...The combination of a healthy drug industry, heavy venture capital investment in start-ups, and new targets for small-molecule drugs is spurring a hiring spree, allowing some young PhD chemists, particularly in medicinal and computational chemistry, to skip the traditional years of postdoctoral training and go quickly to work in the pharmaceutical industry. The boom is great for chemists looking to start their careers, but it is raising questions about the role of the postdoc in the training of chemists today.Hall says he was prompted to start a conversation on Twitter after hearing multiple accounts of principal investigators in academic labs losing postdocs to industry. “And not in a scenario where they have done a 2- or 3-year postdoc, but 4 to 6 months in. I’m 44. I did a very long postdoc. I have a lot of friends who did two postdocs. That was not uncommon at all. Obviously, the opportunities are there now in a way they haven’t been for a while.”Hall adds that it has become increasingly difficult to fill postdoc spots in his lab at NCATS. “I have chatted with a few people who applied for postdocs who basically said, ‘I’m not doing a postdoc. I have a job with pharma.’ ”
Article has lots of good anecdotes from people who have successfully found industry positions. Oh, and I stand by my normative position. Lots of great angles to ponder - read the whole thing.
I always had the impression that post-docs for industry-bound scientists were a novelty of the 1990s that somehow stuck -- and that has ebbed and flowed with the economy (get a job straight from PhD if you can, otherwise you can do a post-doc as a "holding pattern") -- but with the preference always being to go straight to industry.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure of the logic of "voluntarily" doing a post-doc if industry jobs are available without one.
I've also heard from time to time only do a postdoc if academia is what you're after; for industry an industry postdoc is already borderline questionable since thats a low-paying internship, doing an academia postdoc to get industry jobs is straight out a waste of time.
DeleteI guess another point from this article is why people don't pursue academia jobs, thus less people seek postdoc opportunities? Between the decreasing number of available faculty positions, increasing competitiveness of funding, longer duration of postdocs (chem is approaching 4 and bio is at 6 years now?) and there are simply "better" options out there like pharma jobs, the answer is pretty clear to me.
"Hall adds that it has become increasingly difficult to fill postdoc spots in his lab at NCATS. “I have chatted with a few people who applied for postdocs who basically said, ‘I’m not doing a postdoc. I have a job with pharma.’ ”
ReplyDeleteWelcome to life in the big city.
Agree with Jordan. One of the most valuable pieces of advice I got when finishing my PhD in the early 2000s was from a pharma lab head with whom I discussed the possibility to do a postdoc with them. His response was "Why aim for a postdoc if you already know you want to work in the industry? We don't care about a postdoc if you can show industry experience instead, even if it's from a smaller outfit/startup/CRO". Obviously, a postdoc in a high-profile lab certainly won't be frowned upon by most employers but even a just a few years of real-world experience will probably trump most postdoc qualifications.
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