Hey folks and welcome to the grad school sucks podcast the show for academics and PhDs who want to take their career to industry. I'm your host Dr. Matt Carlson and today I'm going to be talking about seven reasons to take your PhD to industry, seven reasons to take your PhD to industry. And actually none of these are from me. This comes from other PhDs who've already gone industry that follow me on Instagram. I asked them if they would reach out and tell me what is their favorite thing about industry? What is a good reason to go industry? And this is what they said these seven things and I do want to provide some disclaimers upfront. Number one, their experiences and what they share may not be representative of every kind of career in industry. Obviously there are some companies that suck to work for and some companies that are great to work for that being said, a lot of the reasons they said why they like going industry and why I think you should consider going industry are backed by research. The scientific journal Nature often does studies of PhDs and they compare responses between PhDs who work in industry compared to PhDs who work in academia. And one of their recent studies in the past three to four years, I believe, found that PhDs in industry report higher salaries, work life balance and career satisfaction compared to PhDs working in academia. If you want to read more about those research findings, I will link to a Nature article in the description of this episode. Last thing I want to say, there's another cool fact about going industry that PhDs who follow me on Instagram told me and I'm going to share that with you at the end of these seven reasons. So let's go ahead and get started. The first reason PhD said to go industry is the pay. And I think this is a pretty obvious one for people who've compared salaries between academia and industry. Oftentimes going industry can lead to an increase in salary of around 50%. And actually that's exactly what I experienced when I left academia to go industry. My salary went up 50%. While my responsibilities actually went down, which is something we'll talk about a little bit later. And like I said, this one is already supported by research and a lot of people already know it. But I think it's important to start at the front end. Many industry jobs that PhDs commonly get from things like data analysts to project manager to instructional design specialist to UX researcher have salaries that actually fall around the range of what most assistant professors make. And that's just an entry level job in industry. Typically, it's very easy in industry to outpace the pay of a tenured professor before you would actually be at the point of getting tenure if you had gone into academia. But let's not belabor the pay because I know that's an obvious one to many people. Number two, the second reason why I think you should consider going industry is that you do not have to be an expert in everything. In academia, we are often considered one man or one woman armies where we have to do everything from managing projects to analyzing data to writing up papers to teaching classes. And these skills are actually pretty distinct. And I don't think are that interrelated. And in industry, many of these roles are actually broken up into specific positions. So if you're good at analyzing data, you could go into data analytics where your primary task would be to analyze data. And if you're ever at the point where you need to access a different skill set or knowledge base, typically, there's someone on your team or in the company that you can reach out to access that knowledge or skill, and then move forward with whatever project you're working on. You're not expected to become an expert in every little thing along the way. Reason number three, work life balance. This was a big one for me. And consistently, when I do polls on Instagram, people say that work life balance is the number one thing they want in a career after they finish grad school. And this is reported usually twice as often compared to the second leading one, which is the pay. And like I said at the beginning, the differences in work life balance between academia and industry are supported by research in that PhDs say the life in industry just gives you better work life balance and academia. And that's what I found. And that's what a lot of other people have found. When I left academia, not only did I get an increase of 50% in my salary when I became a data analyst, but I actually saw a reduction in the amount of responsibilities that I had, probably around 50%. And as one person on Instagram put it, I never work more than 40 hours a week, and I often work more like 30 hours a week. And that is something that I hear commonly from PhDs working in industry. All right, let's move on to point number four. The reason this person loves their career in industry is that they like seeing their work actually used. And this is something that I often hear from people who were postdocs or professors when they reach industry, the work they do actually goes into effect and makes a difference in the company or organization they're working in. And if you think about the lot of the work that we do in academia, particularly on the research side, we will write up a publication and the average publication takes around about 100 hours of work. That 100 hours of work gets published in a journal where it's read maybe a couple dozen times, and hopefully cited at least three to five times. And that is typically all you have to show for that 100 hours of work. Whereas in industry, it's much easier to see the input that you put in actually blossom into something great that can create a positive outcome for clients, customers, end users, or other stakeholders. Reason number five, not having to feel guilty on weekends. And this one was a big one for me, because as a grad student, I worked all the time. And I was privileged to be able