Leaving academia for industry? Here’s how to handle salary negotiations: ask the employer about his difficulties in giving you more

"Don’t sell yourself short when talking about pay, annual leave and other benefits, say scientists who have made the move.

In 2021, Branka Milivojevic prepared to leave academia for the second time. She wanted greater flexibility so that she could be available for her children, and was tired of the instability of grant-based contracts. Five years previously, she had joined a neuromarketing start-up in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as a principal scientist to automate and standardize the analysis and visualization of neuroimaging data. But within a year, she had returned to a university research position, enticed by exciting projects. For her second move to industry, she drafted a list of what she wanted to negotiate for.

“I had a list of the top ten things I wanted for my job,” says the former cognitive neuroscientist, who is now based in Utrecht in the Netherlands. “Negotiating a higher salary is great, but salary is not the only thing that is important,” says Milivojevic, now a data scientist at the Dutch railway operator Nederlandse Spoorwegen. Her list formed the basis of her negotiations with potential industry employers — and reminded her what she was prepared to fight for. This included flexible working hours and a location close to home, or to have her commuting time included as part of her working hours.

 

Increasingly, academics are finding themselves negotiating industry salaries. In 2021, for example, only one-third of newly graduated mathematics and statistics PhD students in the United States entered academic jobs, excluding postdoctoral positions, compared with almost 60% in 2001, according to the US National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates. In the social sciences, that proportion plummeted from 66% to 48%.

 

For many academic researchers, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a re-evaluation of their work life and the realization that they were discontent with their workload, career progression and work environment. According to Nature’s 2021 salary and job satisfaction survey, less than half of respondents from around the world were satisfied with their job prospects. Industry respondents (64%) were much more likely than those in academia (42%) to report feeling positively about their careers. That’s a marked shift from the 2016 survey, in which satisfaction levels across the two sectors were neck and neck (63% and 65%, respectively).

 

A 2022 report from the UK University and College Union found that more than half of its members were considering a career change. It’s unclear how many of these researchers will actually jump ship, but laboratory leaders are already struggling to fill early-career posts. For researchers wanting to move into industry positions for the first time, those who have already done so offer their insights and advice on what homework to do before negotiating, why to negotiate salary and which other aspects of the job are on the table.

 

Data scientist Tim Gravelle has moved between industry and academia for the past 20 years. “You need to get a sense of what it is that you value,” says Gravelle, who joined business consultancy firm Bain & Company in Toronto, Canada, as its insights data science director in November 2022. It is also important to know what skills and traits companies value.

Attaching a price tag

 

Before she found her railway job, in which she develops and implements data solutions for problems ranging from graffiti prevention and bike-rental forecasting to drone-based building inspections, Milivojevic reached out to colleagues who had left academia and conducted informational interviews with them. These are conversations to seek informal advice on a career path from someone with appropriate knowledge and experience. “It was just listening to different people’s stories and trying to figure out what they did, how they did it and what skills they used,” she says. In the end, she conducted between 10 and 20 interviews, she adds, and now Milivojevic offers the same conversations to others who are looking to leave academia for industry. One of those former colleagues whose advice she sought ultimately flagged the advertisement for her current job.

 

Often, people inside academia are not as well placed as those outside to offer advice to those looking to leave. Cancer biologist Shambhavi Naik knew she wanted to move into the field of public policy, but such a move was uncommon in India, where she is based, and she struggled to find people to advise her. “Some of my mentors told me that if I really wanted to impact science policy in India, then I should stay in academia,” she remembers. “It was almost as if I was betraying academia by leaving, so people advised me against going into industry.”

 

Milivojevic credits the book What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles with helping her to understand what she valued. First published in 1970, it is a self-help book still popular with jobseekers, helping them to understand what they want out of a new job. For example, Milivojevic wanted to work in a large organization, because she found the size of academia comforting; she also wanted to be as far from neuroscience as possible, so that she would not be drawn back into the field. She included all of these values in her job hunt and negotiations with prospective employers.

