HOW TO GET A JOB ANYWHERE

(not just in a science lab)

After reading Ken’s excellent post on how to get a job in a science lab, I just had to ask a few more questions. His answers are applicable to GETTING ANY JOB.

Brooke: Ken, I’ve known you for years – we met in the early 1980′s when we were both working as computer programmers. I went to Wall Street and you went to Graduate School. Did you find that the kind of advice you are giving others worked well for you, when you were starting at the bottom?

Ken: I have developed collaborations with people by following my advice, for example asking to do a small definable piece of a project before I understood the big picture view of what we were doing.

So, maybe I should add one more thing that touches on what I said earlier:  It is good to know people.

Except for my first job on Wall Street and my first post-doc position at Penn State, I have never gotten a job where there was not some sort of personal connection involved. Most people will hear this and say, “Oh, that is unfair. It is all an insider’s club and I am only going to get a job by having personal connections.”

Brooke: How did you make these personal connections?

Ken: Before I answer that, let me say that I got my post-doc position at Penn State by funding myself through a grant from the NSF post-doctoral program. I then contacted somebody I wanted to work with and said, more-or-less, I have my own money, let me come and work for you for free. So, in this sense the only academic job I did not get through personal connections I got for offering to work for free.

I got the interview for my second post-doc position, at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, because a professor in my department who was not my PhD academic adviser had a friend working at Lawrence LIvermore in management position. I sought and got help from people I had met during graduate school. I got my current job because I engaged in various academic service committees (review panels, and so on). My current boss was chair of one of the panels I served on. At the time, I looked at serving on these panels as a community service function with no benefit to myself, but it turns out that the network built up through these service activities helped me to get a job.

And how did I look good to my now-boss working on these panels:  Probably by volunteering to do small tasks and then doing them well. I probably avoided being disruptive and managed to say more thoughtful things than stupid things.

By the way, I don’t think that connections help you get a job so much as help you get an interview.

When I worked in the finance industry (before going back to graduate school) I thought business was all about product and marketing and that science would be all about product and nothing about marketing.

I was wrong.  Whether it is yourself or your science that you are trying make successful, you need two things:

(1) the product needs to be good, and

(2) people need to know about the product.

So, whether it is a scientific career or a specific scientific study, you need to make sure that what you do or produce is worthy of interest and of high quality, and then you have to work to make sure that people know that you and your work exist. Marketing of your career means building up a web of contacts who think highly of you.

Doing things of service to others is one of the ways that people will get to know you and come to think highly of you.

Brooke: Amen.

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