Learning to Say No To Your Boss Without Losing Your Job

I suspect that most of us have been in the situation where a boss or an immediate supervisor asks you to take on another assignment. Given the state of the economy and the tenuous nature of most jobs, most employees believe that they have no choice but to accept the assignment despite the fact that it will likely cut into personal time or require overtime work. After all, saying no may be tantamount to a pink slip and collecting unemployment benefits. 

In reality, employees who decline or say no to their superiors when asked about taking on additional work are not fired. That said,  saying no may have a negative impact on future career trajectory. However, it is important to note that there are different ways of saying no and if saying no is articulated correctly, the effect on one’s career  is likely to be negligible.

Not surprisingly, learning to say no the correct way takes some practice! And, in an article entitled “So, You’re The Worker Who Can’t Say No,” Eilene Zimmerman, author of the NY Times Career Couch feature, offers some sage advice on how to say no to a boss without jeopardizing your job.

If you are one of those employees who no longer has a life because you cannot say no the mounds of additional work your boss has piled on, I highly recommend that you read this article!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!!

 

Healthcare and Lifes Sciences Social Communications Leadership Forum

BioJobBlog and BioCrowd co-sponsoring the Business Development Institute and PR Newswire's Healthcare and LIfe Sciences Communications Leadership Forum that will be held on June 9, 2011 in San Diego CA

The forum is comprised of a group of senior marketing and communications executives from prominent biotechnology, pharmaceutical, hospital groups, medical device, and managed care companies. The forum focuses on how healthcare and life sciences brands achieve business objectives with social media and social technologies. The event consists of case study examples from well respected organizations in an intimate setting at AMN Healthcare in San Diego, CA.


The event will cover the following questions:

  • What are the best examples of how to connect with consumers and healthcare professionals through social approaches?
  • What are the best case studies of how healthcare brands create and execute content strategies and content based marketing?
  • How do you integrate social with your traditional customer service and marketing platforms?
  • How are leading brands organizing themselves to best deliver results across the enterprise?
  • How have others overcome the compliance and legal challenges with social communications?
  • How do you plan, manage, integrate, and leverage data from social, online, and offline programs?
  • How are mobile and location-based technologies being applied in healthcare?
  • What are the tools, technologies, and best practices for monitoring and measuring social communications?

Speakers:

Carol Burke, Senior Director of Marketing & Communications, AMN Healthcare

Becky Carroll, Founder, Customers ROCK!/Petra Consulting

Olga Hays, Special Events Coordinator, Scripps Health Foundation
Michael Pranikoff, Global Director, Emerging Media, PR Newswire Association LLC
Monique Ramsey, Principal, Cosmetic Social Media

For additional information, including registration, please click here to visit the event website.

 

The "Thing" About Scientists

Let’s face it; most scientists are lousy communicators. While this is not an inherited defect, the poor communication skills exhibited by most scientists are a direct result of a lack of emphasis placed on oral and written communication skills during their training. In fact, being a “good communicator” may actually hinder a scientist’s success as a world class researcher. After all, prematurely divulging information or breakthroughs may result in being “scooped by the competition” both in terms of winning grant monies and publishing first. Consequently, from a Darwinian standpoint, good communications skills are a trait that may actually be selected against because they more than likely will reduce the overall competitiveness and “fitness” of most research scientists.

Deborah Blum a Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer and journalist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the blog Speakeasy Science nicely summed up the consequences of poor communication skills among scientists in a blog post entitled “The Trouble with Scientists:”

“Real” scientists share their work only with each other and do not attempt to become “popularizers” because that would lead to “dumbing down” the research.

She further asserts that this attitude has seriously compromised the lay public’s understanding of science.

"Scientists won’t talk to journalists; they don’t want to waste their time “dumbing it down”; they don’t see it as “making us smarter.” So, many of the good stories in science don’t get covered at all. Or the stories get covered only for an already science-literate audience – explored in publications like Discover or Science News – rather than for that far larger group, the science disenfranchised."

And, while many politicians and scientists loudly complain about the lack of science awareness and literacy in America Blum astutely asserts:

“Science writers, journalists, broadcasters and bloggers became the voice of science during a time during which too many scientists simply refused to engage. Scientists have ceded that position of power amazingly readily; ask yourselves how many research associations offer awards to journalists for communicating about science but none to their own members for doing the same. Ask yourself how the culture of science responds even today to researchers who become popular authors or bloggers, public figures. Whether young scientists are rewarding for spending time on public communication? And ask yourself how hypocritical this is, to complain that the general public doesn’t understand science while refusing to participate in changing that problem?”

