Life Scientists Should Learn To Be More Social If They Want to Find Jobs
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While I was at the Experimental Biology meeting in New Orleans, LA this past week I presented a seminar entitled “Using Social Media For Career Development in the Life Sciences.” This was the first time that I presented this talk, and was expecting a large turn out given the popularity of Facebook and more recently Twitter, a microblogging platform. Much to my surprise only 15 students showed up for the talk—many of whom hadn’t heard of Twitter and were only vaguely familiar with Facebook. Luckily, a few attendees had Facebook profiles and one or two were on Twitter so the talk wasn't a complete bust. Nevertheless, the lack of interest in this talk was extremely puzzling to me—my other seminars, “Interviewing Tips” and “Alternate Careers for PhDs” were very well attended and I was booked solid for one-on-one resume critiquing sessions during the five days I was in New Orleans.
I started to wonder why bioscience graduate students in their mid to late 20s, many of whom will need to find jobs (postdocs otherwise) in the next few years, weren’t interested in learning how to use social media to advance their careers or conduct a job search. I thought that the lack of interest in this topic might be explained if a majority of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows were already using Facebook, Linked In or Twitter to network or explore career opportunities. This proved not to be the case, after learning that only a small percentage of students (who sought career counseling) had considered using social media to network or look for jobs. While many had Facebook profiles, most students primarily used them to stay in touch with friends and family—not for professional or scientific purposes.
The lack of interest in social media for career development by many of these nascent GenY scientists was confounding. After all, I have been lead to believe that “GenY” is leading the Web 2.0 and social media charge and that aging boomers like me simply “don’t get it.” The fact that I get it and many GenY scientists, don’t forced me to revisit what I learned about the social behavior of scientists over the past 30 years or so.
First, it is no secret that scientists aren’t the most socially-adept individuals and when socializing it tends to be very “cliquish” and oft time exclusive. Second, scientists are notoriously poor networkers and mostly engage in serious networking when alcoholic beverages are involved. In other words, very little networking takes place in professional and scientific settings with the exception of conferences and meetings. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, many of the academicians who train scientists don’t understand networking and often don’t offer any career guidance to their students and postdocs. Unfortunately, most academics have little or no understanding of the world outside of academia and, not surprisingly, there is little incentive for them to learn about it—mostly because of the anachronistic tenure system. Further, because PhDs are taught to be independent and self reliant, there is almost no emphasis placed developing social skills during their training. In fact, many academics believe that being too social is the best way to be “scooped” by their competitors. Paradoxically, there are currently over 30 social networking sites for scientists (including BioCrowd, the career development networking site that and I started). I suspect that many of us who started these sites recognized an opportunity to use social media to bring scientists together on the Web in a less threatening way than IRL. Although several of these sites report high subscription rates, it is not clear how effective they are for networking and career development purposes.
The job market for life scientists has been extremely difficult and competitive for the past five years or so. Academic positions are still hard to come by and the recent downsizing that has taken place in the life sciences industry—about 85,000 jobs have been lost in the past three years— suggest that competition for life sciences jobs will remain fierce for the foreseeable future. Like it or not, graduate programs must begin to provide job counseling and offer career development training to their students and postdoctoral fellows—their lives may depend upon it.
Until next time....
Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!
Dr. Mintz, the best will still get jobs by the traditional methods for the near future. I have been involved in recruiting for many years and even now, as we look for 6 new junior faculty members, none of the search is proceeding with and social media tools. The future is not yet here, I am afraid. Instead, reality is the moment.