As we've mentioned in other places throughout this website, many PhDs will not become tenured professors. By definition, this means that at some point there will be an exit from academia and into "industry", which we'll define here as simply everything that's not academia.
This is something that many, many people do (myself included), for various reasons, yet there is (in our opinion at least) not as much information out there about this transition as one would hope. In this note, I want to discuss a few things about this transition that I wish more soon-to-graduate PhDs knew. In particular, I want to talk about why I hire — and why I like working with — PhDs. (To be clear, I'm not talking about hiring or working with PhDs for Coho, but rather in my "day job" — i.e., a "normal job".)
I have seen a number of PhD students struggle to find jobs, and/or struggle to become happy in the jobs that they find, because of some combination of unrealistic expectations, misaligned expectations, and intellectual stubbornness. Hopefully this will give even just a small amount of clarity in these areas. But first...
What Kind Of PhD?
The specific PhD-to-industry transition I'm talking about is the one involving a PhD in a very technical field moving into an industry that is not related to that field. So, not a graduating medical student moving into residency, and not really even a PhD in reinforcement learning getting a job at OpenAI. Rather, a PhD in differential geometry moving into data science, a PhD in string theory moving into software engineering, or a PhD in topology moving into quant finance.
It is this latter type of transition that I don't think has enough written about it. Namely, a medical student will learn a lot, during their schooling, about transitioning to the next step. Similarly, a PhD in artificial intelligence will know all about the different AI companies, what they're hiring for, and what that type of work will look like. A PhD in topology, however, probably knows a lot less of what it'll be like working as a software engineer for a database management company.
For this type of transition, I think the first thing that anyone should ask themselves is the following:
Why Would Anyone Hire Me?
If I'm Home Depot and I want to hire a junior web developer to revamp the product pages on our site, why would I hire a topology PhD? Answer: I probably wouldn't. I'd probably first look for the cheapest person on the market (via LinkedIn or a recruiting company that we might work with) who has some experience working on websites, ideally websites for large companies, ideally websites for hardware companies.
And if you're the topology PhD, this is actually good, in my opinion. You probably don't want that job. But then what is your strength? What value can you add?
The thing that a PhD can bring to the table is flexibility. "I can learn things fast" is something that everyone says in an interview, and that's great, but I truly do believe that it's true for PhDs. Or rather, the correct statement is: "I can learn whatever I need to in order to do the job, I can do so pretty quickly, and I can do so over and over again".
Many people have the idea that getting a job, or even building a career, goes something like the following. I go to school for a thing, I get a job that utilizes those exact skills I just learned, and then I do things like that, or closely related to that, more or less forever.
That's not dissimilar to the med-school approach, or the AI-PhD-Going-To-An-AI-Company approach. And that's all well and good, we need skilled labor of that form.
But there are also plenty of companies who need skilled laborers of a different type. Namely, I might be a company that's just starting to build out a data science team and I need people who can 1) help me figure out what we need, 2) build things quickly so that we can see if they're working, and 3) be willing to tear things down and build them back better if our current approach is not working. Moreover, we need to be able to do this over and over again to reach our goals. If you're a PhD (or really, anyone who's done serious research on anything, we're just using "PhD" as a catch-all), then that process likely sounds familiar.
And believe it or not, not everyone works like that. A lot of people like to hold on tight to what they've built, even if it's bad for the team or the company. A lot of people don't like learning new things, because that's hard. A lot of people don't like trying things that they're not 100% sure will work, because that might result in a "waste of time" (quotes because a researcher knows that that actually wasn't a waste of time, but rather a thing learned).
And this is why I like hiring, and/or working with, PhDs. That said, it's not just any PhD that will succeed in this setting. There's a couple more ingredients that (again, just in my personal experience) lead to successful PhDs in the work force. One of those ingredients is to fully realize that
No One Cares About Your PhD
Did you publish 6 papers in the most prestigious journals during grad school? Did you figure out how to generalize the doo-hickey definition in order to naturally include the embedding of yee-haws into higher dimensional flava-flaves? That's awesome if you did. That'll probably lead to some cool conversations in the office or at retreats if you find a couple people who really like math and are a couple beers deep. But it will not make you successful.
To reiterate: Teams or companies in this position would not hire a PhD because they have a PhD. They'd hire them because they think they're going to help their team with their projects. This might sound harsh, and it is. Academia is a place that is funded largely by tax dollars and/or donors that don't expect to see monetary returns on those investments. And that's great — the world needs to pursue knowledge for knowledge's sake.
