help... career for a scientist? maybe a new career?

[motovacuum]

I've completely lost any career motivation i ever had.

Moving overseas with DP to a new job for him.
Not having a job isn't an option.

I am a scientist here in the UK (soft end of biology. No serious chemistry, physics, maths or computing skills).

Could try for scientific jobs overseas, but frankly can't think of anything I'd less rather do.... have been inclined to cry under the duvet rather than go to work for the last few years.

I am a bit depressed, but have had lots of failed treatments and GP/ psych recommend career change and moving away from my frankly depressing family.

Need to find something else to do, with minimal amounts of re-training. I look at job ads in the new location and feel like crying or as though the entire weight of the world is on my shoulders and i just can't do anything.

How to get motivated?
How to find a bloody job that I can do?

I have totally useless specialist skills/PhD, so am pretty much graduate recruitment material but without the youth or motivation.

Help. Can't really talk to colleagues or mentors - they either tell me I'm a total waste of space, or say "oh you can't leave our field you're so wonderful blah blah". I don't feel like i've had any original thoughts in about 10 years (since I was just out of undergraduate).

Hello, another given up being a scientist and not sure what to do next person here too. I'm a chemist who took voluntary redundancy last year following several yeasr of work just being too, too awful. No PhD etc here either.

Our company provided careers counselling as part of the redundancy, this encouraged us to look at what we can do and have done, outside our pure "career" acheievements, such as skills acquired doing voluntary work, student jobs in the past, parenting - have you helped with toddler groups etc. Once you start writing it all down, it is surprising how much you might be capable of. Don't believe anyone who says you are a waste of space, or that you are "throwing away your career", this is simply not true.

Then you need to look at your criteria for a job, ie part time, full time, local, prepared to travel etc, before you even start thinking about types of work. If you see an advert, start thinking about how you could do that job and tailor an application.
Also, look at jobs which migh act as a lead in to something you could do later on, maybe school science technician as a precursor to teacher training for example. Could you afford to do voluntary work for a while?

Are you a member of the Institute of Biology? Do they offer a career advice service (the Royal Society of Chemistry do). Science is a great basis for many other types of work, it does sound as though you need a total change. Are you in a position to wait till you are settled overseas or do you need to find something beofer moving? Maybe if you could wait till you are settled and get to know some of DHs new colleagues and families it will help you to know your new community and what might be available. Sorry, lots of questions, hope some of this helps!

Scientific publishing? Do an online editing/proofreading course (I can recommend the Publishers Training Centre one).

If you're in a non-English-speaking country, the local scientific journals would probably be very happy to find an English-speaking editor.

I'm so sorry. This happened to a friend of mine and, despite having her babies really close together, her field had moved on and there was no going back for her.

But look at what you have got: skills, qualifications, experience. Can you get advice on putting together a CV. I bet you are heaps more desirable than you say at the moment.

And don't dismiss retraining. Teaching might be an option ,or working for an exam board or a scientific publisher. Or train in antenatal and postnatal support, breastfeeding counselling or something like that which would fit around your available time and for which biological knowledge would be an asset.

On-line tutoring? Askabiologist.com?

Thanks so much for the replies. I should really find something before we go (it's to an english-speaking country).

I guess I'm lucky in a way to not have kids - have been ttc without any luck for ages (lurking on MN)

Definitely not dismissing retraining, but can't really afford to do the kind of retraining that would let me completely change into a new career (medicine, engineering etc) - and where we're going doesn't have a law school, or government type jobs, or publishing, because it's a tiny university town at the back of bloody nowhere... absolutely packed to the eyeballs with people who do my kind of science but with more relevant skills because htey all have medical or vet degrees.

I am not sure I'd be any good at school teaching, particularly at the moment - tend to get too depressed and demotivated too quickly. Definitely wouldn't be able to control a class, let alone inspire it. Likewise Open University type stuff - not really capable of motivating or being gentle and nice with people starting from such different places.

wow! that is a pretty big change

you're right about pay. 6 years post PhD I still earn less than the PhD student sitting next to me did in 2004. That is how little pay scales change... she was unusually well paid on about 12K less than the average graduate salary...

DH is a geochemist, but actually works in insurance claims. He started working in a claims call centre because he needed the money, and found that his scientific skills of investigation, report writing, and critical thinking meant it was a really good field for him, and now he's at the top of his field. Lots of different things going on, and at the starting end you don't have a continuing responsibility so you walk away at the end of the day

that sounds interesting CMOTdibbler!

i think that part of the demotivation here is that jobs in the local paper are all inane/illiterate stuff for clearly shaky business ideas, or just matter of fact lists of electrician/ plumbing / school cafeteria food handling skills needed. Not the world's greatest starting material if one is unmotivated, unskilled and disinclined to work on a job with lots of pressure/ noise/ kids.

You might find that the other jobs all go through employment agencies - when dh and I relocated (I had a job, he didn't), there was nothing suitable in the paper, but loads of stuff he could do via agencies.

It's a good way of getting around and meeting people, seeing different companies etc.

I presume you are good at data entry, creating tables/graphs and writing reports ? Those are always skills much in demand.