Not withstanding the negative impact that poor communication skills have on the public’s understanding of science, good oral and written communication skills are now critically important for those scientists seeking jobs outside of academia. Poor communication skills are no longer tolerated outside of the ivory tower! A quick perusal of ads for non-academic science jobs reveals that “outstanding oral and written communication skills” are second only to technical skills for prospective new hires. Finally, the meteoric rise of social media suggests that communication—whether virtual or real —is critically important to most human beings (Facebook and Twitter as selective pressures?—go figure!). For those scientists who disagree with me, think about what I just said the next time that you are perusing your Facebook page, LinkedIn profile or getting ready to send your next tweet!

Unfortunately, I was trained by a generation of scientists who—as Blum put it—“hate-to-share!” Somehow, I managed to overcome it. Nevertheless, despite changing attitudes about the importance of good communication skills, the hate-to-share attitude is still pervasive in most graduate and postdoctoral training programs today. Sadly, this attitude is no longer sustainable in a world of diminishing grant monies, lousy job markets and increasing global competition. Unless this attitude changes, fewer and fewer scientists will be successful in their chosen field of endeavor!

Hat tip to Deborah Blum @ for the insights and words!

Until next time....

Good Luck and Good Communicating

 

Reports of E-Mail Demise May be Greatly Exaggerated

ComScore, a company that tracks Internet traffic recently determined that the number of visitors to Web-based e-mail sites, like Gmail, Yahoo mail and others, declined roughly 5.9 per cent from November 2009 to November 2010. In November, 2009 160 million users used web-based e-mail platforms whereas only 153 million used those services. 

According to comScore, the decline represents the growing use of mobile e-mail devices like Blackberry and the iPhone which don’t require their users to log on to the Web to view messages. However, while the number of people who use mobile devices to check e-mail daily rose to 40 per cent, it isn’t clear whether or not the conclusions drawn by comScore are accurate. For example, I use Yahoo mail daily to check e-mail messages on my iPhone. Moreover, although Web-based e-mail use by persons aged 12 to 17 years dropped 24 percent over the past year, the number of users aged 55 years and older continues to rise. Finally, while my children aged 17, 15 and 12 prefer text and chat to e-mail they all still use web-based e-mail for formal communications with their teachers and older persons. I suspect that this is not very surprising to many BioJobBlog readers because the number of baby boomers (old fogies who are comfortable with e-mail) will continue to overshadow the number of Gen X and Gen Y persons for many years to come. Put simply, we boomers are still in control and will not relinquish it until we all die! And, once, we are gone, things are likely to change.

The point that I am trying to make is that while texting, Twitter and Facebook may be appropriate for informal communication among tweens, teenagers and young adults, e-mail is, and will continue to be, the major means of communication for business purposes. This is mainly because e-mail is much easier to monitor, capture, manage and oversee than texting, Twitter or Facebook. And, perhaps more importantly, unlike the previously mentioned “new” forms of communication, archived e-mail messages are now routinely used in American courts to adjudicate legal disputes that arise between individuals and companies. In other words, e-mail messages are now recognized as being part of the “official record” for legal and business purposes.

Coincidentally, on a college visit last week to a small liberal arts college, our undergraduate guide—a 20-something undergraduate communications and marketing major—quietly shared with me that she doesn’t get the whole Twitter, Facebook and texting “thing.” She said she regularly communicates with college administrators, her professors and most of her classmates via e-mail; mainly because the other forms of communication require immediate attention. And, if you are busy or have work to do or don’t want to talk to someone that can be troublesome. As far as she was concerned, e-mail was the best way to communicate. I am not sure whether or not she said what she did about e-mail for my sake, because during our conversation, she paused for a moment to read a text message from her friend admonishing her that she was late for a lunch date.

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting.