 

When cell biologist Rebecca Lim decided to move on from her associate professor position at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, she was adamant that she would travel less. Before the pandemic, she would spend fewer than six consecutive weeks at home, therefore she made limited travel a condition of her employment.

 

Money was also an important factor for her. She looked at the spectrum of jobs that she would be prepared to do — from logistical roles to being a bench scientist in industry — and attached price tags to them. For some jobs, such as a senior operations position or another role that would take her away from the science, “they would have to compensate me incredibly well for me to even contemplate doing that”, she says.

 

But attaching a salary figure to a specific job can be difficult, especially if researchers are making their first leap out of academia or are the first in their family to go to university. “It’s quite a different experience when you come from parents who are professionals,” explains Lim, who is now senior vice-president of scientific affairs driving research and development at a cancer therapeutics company called Prescient Therapeutics in Melbourne. “Mum didn’t finish school. How is she ever going to advise me on such things?”

 

Although job search sites such as Glassdoor offer salary ranges, their scales are skewed towards remuneration in the United States or other parts of the global north, and are often not particularly useful for people from other parts of the world, says Lim.

 

In 2021, Lim identified what her salary would be should she become a full professor, then added her employer’s annual pension to that and used it as a baseline for negotiations. To help with her own salary talks, Naik, who is now head of research at the non-profit public policy research centre Takshashila Institution in Bengaluru, India, asked people in non-governmental organizations and consulting companies what others with a comparable education in similar fields, such as economics or foreign policy, were earning. She also trawled government policy job adverts to benchmark her salary.

 

Karen Kelsky, who left academia in 2010 to start a career-coaching consultancy company called The Professor Is In, says that academics in general “have no idea of their value”. “But they have gigantic, brilliant brains that are finely honed to do research,” says Kelsky, who is based in Eugene, Oregon. “The trouble with [some] academics is that they turn those brains off when it comes to job offers.”

 

The trick is to treat the job hunt like a research question, she suggests. “Anthropologists are going to be well situated to go speak to a lot of people, the [quantitative analyst] people are going to be well situated to do a spreadsheet. Everybody has research skills, so it comes down to not treating your career as though it is outside of your skill set,” she says.

 

The career insights I’m bringing back to academia after a year at Google

 

Kelsky also recommends always aiming high when asking for a salary, because academics tend to habitually undervalue their worth. She warns against doing the company’s negotiating for them. “People, often women, don’t want to put the company in an awkward position,” she says. Although the company might have numerous constraints, “that’s not your business. Ask for a huge number and let them tell you that they have constraints. Don’t assume it”. In fact, most of the people interviewed for this article wished they had asked for larger remuneration when they were offered their jobs.

 

Milivojevic suggests putting a number on the negotiating table initially, because the first figure mentioned becomes the “anchor point” for salary negotiations. But doing so too soon in the interview process, before the prospective employer has decided to commit, could scare them away. “If you wait until they’ve committed to you specifically, then you can have this conversation,” she says.

 

Having alternative job opportunities is the best way to strengthen a negotiating position, says Lim, who still had research funding and projects when she decided to move on from academia. Consequently, she did not need to jump at the first offer, which might not have met her requirements.

 

Geophysicist Matthias Meschede says that having numerous job options allows you to choose the one that best suits your needs. He treated job interviews as fact-finding missions after he had completed his postdoc at the Paris Institute of Planetary Physics in 2017. The following year, after a career fair in Paris called PhDTalent, Meschede had interviews with five companies for possible job opportunities. “I had no idea about salary,” he remembers, therefore he decided to follow the interview processes as far as possible so that he could improve his interview skills and see what salaries prospective employers would offer him.

 

“To really see what you’re worth, you need to see the number,” says Meschede, now a sociotechnical systems manager at a software company called Tweag in Paris, after having been promoted twice there. However, if Meschede were to repeat his multiple-interview strategy, he would “get a feeling for what’s possible in the first interviews and try to go up from there with my own offer”.

