The Power of a PhD: How Anyone Can Use Their PhD to Get Hired in Industry

By Dr. Isaiah Hankel

What if all your years of hard work in academia finally paid off?

Imagine never having to work in another dead-end academic position, or being able to tell the world you are in a leadership position within a thriving company. PhDs are in demand in industry, but often, these PhDs are invisible to potential employers. Dr. Isaiah Hankel, leverages his expertise as the CEO of the world's largest career training platform for PhDs, Cheeky Scientist, to help PhDs overcome their biggest obstacle: obscurity. 

The Power of a PhD is the stepwise blueprint that 18 million PhDs worldwide are seeking. Dr. Isaiah Hankel’s eight core steps within The Power of a PhD include:  

• Industry career options for PhDs
• Communicating the right skills
• Writing industry résumés
• Mastering LinkedIn profiles
• Networking and job referrals
• Generating informational interviews
• Acing industry interviews
• Negotiating your salary

This eight-step approach provides a consistent and proven methodology that allows PhDs to transition into industry without suffering the painful process of trial and error.

You could be the next PhD hired at Amazon, Google, Apple, Intel, Dow Chemical, BASF, ERM, Merck, Genentech, Nestle, Hilton, Tesla, Syngenta, Siemens, the CDC, UN or Ford Foundation!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Release date: Sep 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781631958472

Dr. Isaiah Hankel

Dr. Isaiah Hankel is the Founder and CEO of Cheeky Scientist, the largest career training platform for PhDs in the world. His articles, podcasts and trainings are consumed annually by 3 million PhDs in over 150 different countries. He has helped PhDs transition into top companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, Intel, Dow Chemical, BASF, Merck, Genentech, Home Depot, Nestle, Hilton, SpaceX, Tesla, Syngenta, the CDC, UN and Ford Foundation. Dr. Hankel has published two bestselling business books on career transitions and his methods for getting PhDs hired have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, Nature, Forbes, The Guardian, Fast Company, Entrepreneur Magazine and Success Magazine. He currently runs Cheeky Scientist in Miramar Beach, Florida, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. 

Book preview

Introduction

How PhDs Can Transition Out of Academia

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists ... it is real ... it is possible ... it’s yours.

— Ayn Rand

In the Preface, I only scratched the surface of why PhDs want to transition out of academia. Many PhDs feel professionally unfulfilled in academic positions because they are overworked, work in uninspiring roles, and are paid marginal academic stipends, fellowships, and wages. Far too many PhDs are unable to find meaning or joy in their academic careers, which negatively impacts both their professional and personal lives. But most of these PhDs face a lack of training for how to get a job outside of academia. After all, most PhDs have spent decades—the entirety of their professional careers—in academia. They also face imposter syndrome. After spending their lives in academia, many PhDs think they can’t be successful in industry. They falsely believe that their lack of post-PhD industry experience removes them from consideration for top industry roles.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

The World Economic Forum recently labeled today’s industry landscape as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to the Forum, the top three skills employers recruit for are complex problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity.¹² In other words, employers need job candidates who can correctly identify problems, find the right problems to solve, and then solve those problems with creative solutions.

Guess what? PhDs like you excel in all three of those areas.

Never forget that, regardless of your PhD background, you are an expert researcher. You are highly trained in identifying problems and creating solutions to those problems. Think of all the hours, days, week, months, and years (even decades!) you’ve spent trying to find answers to the world’s toughest questions. You know how to attack questions from every angle. You know how to follow a lead through fifteen academic journal articles, eight book references, and countless plots in obscure, barely readable figures published ten or more years ago just to (maybe) prove some minuscule aspect of your overall hypothesis. Employers deeply value this for any industry role. Make sure they know you have these skills.

Employers also value your ability to wrangle uncertainty. If you have a PhD or are getting a PhD, you’ve probably spent years of your life smack in the middle of uncertainty. You have no idea if your next grant is going to be funded. You have no idea if your paper is going to get past that third reviewer and be published. You have no idea when your committee is going to give you the green light to defend your thesis. You don’t even know if the project you’re working on has an answer at all! Everything you’re doing—your life’s work—could be proven untrue at any time. As a PhD, you’re not just comfortable with uncertainty; you thrive on it.

You know that without uncertainty, discovery would be impossible. Innovation wouldn’t exist. Most people don’t understand the relationship between uncertainty and creation. You do. Most people want a sure thing and spend their entire lives choosing unhappiness over uncertainty. Use this to your advantage by leaning into your ability to work through uncertainty toward innovation. Make sure you communicate it to employers too.

One of my thesis committee members once told me the difference between leaving graduate school with a master’s degree versus leaving with a PhD is that a master’s degree is granted to those who have mastered a field while a PhD is granted to those who have added to a field. Less than 2 percent of the population has a PhD because adding to a field is hard.¹³ Anyone can regurgitate information. That’s easy. It’s so much harder to create information, to bring new knowledge into existence for the very first time.

