This month’s blog post is about Philipp Kempf’s experience in industry. He left academia, after doing a PostDoc, to work in offshore services as a project manager.
By Philipp Kempf
You hear or say it when talking to a colleague at the end of a tough week or when a research proposal is rejected: “Maybe I will just go into industry. The work is easier, the pay is better, and I do not have to worry about defending my professional existence every year and a half.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? This complaint is perfectly reasonable, because across the board, with only few exceptions, the contractual situation of even the top-notch postdoctoral researchers is truly precarious.
At the end of 2018, my contract as a PostDoc ran out, and because I was getting nowhere with my project at the time, I lacked the drive to write research proposals. It did not help that research grants for 2- to 3-year positions usually take about 2 to 3 months to finish and have a success rate around 15% in the countries that I know best. I applied successfully to an offshore services company and became a project manager. I do not want to keep you hanging: the work was not easier, the pay was comparable to my salary as a PostDoc, but I did get an open-ended full-time contract.
A quick background: I went to school in Germany and England. I did my Bachelors in Frankfurt, my Master in Tromsø and my PhD in Ghent. Every time I changed school or university, I learnt plenty of things outside of the particular subject that I was studying. School systems and universities in different countries have different perspectives and ways of teaching. For example, I always felt that the way mathematics are taught in German schools is more theoretical than the English method, which is more applied. Another example is the flat hierarchical structure in Norway, that I happen to find refreshing. A change of perspective is valuable, regardless of the question whether the new school or university is “better” (whatever that means).
Going to the industries was such a change of perspective for me. There are two big differences that I experienced. The first one is the pace. By pace I do not mean that people in the industries work faster or longer days. I mean that a project may only last three weeks and as a project manager I would be involved in anything between one and five projects simultaneously. In contrast, a scientific project usually takes at least one year.
The second big difference that I experienced is teamwork. While teamwork is very much a cornerstone in geosciences, the scale of teamwork in the industries is an order of magnitude higher. If you translate the scale of teamwork from industries to academia you get one team exclusively writing research proposals, field-geologists conducting the fieldwork, logistics staff handling the logistics, lab-geologists and technical staff doing the lab work, geo-statisticians to put numerical meaning to the data produced, geo-writers publishing the findings (one for text, one for maps, one for graphs, one for tables) and then you would have my role as a project manager supporting and following-up on everyone as best I can and trying to recognise bottlenecks early and avoiding them. On top of this project-based process would be a team reviewing this process trying to make it more efficient.
I have not seen a geo-research group that works with this level of teamwork. For this insight into what teamwork means in other places, I am grateful to have been part of industry and I would recommend it to every scientist. We have a lot to learn.
Note from the PGR Forum:
Many careers and jobs are open to you after completing a PhD. As a geoscientist, you are trained to be both literate and numerate, and have strong project management skills – you have managed a project (probably with a big budget) for at least 3 years. To keep up to date with opportunities in academia and industry please follow us on twitter.
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