 

Often, academic expertise is not quantified in the same way as industry experience, although the underlying skills are the same, and this disconnect can put former academics at a disadvantage in salary and benefits negotiations, says Milivojevic. “When we write an academic CV, we say things like, ‘I was a postdoc for three years at this institution.’ What that means is that you’ve been leading a project, coordinating multiple stakeholders — because your collaborators are, in fact, stakeholders — and you were preparing presentations and reports.”

 

On her CV, she included a separate list of skills that translated her academic experience into industry-friendly language. For example, instead of saying that she managed a certain number of students and postdocs, she noted the number of FTEs (full-time equivalents, or a measure of an employee’s workload) under her supervision. In her informational interviews, she asked former colleagues who had moved to industry to explain the terminology used in advertisements, so that she could tailor her CV to industry requirements.

Compensation’s various flavours

 

Some employers might not be able to meet a prospective employee’s salary number, but they might be prepared to offer equity in the form of company stock or other types of compensation. Applied cryptographer Markus Zoppelt left academia in 2021 and did two other jobs before starting his current position as a software engineer at Code Intelligence in Bonn, Germany, in 2022. “I was very eager on getting a stake in the company I worked for,” says Zoppelt, who works remotely from Nuremberg in Germany.

 

In some areas of industry, such as the non-profit sector, salaries tend to be lower than those offered elsewhere, says Patrick Forscher, a behavioural economist based in Geneva, Switzerland, and associate director at the non-profit organization Busara Center for Behavioral Economics in Nairobi. But there are often other benefits, such as being able to work remotely, travel and do advocacy work.

 

Forscher says it is important to negotiate company support when it comes to bureaucracy in foreign countries. His organization has a great deal of experience with immigration, and uses the services of consultants to assist. “Make sure that you’re working for an organization that’s familiar with how to manage visas and things like that,” he says. “If there’s not much support, it can be extremely disorientating and difficult to live.”

 

In 2019, Gravelle left a lecturer position at the University of Melbourne to take up an industry position in Toronto. For him, a flexible working arrangement was non-negotiable. “The salary, bonus structure and stock options were really attractive, but the flexibility of where I did my work was really important [because] I liked being home when my kids came home from school,” he says. “Coming from academia, people are used to having a lot of unstructured time and if that matters to you, then a position that allows you to have a hybrid or remote-working arrangement could matter a lot to you.” Others who are used to the laboratory bench might find they are more productive in an office, surrounded by people.

 

How to sail smoothly from academia to industry

 

In today’s globalized workplace, in which people are increasingly opting to work remotely, employees need to be aware of the various legal provisions that apply to where they are living and working — and where these provisions differ.

 

For example, different companies and countries offer a variety of pension and health packages, which might deviate from those offered routinely by academic institutions. In France, for example, companies offer 30 annual holiday days, whereas US companies usually provide only a handful of vacation opportunities. Some countries, including the United States, do not have government-mandated paid parental leave, whereas others pay for a full year of leave.

 

A prospective employee should not assume that these benefits are standard when they are negotiating their job and salary package. Candidates should explicitly ask during interviews about annual leave, parental leave, health care and retirement benefits. “This is going to vary from one country context to the next, especially when it comes to employer pension contributions,” says Gravelle, drawing on his experience of working in Australia and Canada.

 

Although academics might have to accept a more junior position when they move to industry, the skills they have acquired, even as early-career researchers, mean that they could progress rapidly. “That’s been my experience,” says Gravelle. “I was able to advance a lot faster because of the technical tools that I had gained in graduate school.”

 

With this acceleration, however, comes the possibility of exploitation — in which people take on more managerial work or increase their workload without a commensurate change in title or an increase in pay. As such, employees should remember to re-evaluate and renegotiate after a few months if their workload and responsibilities do not match the job they were hired for, or if circumstances change.

