When you're new, finding that first job can be the hardest. It can seem like positions are impossible to find, and if you do find one and apply, frequently you'll get no response. If you're a freshly-minted bioinformatician / biostatistician / health analyst / someone who does math-y, computer-y stuff to biological data, this is for you.
Thanks for reading Make More Machines! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
By "new in career" I mean someone who :
Is straight out of full-time education and/or academia, post-degree, masters or PhD
Is shifting fields, where the fields don't overlap much
Has little or no track record in the field
Has little or no evidence of independent work
This incurs a distinct set of problems compared to job-seekers later in their career:
You don’t have the network to find many jobs.
Your qualifications and education might be all you have to sell yourself on. And there are lots of other people with seemingly identical qualifications, so it's hard to stand out from the crowd.
There’s no evidence that you can translate your qualifications into actual results, no evidence you can work. Every employer has had the misfortune of hiring someone who was fine on paper but couldn't deliver or couldn't manage themselves. They don't know if you will be able to do the job.
In summary - you can't find the jobs, you look like every other applicant, you're an uncertain quantity.
What you should do
Simple - solve for all the above problems. In detail:
Your CV
Normally your CV should lead with your strongest points and for most people that's experience and positions. As a newcomer, it might instead be your education. Think about putting that first.
A lot of newcomers tend to overwrite their CVs and stuff it with lists of skills, software used, courses attended ... which transparently looks like padding from an unconfident person. If your CV only has a page worth of material, don't try to make two pages out of it.
Strengthen your CV with examples of solving problems rather than skills. Look for ways in which you did more than just the coursework, took initiative, handled ambiguous situations, did more than just be a person who followed instructions. This might be research projects, summer work, personal projects, and activities outside science. Show you can translate your training into action. A Github profile or other public work portfolio can help.
Conversely, maybe you could focus on a particular technical skill that employers need and isn't trivial to acquire - sequencing assembly, transcriptomics, NLP, etc. It's a narrow but deep strategy - you're aiming for fewer jobs but you're one of the few people that can do those jobs.
Another narrow-but-deep strategy is to think about what is unique about you. What do you have that other candidates don't? Maybe you come from a medical background, or you worked on a few immunology projects, or your basic degree was in plant science. What can help you stand out?
I'm normally not a fan of listing extra-curricular activities and hobbies on CVs, because they're often irrelevant and take just take up room on a CV. But if there's something you did that demonstrates appropriate skills, initiative, leadership? It might be useful to include it.
Finding jobs and opportunities
The best fix is, of course, to get experience. Here's some approaches to take:
Get a job - almost any job - to start with. Once you have that and have shown that you can actually do work, things will be a lot easier. This might include a job outside of science / tech or perhaps in an adjacent or different area. This is a bit tricky - you don't want to end up on another career path - but maybe you can find something that overlaps enough such that you can get started and course-correct on your next job.
I'm reluctant to recommend that you do unpaid or low-paid internships, studentships or vacation scholarships, but if you can swing it, even a few months experience could be valuable. And there are paid versions of these. Some companies and research organizations have good graduate or intern programs. These can be great place to start because they're explicitly looking for raw talent to upskill. Some examples lie below.
Academia is constantly hiring junior research assistants and similar positions. The pay isn't great, the contracts will be short term but it's not a bad place to start and learn a lot.
Do an MSc or PhD. This can sometimes be a bad step - too many people just passively drift into further education, you should only take these on deliberately and with motivation, you don't want to make yourself look more academic and theoretical - but it can be a useful branding of your skills, if your CV doesn't shout out the right things. And you might learn something.
Doing a postdoc is more marginal - if it interests you, if you'll learn something, if the environment is good, why not? Doing a second postdoc might make you start to look like an academic, so be careful if that's not what you want.
It can help to talk to people and think a bit outside the box as to where jobs can be. For examples, CROs are constantly employing relatively junior people, as are big pharma for clinical programmers.
Internships, scholarships, grad programs, etc.
No recommendation intended, non-exhaustive, might not be up to date, just listing:
There are lots of startups and small companies that don't have a lot of money but need people to do things. There are opportunities out there, if only you can find them ...
... which brings me to networking. Too often people interpret this as spamming strangers to ask them for a job. It can work but it's not a great approach. A better albeit slower strategy is to attend events and talk to people, to become part of the community and known. Look at groups for your domain (e.g. bioinformatics), regular meetups.
Recruiters generally are more interested in people who've had one or two positions, but you can still have useful conversations with them and get some good advice.
There's lots of advice around - articles, forums, youtube channels. Much of it is terrible, but you'll recognise it after a while, usually because they're dogmatically preaching odd things that no one else says or offering "one weird trick" solutions.
If you're graduating from a course, your institution will probably have career advisors and resources. Use them.
A job search is like any other skill, you will get better with practice. You'll find jobs faster, make better applications and interview better. You will fail more than you succeed, but each failure can get you closer.
Good luck. Once again and as always, if you disagree or have something to add, put it in the comments.
Thanks for reading Make More Machines! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.