 

Improving the Public's Understanding of Science and Scientists

Alan Alda, a well known actor and science enthusiast, is doing his share to improve the science literacy of Americans. His was the host of the Science Frontiers (which ran for 15 seasons on PBS until it was cancelled in 2005) and more recently the host of Wired Science which failed to catch on and was also canceled. Alda’s approach to science education is asking questions that nonscientists could understand while throwing in a bit of humor as well. In a recent interview he stressed that he always tries to “keep it a conversation.” Sometimes, he added, scientists and researchers would “lapse into lecture mode, and I’d have to bring them back into a conversation. This isn’t surprising because many scientists are unfamiliar or lack the necessary training to engage in conversational science. For the most part, scientists are trained didactically and exchange information via formal traditional channels which include: seminars, oral and written presentations at scientific meetings and congresses and publication of research findings in peer reviewed journals. In other words, science education has historically resembled a one way conversation rather than a dialog. Unfortunately, web 2.0 and social media is all about conversations and one way conversations are becoming less acceptable, even in science circles! To that end, Alda just finished teaching a six-week course of workshops at Stony Brook University on Long Island instructing scientists how to use improvisational acting techniques to express themselves more clearly. “The idea is you can’t really communicate ideas unless you know what’s going on in the other person’s mind,” he said. 

Despite many incredible scientific advances in the past decade, the science gap in America continues to widen. Science is becoming increasingly complex and fewer Americans are capable of understanding it. Therefore, it is incumbent upon scientists to begin to understand that they have a critical role to play in improving the public understanding of science. This responsibility can no longer be relegated to primary and secondary school teachers nor should nonscientists like Alda,Ira Flato of NPR’s Science Friday, Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad of RadioLab (a great show), be expected to carry the banner and lead the charge! 

Interestingly, while listening to this week’s Science Friday, I learned of educational initiatives being sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundations that are aimed at bringing more science into the entertainment fields. The computer systems institute also offers flexible programs as well.  While this is an important first step, it may be too little; too late. Throwing money at the problem won’t solve it: scientists need to step out of their comfort zones and learn how to better communicate and interact with the lay public. To that end, by way of a sport’s analogy “we scientists control our own destiny” We can choose to collectively learn how to better inform the American public about what we do and how we do it or allow the science literacy gap to ultimately become a chasm in the 21st century.

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Learning and Listening!!!!!!

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The Who's Who of Social Media, Pharma and Healthcare

I met Jonathan Richman,the author of the Dose of Digital blog, last week at the BDI Conference (#BDI) on Social Communication and Healthcare in NYC. BTW, for those of you who were unable to attend, you missed an informative and compelling meeting on the status of social media in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Anyway back to Jonathan. He gave a great talk on pharma and social media which prompted me to visit his blog. While perusing Dose of Digital, I came upon a wiki that Jonathan maintains called --what else-- the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki.” 

It’s a comprehensive, cataloged list of social media initiatives underway at pharma, biotech and healthcare industries. Noticeably absent from the wiki, are social networking sites like BioCrowd that were specifically created for life scientists and other bioprofessionals. Hey, wait a minute, aren’t scientists the lifeblood of the life sciences industry? Would there be a life sciences industry without scientists? Hmmmm....I will have to talk to Jonathan about this!

I highly recommend you check out the wiki if you are a life sciences social media enthusiast!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Social Media Hunting!!!!!  

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Job Market For Bioscientists May Be Better Than Expected

The US economy has lost about 7.1 million jobs since December 2007 and nationwide unemployment is hovering around 8.5 percent. Despite the lost of  about 80,000 pharmaceutical jobs over the past three years and unprecedented consolidation taking place in the life sciences sector—Merck-Schering Plough, Pfizer-Wyeth and Roche-Genentech—the job prospects for scientists at biotech companies, medical devices and diagnostics, and government appear to be stronger than anticipated. While drug discovery and sales jobs may be scare, there are rapidly emerging opportunities in the fields of medical communications, regulatory affairs, biomanufacturing, clinical trials management , bioengineering, medical devices/diagnostics and website development and management.

President Obama’s promise to restore science to its rightful place, his reversal of the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and an unwavering commitment to alternate energy technologies suggest that the future may be very bright for bioscientists. For example, there are massive hiring initiatives at federal agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Unites States Department of Agriculture (UDSA) — as the Obama administration attempts to overall these agencies— and funding levels at the National Institutes of Health are on the rise (aided in part by a $200 million Challenge Grant stimulus program).

While the road to economic recovery may be a long one, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who are currently engaged in life sciences research should “stay the course and not jump ship just yet.” The life sciences industry is more recession proof than others and it will be one of the first to experience an economic turn around. And, when it does it is best to prepared to find a job!

Until next time…


Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!

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