to do so. I didn't have a child or a sick elder that I had to take care of. And so I was able to pour a lot of my time into pushing my academic career forward. And whenever I pulled back from that and left academia, I did feel guilty on the weekends and in the evenings for not constantly be doing something, whether it's reading an article to prepare for a class or for a paper or catching up on some writing or attending to a few emails. And I call this phenomena grad guilt, which is that you feel guilty whenever you're not working, because you spent so much time as a grad student working all the time and always feeling behind the eight ball. But in industry, the vast majority of people do not work on weekends. They do not work during the evening, and they expect you to take that time off. Obviously, some exceptions exist. But this is a trend I find when I talk with PhDs and one that's supported by research. All right, reason number six, respectful communication, and appreciations and thank yous. Now, I know there are many great academic mentors out there, and I hear about them occasionally in the DMs from grad students and PhD holders. But I think we can all think of at least a few experiences we've had in grad school, or maybe even as a postdoc, where you had a supervisor who was overly critical and demanding and rarely said thank you. And if you didn't, then that's awesome. And I'm glad you had that experience. But from the responses I get from a lot of people, it seems like that's a fairly common thing for grad students. And the juxtaposition between that experience and what many people experience in industry is pretty stark. And while of course, there are lots of examples of toxic work environments in industry, in my experience, as well as the experience of people that I talk with who've left academia and gone to industry, it is fairly common to feel much more appreciated in industry than when you were in academia. All right, folks, if you've liked these seven reasons to go industry, and you're interested in figuring out what your path to industry would look like, I encourage you to download my six week checklist. It is a one page PDF that outlines all the tasks that I think the average PhD is going to need to take in order to be competitive for industry. You can sign up for free by going to the description in this episode and clicking the link for the six week checklist or by going to sixweekchecklist.com. All right, number seven, the last reason I'm going to share is the ability to move up or move laterally. When you get into industry, you're going to notice that there are a lot of career ladders that you could climb if you wanted to, you could get a senior position in whatever kind of an individual contributor role you have, you could get into management and climb higher and higher in that way. You could find that there's a different role, maybe one with a similar pay structure that you like better. And so you decide to switch from whatever you're doing to that new role. There's a lot more flexibility and potentials for career progression in industry compared to academia. And I think that is at least somewhat reflected in the fact that PhDs in industry tend to report higher career satisfaction compared to PhDs in academia. When you're in academia, really the only position that you're trying to get is a professor position. And once you get that, there's two positions above that associate and full professor, a very small percentage of professors will go on to become a dean or take some kind of administrative role. And frankly, even if you do find the professor position and you stick with that in the long run, you're one of the lucky few who actually got it. So those are my seven reasons to go industry. And before I let you go, I want to share one more interesting fact. And that's that I asked the audience on Instagram that I have who are already industry PhDs, if they would leave industry and go back to academia, if they got a professor position that already had tenure. So their options were stay in industry with the current career you have now, or go back to academia and automatically get tenure. What do you think people voted for? At the time of me recording this, 63 people had voted and 11 of them voted to go back to academia for that tenured professor role and 52 voted to stay in industry with the career they have now. And I think something about that is telling. And obviously, this is not a randomized controlled trial. This is not some big nationally representative study. This is literally just the results of a poll that I ran on Instagram. But I think there's something important there. And that's that the golden ticket of getting that professor job, that tenured professor job, is actually much less compelling in light of a career in industry. And frankly, I expected a little bit higher of a response for people to say they would go back for that professor job. I was anticipating at least 25%, maybe up to 50% of people would have said, sure, take me back to academia if you give me an already tenured professor job. But no, nearly five times more PhDs in industry would want to remain in their industry careers compared to getting that golden ticket of a tenured professor spot in academia. So if you're approaching graduation in the next six to 12 months, or even the next few years, I want you to think about that. PhDs who've already left academia would have voted overwhelmingly to not go back even if they got that lottery ticket of a professor position and it already had tenure. That's all I had for you today. Be sure to check out the description of this episode for links to both that Nature article as well as my Instagram account if you'd like to follow along there. And if you appreciated what I shared today, please consider leaving a rating or review on Spotify or Apple podcast, or leave me a thumbs up or comment and subscribe on YouTube if you're watching there. And I will see you all