Small uni towns often have lots of startup companies who need help with applications training (nice as you teach people who want to learn to use things), writing training materials (usually they supply the details but need someone who can have a go at using the equipment and put it into usable language), and testing

CMOTdibbler - that is interesting, the skills you mention re the insurance claims are exactly the sort of skills I have (having worked in quality assurance for the last few years), would never have thought about insurance as a field for potential work. Goes to show that you should always keep an open mind.

DH gave up a career in medical science to slum it as a lab technician. He's done a variety of really interesting fixed term research jobs, from gene therapy to prions. He's now happily ensconced as a lab technician in a university. The pay isn't fantastic but the hours and the holidays are good and the stress levels are pretty low.

Perhaps something like this?

Lots of peole don't think about claims as an interesting and varied field - dh started in motor, then did household, then commercial. These days he manages multi million pound claims where he might have to get forensics, appoint barristers, organise a school to move into complete portacabins in 3 weeks - anything !

hmm. thanks - that's really interesting. Will try to find some agencies.

Slug - good idea, but not sure I could cope with being the lab technician after having been one of the ones doing the interesting stuff in the lab. My lab skills are also something I'm trying to get away from - too much ionising radiation and icky headache-inducing chemicals.

moto - I left a lab job post phd and have ended up doing database support for a genome project. I'm basically reading papers and speaking to researchers then updating the database. It's fairly straightforward work, interesting at times (spectacularly tedious at others, but you can't have 100% exciting jobs can you?!), and there isn't nearly so much that can go wrong. I was sick of lab experiments - although when they worked, it was amazing, that was not the normal outcome. I now get to network and read about fascinating experiments, without the pressure on me to publish or just get some results.

What part of lab science are you sick of? is it the experimental stuff, the politics, the wasted weeks and months when your cells won't grow/get contaminated? If you can work out what bits you hate the most, that may help you work out what you don't mind doing :)

I think what I really like is synthesising information. I've quite enjoyed coming up with the info for cochrane-type (though not really - not medical) reviews of very obscure primary literature, working out what is and isn't supported by evidence, what the important common points are among studies, whether these correlate with authors, etc.

I also absolutely totally love learning languages, though have only really tried western european ones & greek... currently half-heartedly battling with a couple of non-european non-roman-alphabet ones and it's not going too well

What made me want to cry under the duvet rather than go to work was feeling deeply inadequate because I was working so much by myself in an environment of extremely alpha competitive people who were working together... and having shite collaborators who just don't care enough to get stuff done on the projects on which my career depends (but theirs doesn't).

Sounds like you've got some extremely useful skills there, maybe some sort of work in publishing would be up your street? Are your languages good enough that you could do translation? Those sort of jobs could probably be done remotely, so that it doesn't matter that you are in a small town somewhere.

Your former colleagues sound as though they would drive many people to despair! Do you still like practical science or has this experience put you off forever do you think?

I've always been attracted to the NHS evidence-based-care kind of synthesis exercise, or similarly the idea of writing briefings for minsters in a government department (can't do that where I'm going, it's about as far from central govt as you can get).

Translation work could be just ok, though in pretty specific areas and pretty specific languages (1980s swedish botany texts anyone? 1970s romanian monographs? C19th hoch-deutsch cell biology? C18th french anatomy? yeah, thought not.)

Practical science I could live without happily enough. Would enjoy it more if i had a good technician I think...

Thanks everyone for being so helpful. You've all helped so much taht I've even sent off an application for a science job this afternoon. :)

Well done, glad you are feeling a bit more positive.

Even if they don't get you a job, your language skills should certainly make your CV stand out from the crowd!

Good luck with the application, just had to post as your situation sounds familiar!

I left academia straight after my PhD as I could not take the soul destroying nature of experiments not working every day any longer (plus I was a crap scientist!)

Just to maybe give you some ideas, these are some of the fields my PhD friends have gone into after PhDs/a few years post doc-ing (all in life sciences):

I now work for a pharma company in clinical operations e.g. organising and running international patient clinical trials, several of my friends have gone into medical writing (language and scientific writing skills would be great here), 2 are involved in public engagement/science communication things (although this is quite London-centric), one is doing TeachFirst and 5 (yes 5!) are on a NHS training scheme to become clinical scientists.

A careers advisor helped me see that there are a lot of transferable skills from your research work - project management (planning experiments, managing your own time, working independently, managing a budget if you have your own grant), communication (written - papers, your thesis, posters etc. and oral - seminars, conferences etc), also people management if you've taught and supervised others. You just have to sell them in the right way :)

Spangers - many thanks for this. Things go up and down. Today's a down day.... so I don't think I could do any of the things you mention... feeling too inadequate, too crap at communicating, too disengaged and fed up .
On an up day I might feel more hubristic.
I thought of doing the NHS clnical scientist scheme until we decided to leave and go to the icy wastelands...

Your story sounds familiar. Are you in an academic or similar type of environment? That is filled with alpha-males and lots of isolated working. Some people thrive in that environment, others don't.

Has your dp contacted his new employer to see whether they can help you finding a new job. When we moved to the UK, I had a job (scientist in academia) but dp didn't. A couple of my colleagues gave me names of people who might be able to use dp's skills (also a scientist) and within 2 months he'd found a job with the same employer (different department) too.

Oh, I just read that last post back and realised it sounds as though I recognise you in RL. That's not what I meant! I just meant that I recognise the scenario.