieve our career goals when trying to get a promotion or make a career change. The term mentor can also often be interchanged with coaches and sponsors, although these are very different things. We also have people in our lives who we may already see in these roles. These could be our line managers or supervisors.

A mentor is someone who is typically more experienced than you as a mentee. They offer specific knowledge, skills or experience…

When you hear the words ‘personal branding’, what does it make you think? Some words that may come to mind are marketing, Instagram influencers and self-promotion. Personal branding can be related to all of these things, but when you put it in the context of career development, it takes on a whole new meaning. In today’s job landscape, whether you have a secure job or are looking for one, personal branding is key to your success. If you want to progress within a company, you will be competing wi…

If you are thinking about carving a career path outside the lab, you may either have an undergraduate degree in a science subject and know you don’t want to work in a lab, or you have been working in a lab and want to transition out. Either way, planning your move is essential to making the best decision for your career path moving forward. The question is, how do you go about career planning? What things do you need to think about? Where do you even start? These questions can be overwhelming, a…

If you want to navigate your career development, you can find a lot of advice online. There are job sites with career profiles for different jobs and websites like Glassdoor which show you reviews of companies from people who have actually worked there. You may have spoken to a careers adviser in university, who showed you a list of jobs matching your subjects. Or you may have career conversations with your manager, discussing your future trajectory at that company.

A lot of these resources wil…

Volunteering is something that we often heard about in school or college. We were encouraged to spend a few weeks at our local charity shop and include it on our CVs. Its purpose was to give us work experience when we couldn’t get a job yet. And to help our applications for whatever next step we wanted to take. I later came to realise that volunteering can still help us further down the line in our careers. On top of this it allows us to give our time helping an organisation’s cause. We can gain…