 

Unlike in academia, there are manifold trajectories that a person’s career can take in industry. “The first step out of academia is not the last one,” says Milivojevic, who has been in her role at Nederlandse Spoorwegen for almost two years. “In academia, you spend so long trying so hard to get this job, and there’s only one pathway.” Outside academia, there are many more positions, companies and even sectors, she notes.

 

“If the first job is not the perfect one, you will gain some experience, learn something about yourself as well,” she says. “And then you can take the next step.”" [1]

1. Nature 616, 615-617 (2023)

‘Democracy in microscopy’: cheap light microscope delivers super-resolution images

"When Ali Shaib was doing his master’s degree at the Lebanese University in Beirut, he spent several weeks on a waiting list and visited a different campus to take a few images on a costly microscope, something scholars in richer countries took for granted.

Now, Shaib, a nanoscale specialist at the University Medical Center Göttingen in Germany, and his colleagues have developed a method for ordinary light microscopes that they hope will demolish such barriers.

The technique¹ — which has recorded jaw-dropping images of individual proteins and never-before-seen structures in cells — offers a level of detail that eclipses even that of multi-million-dollar ‘super-resolution’ microscopes.

“There should be some form of democracy in microscopy,” says Silvio Rizzoli, a nanoscale specialist also at the University Medical Center Göttingen who has pioneered the technique, dubbed ONE microscopy, with Shaib. “It’s high resolution for the many, not the few rich labs.”

At the nanoscale

The power of conventional light microscopes is limited by the laws of optics, which mean that objects smaller than about 200 nanometres are a blur. Researchers have developed physics-beating super-resolution methods that, Rizzoli says, can bring this limit down to around 10 nm. The approach, which earned the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, uses optical tricks to pinpoint fluorescent molecules attached to proteins.

In 2015, researchers came up with another way to evade optical limits. A team led by Edward Boyden, a neuroengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, showed² that inflating tissue — using an absorbent compound found in nappies — moves cellular objects away from each other. This technique, called expansion microscopy, led to leaps in microscope resolution and can resolve structures of around 20 nm.

Shaib and Rizzoli’s technique — described in a study posted to the bioRxiv preprint server last month — melds the two approaches to achieve resolutions below 1 nm. That is sharp enough to reveal the shape of individual proteins, which are typically imaged in finer detail using much more expensive structural-biology methods such as cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) or X-ray crystallography.

Expansion microscopy’s simplicity is part of its appeal, says Boyden, who estimates that more than 1,000 laboratories have adopted the technique. Samples are treated with chemicals that anchor their proteins to a polymer that, with the addition of water, swells to 1,000 times its size, moving the molecules apart. ONE (short for one-step nanoscale-expansion) microscopy uses heat or enzymes to also break the proteins apart, so that individual fragments are stretched in different directions during expansion.

The researchers have used their approach to record pictures of a neural molecule, the GABA_A receptor, that closely resemble much-higher-resolution cryo-EM and X-ray crystallography maps of the protein. They also captured the outlines of a bulky protein called otoferlin, for which the structure hasn’t been determined and that helps to convey audio signals in the brain. The shape resembles a structural prediction made by the AlphaFold deep-learning network.

The method cannot match the resolution of cryo-EM, which can reveal near-atomic-level details smaller than 0.2 nm in some cases. But cryo-EM can be finnicky and expensive. By contrast, ONE microscopy could offer a quick and easy way to obtain structural insights into just about any molecule, says Rizzoli. “You can look at any protein, and you can get resolution you couldn’t dream about.”

Increased accessibility

Rizzoli, who is originally from Romania, says that part of the motivation for developing the technique was to broaden the accessibility of cutting-edge light microscopy. The ONE-microscopy method is straightforward to apply and works with now-antiquated fluorescent microscopes from the 1990s.

Salma Tammam, a pharmaceutical technologist at the German University in Cairo, is planning to send a PhD student to Göttingen to learn the technique this summer. Her lab studies how nanoparticles move about in cells. They would like to see the fine details of the particles and their cargo. But like many researchers in low and middle-income countries, they do not have access to expensive super-resolution microscopes. “This brings us resolution in an affordable manner,” she says.

