Some thoughts about career strategy for PhDs

1. Beyond Publish and Perish:
Developing a Global Career Strategy
Dr Breno Nunes
Lecturer in Operations Management
OIM group
e-mail address: b.nunes@aston.ac.uk
PhD workshop
Aston Business School
Birmingham, UK, 01 MAY 2013

2. Developing a career strategy
A deliberate plan to help you to achieve your long term
goals intelligently.
RESULTS
EFFORTS
(£, time, energy)
Strategic career

3. Who are your career stakeholders?
• YOU
• your supervisor
• your family?
• your co-authors
What are you trying to achieve?
• Money
• Prestige / popularity
• Work flexibility / Free time
• Personal satisfaction / enjoyment
Today
Tomorrow
??????
Next 5 years
Next 10 years
?

4. Career choices
• Academic
• Research position
• Teaching position
• R+T+C position
• Industry / government
• Consulting
• Specialist area (industrial sector)
• Governmental agencies
• Third sector (Not for profit, NGOs)
• Entrepreneur

5. Strategic areas for your career and quality of life
Financial Social
Intellectual
PhysicalEmotional
Spiritual
Professional
development

6. Self-assessment
(Today’s performance versus where I want to be)
• Financial health
• Networking / professional relationships
• Physical / Emotional / spiritual wellbeing
• Output-effort ratio (Productivity levels)
• Skills needed versus your strengths and weaknesses

7. Career Strategy
Strategic Importance for your career
PerformanceScale
HighLow
Worse
than
As
expected
Better
than Excess?
Appropriate
Improve
Urgent
Action
Adapted from Slack, 1994

8. Pillars of an Academic Career
Research
Publications
(analytical and
writing skills)
Teaching
(verbal and soft
skills)
Community
Engagement
(Analytical and
social skills)

9. International Careers
Issues to be considered before applying
• Where to go? (state, nation, continent, globe)
• Language
• Place
• Mentors
• Department
• School
• University
• Where is next?
• Long term career plan is essential!

10. Benefits of going for international experience
• Language
• Networking
• Cultural learning
• Better salary? Financial earnings?
• Access to expertise (or experts)
• Better infra-structure and resources?

11. MUST DO for academic career
• Negotiate your teaching responsibilities
• Publication strategy
• Quality versus Time versus Effort
• Demonstration of outputs in all areas
• Demonstration of potential outputs
• Time management
• Networking / professional relationship management
• Understanding the career life cycle and trade-offs
• Learn the rules of the game quickly

12. Avoiding Pitfalls
• Too much multi-tasking
• Initiating too many things at the same time
• Careful with benchmarking yourself against colleagues
• Too much planning
• Working too much on non-valuable outputs
• Formal rules versus informal rules of the game

13. Final Considerations
• Define well your personal and professional long-term goals
• Make conscious career choices
• Different countries and schools value different things
• Equivalence of degrees & Certifications
• Teaching vs Research vs Community
• Value of interdisciplinary studies
• Methodological positioning
• Value of emerging topics
• Publication rankings
• World academic and industrial trends

14. Thanks!
Dr Breno Nunes
b.nunes@aston.ac.uk