But we all have bosses. Even CEOs have bosses — the customer. And these people need to be kept happy (especially the customer!). Otherwise, it's lights out for all of us, and we're not making rent and/or back out looking for jobs. And this is why no one cares about your PhD.
What We Do Care About
The picture I just painted is purposefully bleak and cut-throat, because I've seen far too many PhDs think that a red carpet is going to be rolled out for them just because they know how to solve a certain crazy set of PDEs. Unless my team specifically needs that set of PDEs solved (which is highly, highly unlikely), then I really couldn't care less about that.
What I do care about is whether or not I can trust you to take a question like "hey can you take a look at whether or not this type of user is more likely to abuse this type of product offering", and make it your own. The person who comes back with analyses on a few different types of user, using a few different definitions of "abuse", and can propose a couple different actions that we could take in response to it, is someone I want on my team.
If your PhD supervisor asked you to look into a thing and you only looked at that one thing, without looking left, right, up, or down, then you probably won't get too far in your research. If your PhD supervisor needs to walk you right up to every conclusion, then they'd just do the research and write the paper on their own.
And just so I'm clear: I'm not saying this because it's what I want, I'm saying it because it'll help the PhD succeed. Namely, succeeding in anything requires this type of thinking and this way of working, and getting a PhD is great training for that. But it's important to remember that the PhD, in this scenario, is indeed just training. When understood properly, the PhD can use their superior work habits and creative thinking to succeed just about anywhere. When understood improperly — namely, as a thing that should be rewarded in industry for its own sake — unfulfilled expectations and disappointment (from both employer and employee) can ensue.
The second ingredient that I've found leads to more success for PhDs-turned-career-people is a generalized definition of research, so let's explain that real quick too.
Generalized Research
This is related to the fact that "no one cares about your PhD", but will hopefully be a more positive take (I'm aware that a lot of this article is harsh, but it comes from a place of passion, because I hate seeing PhDs not be as successful (or more importantly, happy) as they could be with only a few small perspective shifts). Namely, some folks like doing research because of the particular thing they're researching. They just really, really love the dynamics of superconductors at certain temperatures and couldn't imagine ever thinking about something else. And that's cool, but then you better land yourself a position in exactly that field or else you'll be sad.
The other set of researchers, though, enjoy research because they like learning new things and solving hard problems. That's the approach to research we very much recommend, because it comes with two benefits. First, if you land a position doing research in the specific field that you love the most, then great, you'll still be happy. Second, and more importantly, you can do anything that requires learning new things and solving hard problems, and you'll still be happy. Indeed, learning new things and solving hard problems, over and over again, is exactly the set of traits that we described above as "the reason" why PhDs get hired.
As we've mentioned in other articles, there's often a view within academia that working outside of academia is not interesting, not challenging, and not deep. I have found none of those things to be true, and I love working with people with PhD-levels of research experience who can get just as excited about the problems we're working on now, as they did about their PhD problems. And this brings me to the final point...
You Should Want The Same Thing
If you're a PhD, and/or you're just someone who knows what research is like, enjoys working hard, learning new things, and solving hard problems, then you should look for places (companies and/or teams) that will allow you to do that, and reward you for it. Your ability to learn new things quickly, over and over again, tear things down and build them back up, collaborate, be creative, etc., is sought after. It's not sought after by everyone or by all companies, but they're out there.
Find a place, or at least a boss, that will let you — indeed, encourage you — to work that way. And find a place that will reward you for that effort. It's not easy to do, but few things in life that are worthwhile are.
I think that a lot of the negative stigma about industry that exists in academia comes from academics hearing about their friends going out and getting soul-sucking, intellectually non-stimulating jobs. And that's fair, because that happens a lot. But I also think that this often happens because of a misalignment of expectations. Academics (sometimes) go out into industry expecting people to give them special treatment for their degrees, or expecting to be able to apply their academic expertise to the job at hand.
By (hopefully) knowing a bit more about where your work-value (which is very different than your human-value, but that's a whole other post's worth of material) actually lies — namely, in your ability to learn, be creative, take ownership of problems, and provide results without always having to be led right up to them — you'll hopefully be able to have some criteria to look for in your job hunt.
Namely, ask your interviewers what the work is like, what they think the work will be like in 6 months, what kinds of things you should know to do your job well, etc. If the answers are things like "we don't know for sure", or "we're excited to find out with you", etc., then that actually sounds (to me) like an exciting place to work, if you're the kind of person who wants to be doing something different in 6 months than you are today. Not everyone is, and that's okay.
Of course, there are lots of other things to consider, but hopefully that's at least a start!