Broadening the reach of super-resolution microscopy is also important for scientists at well-funded institutions, says Noa Lipstein, a synapse biologist at Leibniz Center for Molecular Pharmacology in Berlin. She has access to a well-established super-resolution technique called stimulated emission depletion microscopy. But she recently started an independent group and has chosen to apply ONE microscopy to their research into the fine details of neural synapses.

“It’s allowed me independence, because I don’t have to rely on connections to big shots with heavy machines,” Lipstein says. “This I can do in my own lab and my own bench.”

Lipstein hasn’t pushed the technique to its limits, but she’s already getting glimpses of new biology. “It’s almost a given that we are going to see new things. We already see them, but we don’t know what they are,” she says." [1]

1. Nature 616, 417-418 (2023)

 

„Demokratija mikroskopijoje“: pigus šviesos mikroskopas suteikia itin didelės raiškos vaizdus

   „Kai Ali Shaibas baigė magistro studijas Libano universitete Beirute, jis kelias savaites praleido laukiančiųjų sąraše ir lankėsi kitame miestelyje, kad padarytų kelias nuotraukas brangiu mikroskopu – tai turtingesnių šalių mokslininkai laikė savaime suprantamu dalyku.

 

     Dabar Shaibas, Getingeno universiteto medicinos centro (Vokietija) nanoskalės specialistas, ir jo kolegos sukūrė paprastų šviesos mikroskopų metodą, kuris, jų manymu, sugriaus tokias kliūtis.

 

     Ši technika, kuri užfiksavo stulbinančius atskirų baltymų ir dar nematytų struktūrų ląstelėse vaizdus, suteikia tokį detalumo lygį, kuris užtemdo net kelių milijonų dolerių „superraiškos“ mikroskopų detales.

 

     „Mikroskopijoje turėtų būti tam tikra demokratijos forma“, – sako Silvio Rizzoli, nanoskalės specialistas iš Getingeno universiteto medicinos centro, kartu su Shaibu pradėjęs taikyti ONE mikroskopija pavadintą techniką. „Tai didelė raiška daugeliui, o ne kelioms turtingoms laboratorijoms."

 

     Nano skalėje

 

     Įprastų šviesos mikroskopų galią riboja optikos dėsniai, o tai reiškia, kad mažesni, nei 200 nanometrų, objektai yra neryškūs. Tyrėjai sukūrė fiziką mušančius itin didelės skiriamosios gebos metodus, kurie, pasak Rizzoli, gali sumažinti šią ribą iki maždaug 10 nm. Šis metodas, 2014 m. pelnęs Nobelio chemijos premiją, naudoja optinius triukus, kad tiksliai nustatytų fluorescencines molekules, prijungtas prie baltymų.

 

     2015 metais mokslininkai sugalvojo kitą būdą, kaip išvengti optinių ribų. Kembridžo Masačusetso technologijos instituto neuroinžinieriaus Edwardo Boydeno vadovaujama komanda parodė, kad išpučiant audinį – naudojant sauskelnėse esantį vandenį sugeriantį junginį – ląstelių objektai atitolinami vienas nuo kito. Šis metodas, vadinamas plėtimosi mikroskopija, padidino mikroskopo skiriamąją gebą ir gali išskirti maždaug 20 nm struktūras.

 

     Shaibo ir Rizzoli technika, aprašyta praėjusį mėnesį bioRxiv išankstinio spausdinimo serveryje paskelbtame tyrime, sujungia šiuos du būdus, kad būtų pasiekta mažesnė, nei 1 nm, skiriamoji geba. Tai pakankamai ryšku, kad atskleistų atskirų baltymų formą, kuri paprastai vaizduojama smulkiau, naudojant daug brangesnius struktūrinės biologijos metodus, tokius, kaip krioelektroninė mikroskopija (krio-EM) arba rentgeno kristalografija.

