Andrew Akbashev

Postdoc doesn't make much sense for industry.

After postdoc, you’re clearly overqualified for entry roles and still under-qualified for manager roles.

1. You compete against applicants who already have years of industry experience.

2. You become overqualified for entry positions in 95% of the cases. Even PhD is considered an ‘over-qualification’ for many entry positions.

3. You can’t land higher positions because they are normally NOT available to those without industry experience. Coming from academia, it’s really hard to secure a managerial position in the corporate world.

4. Your postdoc skills could be very useful for some specific R&D roles, especially if they fit it precisely. But how many such roles exist?

Basically - unless there is a perfect fit, it’s really hard to convince companies that they need you because of your academic experience.

❗️A postdoc makes sense WHEN:

0. You want to stay in academia.

1. Your personal situation requires it (immigration, family, etc).

2. You want to make or join a startup based on your research experience.

3. Your postdoc is in partnership with industry. Here, the partnership should be setting you on the industry track, not purely academic.

4. You are from fundamental research, can’t find an industry role and want to get hands-on experience in applied fields as a postdoc.

📍 Important:

I discuss the academia / industry divide with the top industry recruiter:

“Academia vs Industry: A Recruiter Gets Brutally Honest”

youtu.be/xBGfu-rUg34

Watch it even if you want to stay in academia.

You will understand how industry thinks about academics at a completely different level.

—

I spoke to a man who’d spent years homeless with a criminal record, and who eventually became a Senior Researcher in one of Intel’s most demanding R&D divisions.

Today, he hires PhDs and leads a ton of innovations. He has 350 patents and received the Top Inventor Award (highly prestigious at Intel).

But how did he do it?

From living on the streets to a job that every PhD dreams about?

Brandon’s story is absolutely worth your time because it all applies to our own lives.

This conversation will stay with me for a long time.

When life gets dark and I see no way out, it will be reminding me that I can create my own light.

Full Episode: lnkd.in/egeZhAjz

p.s. He also explains how & why they hire PhDs and postdocs, and what can help academics get prepared for real industry.

TOTAL nonsense.
This is NOT how university professors and academia generally work.

1. We don't develop solutions to problems. We do research. Research adds new knowledge, and we do our best to make it publicly (!) available. Research is paid from public money, we've been under a lot of pressure to make research publicly available, and we do it now through preprints and Open Access.

2. Some labs work with industry on actual well-formulated problems, but those are often paid by the industry and are co-sponsored by public agencies (for example, DOE in the US).

3. Professors normally get salaries for teaching. Teaching can be viewed as a 'paid service to the society'. Research funding has little to do with it.

4. Some professors start companies BUT WITH INVESTORS' money. Governments do contribute, sometimes they may help with seed money, but generally not more. By the way, a government's job is (in particular) to invest public taxes into its own economy. And they do it by seeding startups and businesses in areas where otherwise it's hard to nucleate them. Investment is always a bet. Its about pushing the risk / reward button. Which means there is a reward in the end - a viable business that grows, creates employment and pays taxes.

5. Governments are actually doing a lot to ENCOURAGE professors, PhD students and scientists to make companies, especially based on their research. This matters a lot to the future of any country, it enables the competitive edge in real technologies (not lab prototypes but actual, viable products).

📍 Also, keep in mind that academics are heavily UNDER-PAID in many countries.

Many of them work in academia because they are simply passionate about science, teaching and research.

Expecting them to return the "outcome to society at no cost" makes no sense.

The best way to make 'use' of professors is:

- give them more funding and freedom
- enable more seed funding for startups
- let them breath by cutting the unnecessary bureaucracy

This is the best way to see the 'return on investments'.

Public funding is an investment.
And the major return on investment is - new knowledge and new educated PhDs.

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My new lecture - Who will become a professor? And why?

Three PhD students with three dramatic stories, each with a different career path hoping to stay in academia.

If you want to become a PI, you may face challenges you never anticipated.

It’s easy to make mistakes and be misguided by someone’s advice.

It’s easy to get stuck on ‘infinite postdoc’ or hit a wall as a dual-career academic couple.

In this talk, I show how unpredictable your academic career can be.

I also explain how PhD students often miss out on opportunities.

What should students do to significantly improve their chances? How to compete for academic positions?

Lecture: “The Real Cost of Following Your Academic Dream”

youtu.be/IM6Qp3yXNro

(I recently gave this talk at the PhD / postdoc symposium in Swiss Alps)

Traditional peer review may go extinct. Slowly but steadily.

The trend is worrisome but expected because:

- scientists are overloaded, their time is precious.

- scientists aren’t paid for peer review, so many think “Why should I bother about who writes it?”

- scientists who receive increasingly negative reviews and rejections from at top journals - they no longer care about rigor so much anymore. When the system doesn’t reward you for rigor, why bother?

Human-written peer reviews are turning into “handmade products”.

Soon, these reviews will need much more justification than simply “editor needs your review”.

Again, it’s a very bad trend.