Filling in industry skill gaps

‘Wow, you resigned from your job without having the next one lined up?’, I almost whisper into the telephone. I am speaking with Clara, a biomedical scientist with a PhD and two years’ work experience in industry. She faced severe problems with her boss, tried and failed to resolve them and quit. Although I risk being seen as overly conventional, I ask her, ‘Couldn’t you have stayed in your job until you got your next offer? Are you not afraid of unemployment?’ ‘Ah, don’t worry’, she replies. ‘I’ve seen so many colleagues have an easy time getting their second job in industry that I never thought about being unemployed for too long.’ And it turned out to be true: whereas she needed to write 80 applications before she got a job offer two years ago, she got three job offers out of just ten applications this time around.

Scoring the first job after university can be challenging for graduates of some fields, but moving from this first job to a second seems much easier. Why exactly is this difference so big?

We have worked in career development for scientists for nine years, and have come across the same three reasons for this over and over again. First, you get better access to an industry network; and as networking is a vital part of professional development, most people give increasing weight to this activity as their career progresses. Second, you will have gained a broader outlook on career options and horizontal mobility in general. And third, you will have developed an industry-specific skill set.

But you don’t have to wait until you’ve started your first job to work on your skills. Here, we look at four typical skills gaps that fresh graduates have (or at least believe they have) and share ways to address them before you leave academia.