 

     Išsiplėtimo mikroskopijos paprastumas yra jos patrauklumo dalis, sako Boydenas, kuris apskaičiavo, kad daugiau, nei 1000 laboratorijų taiko šią techniką. Mėginiai yra apdorojami cheminėmis medžiagomis, kurios jų baltymus pritvirtina prie polimero, kuris, pridėjus vandens, išsipučia iki 1000 kartų didesnio dydžio, todėl molekulės atsiskiria viena nuo kitos. ONE (sutrumpintai iš vieno žingsnio nanoskalės plėtimosi) mikroskopija naudoja šilumą arba fermentus, kad taip pat suskaidytų baltymus, todėl atskiri fragmentai ištempiami skirtingomis kryptimis plėtimosi metu.

 

     Tyrėjai panaudojo savo metodą, norėdami įrašyti nervinės molekulės, GABAA receptoriaus, nuotraukas, kurios labai panašios į daug didesnės skiriamosios gebos krio-EM ir rentgeno kristalografinius baltymo žemėlapius. Jie taip pat užfiksavo didelio baltymo, vadinamo otoferlinu, kontūrus, kurių struktūra nenustatyta ir kuris padeda perduoti garso signalus smegenyse. Forma primena struktūrinį AlphaFold gilaus mokymosi tinklo numatymą.

 

     Metodas negali atitikti krio-EM skiriamosios gebos, kuri kai kuriais atvejais gali atskleisti beveik atominio lygio detales, mažesnes, nei 0, 2 nm. Tačiau krio-EM gali būti sudėtingas ir brangus. Priešingai, ONE mikroskopija gali pasiūlyti greitą ir paprastą būdą gauti struktūrinių įžvalgų apie bet kurią molekulę, sako Rizzoli. „Galite pažvelgti į bet kokį baltymą ir galite gauti rezoliuciją, apie kurią negalėjote svajoti."

 

     Padidintas prieinamumas

 

     Rizzoli, kilęs iš Rumunijos, teigia, kad dalis motyvacijos sukurti šią techniką buvo išplėsti pažangiausios šviesos mikroskopijos prieinamumą. ONE mikroskopijos metodas yra paprastas taikyti ir veikia su dabar pasenusiais fluorescenciniais mikroskopais, likusiais nuo 1990 m.

 

     Kairo Vokietijos universiteto farmacijos technologė Salma Tammam šią vasarą planuoja išsiųsti doktorantą į Getingeną mokytis šios technikos. Jos laboratorija tiria, kaip nanodalelės juda ląstelėse. Jie norėtų pamatyti smulkias dalelių ir jų krovinio detales. Tačiau, kaip ir daugelis mokslininkų iš mažas ir vidutines pajamas gaunančių šalių, jie neturi prieigos prie brangių didelės raiškos mikroskopų. „Tai atneša mums sprendimą prieinamu būdu“, - sako ji.

 

     Didelės skiriamosios gebos mikroskopijos pasiekiamumo išplėtimas taip pat svarbus gerai finansuojamų institucijų mokslininkams, sako Noa Lipstein, Berlyno Leibnizo molekulinės farmakologijos centro sinapsės biologė. Ji turi prieigą prie nusistovėjusios didelės skiriamosios gebos technikos, vadinamos stimuliuojamos emisijos išeikvojimo mikroskopija. Tačiau ji neseniai įkūrė nepriklausomą grupę ir nusprendė pritaikyti ONE mikroskopiją jų smulkių detalių tyrimams nervinių sinapsių.

 

     „Tai suteikė man nepriklausomybę, nes neturiu pasikliauti ryšiais su dideliais bosais su sunkiosiomis mašinomis“, - sako Lipstein. „Tai galiu padaryti mano laboratorijoje ir mano stende."

 

     Lipstein nepasiekė šios technikos ribų, tačiau ji jau gauna žvilgsnį į naują biologiją. „Beveik savaime suprantama, kad pamatysime naujų dalykų. Mes jau matome juos, bet nežinome, kas jie yra“, – sako ji." [1]

1. Nature 616, 417-418 (2023)