If you have a PhD, you are a creator of information. This is one of your most valuable and most transferable skills. Don’t assume that everyone can create information. Most job candidates can’t even write a book report. You, on the other hand, have spent years creating information and months putting it into a hundred-page story called a thesis just so five other people can read it. This kind of innovation and tenacity is uncommon and should be communicated to every employer you approach.

PhDs also learn faster than any other group of people. This is because PhDs are rigorously taught how to learn. After all, the acronym PhD stands for a Doctor of Philosophy, and philosophy stands for knowledge and the ability to ascertain knowledge, which makes PhDs quite literally doctors of learning. Your ability to learn quickly, especially on the job, is incredibly valuable to employers. It’s also exceptionally rare. Just watch the average job candidate try to learn a new software program or standard operating procedure (SOP). Then watch a PhD learn that same software program or SOP. The speed at which the PhD learns, as well as the autonomous nature of their learning, is unmatched.

Speed of learning is a competitive advantage that frightens other job candidates. This fear is often expressed through misinformation like, You’re overqualified if you have a PhD or PhDs are lab rats and can’t understand business or You can’t get a job without industry experience. Don’t believe those lies. Your ability to learn quickly should not only be communicated to employers but should also be leveraged to implement what you read in this book.

The ability of PhDs to learn quickly is, in large part, responsible for my success in helping hundreds of thousands of PhDs get hired into their dream industry careers. I’ve helped PhDs transition into all eleven sectors of business as defined by the S&P 500 index, including information technology, healthcare, communication services, consumer discretionary, financials, industrial, consumer staples, utilities, real estate, materials, and energy. Feeling blind in terms of your industry transition, feeling stuck in academia with no idea how to change your circumstances, or feeling as though you are begging to get hired or begging to get promoted to your next industry position does not have to be your professional experience. As a PhD, you have the value necessary to be sought after by industry employers throughout your career.

Your Guidebook to Success

Whether you want to be one of the highest-paid Chief Scientific Officers or Medical Directors in your field, or the most sought-after Data Scientist, Project Manager, Product Manager, Principal Scientist, Senior Engineer, User Experience Researcher, Application Scientist, Technical Sales Specialist, or Clinical Research Associate in your industry sector, the methods I’ve trained PhDs on over the past decade—the same ones in this book—will lead you to success.

The Power of a PhD is your guidebook for revealing your value as a PhD so that you will never have to feel blind, stuck, or disrespected in your career again. This guidebook is divided into eight core steps that cover:

Industry career options for PhDs

Communicating the right skills

Writing industry résumés

Mastering LinkedIn® profiles

Networking and job referrals

Generating informational interviews

Acing industry interviews

Negotiating your salary

These eight steps provide a consistent and proven methodology for transitioning into industry without suffering through the painful process of trial and error, uncertainty, and constant rejection. If you have a PhD or are on your way to having one, you can transition into industry. You can wake up excited for your career every day, knowing you will be respected by your peers and valued for your skills, training, and education. You can have the professional lifestyle you’ve always wanted. It’s waiting for you. Let’s begin.

STEP #1:

Understand That You Are Your Biggest Obstacle

You are the only problem you will ever have and you are the only solution.

— Bob Proctor

Chapter 1

Academia Destroyed Your Industry Job Search Strategy

An industry job search is maddening because PhDs are never rigorously trained how to do it properly during their academic careers. Most PhDs are never, ever trained how to execute a job search at all. You picked this book up for one simple reason: to transition out of academia and get hired into an industry job. Yet knowing—or not knowing—how to apply for a job is the limiting factor in determining how successful your industry job search and subsequent industry career will be. And how successful your career is will be a major determinant in your personal level of achievement and fulfillment, especially after spending decades in academia.

When it comes to executing an industry job search, most PhDs procrastinate, think about getting an industry job, procrastinate more, upload an academic résumé to hundreds of job sites, fail to get a response, and give up.

Does that sequence remind you of your own industry job search?

If you have a PhD or are about to get one, then probably. I have personally heard from tens of thousands of PhDs in over 150 countries that the above sequence encapsulates either their current industry job search strategy or the strategy they tried before reaching out to me. This particular job search strategy doesn’t work because academia and your academic mindset have flipped it upside down. My job is to help you turn it right side up—starting now.

Every PhD starts their job search (after the procrastination period) by uploading résumés and hoping for the best. A small percentage of PhDs will look at interview questions and imagine answering them correctly. Only a handful will record their progress and connections during a job search. A select few, if any, will devise a networking strategy, build and reactivate their network, and seek job referrals. The problem is that everyone is executing their job search in the upside-down order that academia taught them: résumés, interviews, strategy, referrals. Due to lack of training, PhDs assume that an industry job search mirrors an academic job search. Or even more ignorantly, they believe it mirrors the peer-reviewed publication process.

Let’s see … so I need to write a document similar to an academic paper (résumé) and send it off to reviewers (employers) and then if the reviewers like my work they will ask me to come in and defend my position (interview) similar to the way my thesis committee would. Wrong. The academic social norms you are following now will not get you hired in industry.

This is why so many PhDs spend most of their time writing and rewriting their résumés or LinkedIn® profiles. Then they spend the second most amount of time fantasizing about a phone screen or interview they have yet to schedule. Then they spend very little time, if any, creating and recording a job search strategy or building and reactivating their job referral network. If you want to get hired into the best possible job for you, you need to flip this sequence on its head.

Another reason many PhD-level job candidates perform their job searches in reverse order is because they are incorrectly aligning their efforts with what the hiring funnel looks like from an employer’s perspective. When I say hiring funnel, I mean a company’s increasingly stringent workflow that job candidates go through on their way to being hired. For example, the average industry company receives 250 résumés per day.¹⁴ Employers will only invite twelve to fifteen of those job candidates to a phone screen. Of the twelve to fifteen people the company finds time to do a phone screen with, they will do a video interview with three or four candidates, and then, finally, bring in one or two people for a site visit. This is why most job candidates only focus on résumés and interviews; it is all they can see of the hiring process. They’re not looking at what needs to go on behind the scenes to disrupt this funnel. They’re not thinking about how they can accelerate themselves through the funnel or skip certain parts of the funnel or guarantee their progress from one stage to another. Instead, they are only seeing the start of the funnel—the résumé—and the site visit interview at the end of the funnel.

Now is a good time to start asking yourself a few new questions:

What if I could skip the résumé stage of the funnel altogether and not be one of 250 résumés?

Who could I talk with to schedule a phone screen today?

Could I get hired without a site visit and get a job offer right after a video interview?

How could I make myself such an incredible job candidate that I could skip the funnel altogether?

How could I create my own funnel and get multiple companies to fight over me?

You can do all those things. I will teach you how.

By now, you should clearly see how your academic perspective and lack of job search training has been limiting you. Now it’s time to replace your academic perspective with an industry perspective. It’s time to look at what a right-side-up industry job search looks like.

How to Create a Job Search Strategy

An industry job search, executed in the correct sequence, starts with understanding your career options and creating a job search strategy, and creating a job search strategy starts with realizing that sequence matters. You cannot just haphazardly execute different job search activities at different times. Your approach must be organized in the right order. You also need to record your progress. At the very least, you should have a spreadsheet with five columns:

Companies of Interest

Job Postings or Informational Interview Notes

Company Contacts

Date You Last Followed Up

Next Follow-Up Date

To get hired, you must design a campaign. You must map out the steps you are going to take, and you must plan for contingencies. You cannot just fly by the seat of your pants. You can’t wake up on Tuesday and submit a few résumés, do nothing to progress your transition Wednesday and Thursday, reach out to a few contacts on Friday (the worst day to reach out to people, by the way), coast on the weekend, and then search for more online job postings on Monday. Does this sequence sound absurd? As you read it, you might have thought: Ridiculous! No one searches for a job like this! Are you sure? If we catalogued your job search activities in a spreadsheet hour by hour, what would the result look like?

Thinking about your job search does not count as an activity. Wanting to transition doesn’t count either, nor does playing out various scenarios in your head like If I apply to this job, will anyone get back to me? or Should I reach out to this person on LinkedIn®? Thinking about, dreaming about, and considering the possibilities of your transition are not the same as executing a job search.

Where are you documenting your progress? Where are you writing down your plans for each day of the month? Do you even have a plan? Are you following a protocol?

If not, it’s time to start.

Once you have a strategy in place, you must grow and engage (or reengage) your network. The major component of your networking efforts is following up consistently with an ever-growing list of contacts at the companies you want to work for, setting up informational interviews with those people, and gently guiding them to a position where you can gently ask them for a job referral. That’s where you need to live.

You hate people? Great, stay poor.

You can’t stomach talking to strangers? Perfect, enjoy staying on government assistance programs for the rest of your life.

If you want a job that pays well and allows you to do your best possible work, you must get comfortable with seeking job referrals. The good news is I share a painless process for doing this in later chapters—so painless that even the most intensely introverted PhD who hates networking with a passion can follow it.

Next, you need to craft your professional profile carefully and correctly. Your professional profile includes your industry résumé and your LinkedIn® profile. You can expand your profile to include other documents and other social media profiles, and we will discuss this in later chapters, but your résumé and LinkedIn® profile are required. That being said, you should spend very little time adjusting your professional profile. You should establish your profile and then only slightly adjust it as needed based on the jobs you target. If you’re applying to a new job online and uploading a résumé, the résumé you upload should be highly targeted to that position. It should not just have one or two skills from the job posting slapped into it (although most PhDs don’t even do this, by the way). Instead, it should have every technical skill and transferable skill from the job posting inserted into the résumé. We will discuss exactly how to design your résumé and LinkedIn® profile in later