Hello, and welcome to this video on Career Exploration Strategies. I’m Eamon Dubaissi, a research staff developer with Prosper. As I’m sure you know, it can be quite overwhelming to consider all the possible career options that exist, both within and beyond academia. Here, we will look at some practical steps that you could take to break down the process. We will look at ways in which you can begin to identify careers, organisations and roles that might suit you. With the career clusters and other resources on the portal, you might have been inspired by different careers. However, these are just a small range of possibilities.

It’s important to take ownership of your career exploration to drive it forwards and tailor it to your own needs. The strategies we present here are designed to get you started, to stimulate new ideas, and to support you as you weigh up your options. In terms of the outcomes of the video, I will first touch upon how you can use your research skills to your advantage in career exploration. I will then spend the bulk of the time introducing you to three complementary and interlinked strategies to assist your career exploration. At the end, I will touch upon the importance of using your research into different careers, organisations and roles to reach out to people to find out more. You can make use of the very same research skills that you’ve honed as a postdoc to explore careers. In fact, you could treat your career exploration as a research project in itself. Are there some transferable skills that you possess, but have given little attention to?

Perhaps you’ve never spent the time to look carefully at what you’re doing when conducting research. It helps to look at a definition of research skills to bring awareness to the process and the skills needed to conduct research. Indeed.com describes research skills as a collection of several separate skills that help you to find and review information and arrive at a decision. We make the argument here that you can also apply this to career exploration. So let’s break these research skills down and apply them to exploration.

Firstly, you need to be able to search for information. For career exploration, this could include reviewing the career clusters, conversations with others, and browsing the web. You need to pay attention to detail. So where is the organisation based? What would you be doing? What is the scope for career progression and development? These are some examples. Good research involves recordkeeping or taking notes. You can make lists, journal or create a database of careers that might suit you and why. Time management is also important in research. For career exploration, you need to know how long you’ve got and when to do things by. You need to be organised with your time, especially if you are balancing with a current job.

Problem-solving is at the heart of research. You have a problem when searching for suitable careers. You need to know what’s out there and what would be a good fit for you. Based on what you know about yourself, would a particular career be appropriate for you, and what do you need to do to get there? In terms of communicating your results and career exploration, this includes networking to let people know your thoughts, and leveraging the support from others. Hopefully, you can recognise these research skills in yourself, and you’ll see how they apply to the different strategies. One of the main difficulties you might have with career exploration is knowing where to start in the first place. This is the hardest part and where we are going to try to help you. We’re going to focus in on three strategies that you could use to stimulate new ideas and give you a starting point to move forwards from. A good place to begin is to zoom out and take a considered look at your current network and what those people in your network do for a job.

You can map your warm network, the people that you know, in order to assess whether their careers are of interest to you. What is your warm network? Essentially, it describes the people that you know personally and, importantly, that they know you in some kind of personal or professional capacity. So this includes people that are closest to you, such as family and friends, also colleagues and ex-colleagues. It also includes acquaintances, those you have had a few conversations and shared experience with, but perhaps don’t know so well.

Why is it a good place to start when first embarking on career exploration? Well, first, it is a quick and simple way to get started, to do something rather than to freeze. It allows you to start getting some new ideas. Also, it is easy to have informal chats with those in your warm network, and they can provide support so you don’t feel isolated. Your warm network can provide you with motivation. You can share your career aspirations with them, and they might be able to help you find others to connect with. Many of your ex-colleagues and acquaintances likely have a similar background to your own in terms of their work history; this can give you confidence that you too can move forwards and onto new careers. At first, the aim of plotting your network is to get an overview of what everyone does in order to direct further research. There is no requirement for you to reach out to people for informal chats at this stage, it’s just to stimulate ideas.

However, as you know them personally, if something does strike you as being of interest, the best way to find out more is to ask them. So start by putting yourself at the centre of the map and ask yourself who you know. Think of all the people around you and put a branch to their name. What do they do? Note down the organisation and role. You could highlight those people that you are initially most drawn to in terms of their careers. Don’t make too many assumptions at this stage, and don’t dismiss anyone whose career you have a feeling wouldn’t suit you when you might not actually know much about that career. You can also highlight those people that might be able to give you support and advice, or those people that are well-connected and might know others in a field of interest to you.

Once you’ve made your map, take a step back and critically assess which areas you might look into in more detail, or who you might meet for a quick chat with. You might choose a few different careers as a starting point for further research. As you will see with the other strategies, LinkedIn is an extremely powerful tool to strategically expand your network in areas of interest to you; it can also be of use in these early stages for analysing your current network. As you are creating your map, you can make use of LinkedIn to remind yourself of connections that you might have overlooked.

You can simply browse your connections on the LinkedIn webpage to add people to the map; you can also download your connections to quickly scan them. At the time of recording, you can do this by going to settings and privacy, data privacy, and get a copy of your data. Decide whether they are worth adding to your warm network map, based on your personal connection to them, and what they offer. Over time, as you make new connections, perhaps using the next two strategies that we will discuss, you can add to this map, so it becomes not just your warm network, but it starts to change to include people that you know less well or not at all; these new connections will have the types of careers that you’re most interested in.

The next strategy takes an organisation that you have an interest in as a starting point, and helps you to expand your understanding of that organisation and other similar organisations. This could be an organisation you have found in the career clusters, or one you have become aware of from a different source. It doesn’t matter where the initial interest comes from, it’s what you can then do to become more informed. This strategy helps you to start building a picture of what a sector or industry looks like. To summarise the approach, you take an organisation of interest and gather more information on this organisation and similar ones, plus types of roles available in that organisation. If you’re unsure which field you’d like to go into, you can replicate this approach with different starting organisations; we suggest keeping the information you gather separately rather than mixing things up.

Then it is important to record the information you gather. This could be in a list or spreadsheet or journal, something that you can easily come back to to refresh your memory. Record your thoughts as well as facts. Ask yourself if the types of organisations and roles you are looking at would suit you in terms of your skills, strengths, and values. The final step of the strategy encourages you to use knowledge that you have gained to reach out to others for further insight, making new connections and potentially opening up new opportunities. Even just sharing a list with people that you know might help you to identify people for further conversations and networking opportunities. Let’s now take a closer look at the tools you could use to gather more information about an organisation and identify similar ones. When you Google the organisation of interest, not only do you get a link to their website, but often also returns what people also search for. This might allow you to identify competitor organisations. Make a note of these and then you can use the same tools presented here to find out more about them too.

On an organisation’s website, in the About Us section, you can learn more about who they are, what they do, and why they do it, their values. Does this align with what you would like to do and where you would like to be? Sometimes larger companies also post their annual report on the website. This is useful for general research. If you do apply for a job there, it is a good resource to look at ahead of applications and interviews. Sometimes an organisation’s website might also have blogs and news items that you can read for more information. When you work at a university, you often have access to business databases through your library. Examples include Marketline, Nexis and D&B Hoovers. You can use these resources to your advantage to understand more about the organisation you are interested in, similar organisations, and the sector as a whole.

Finally, LinkedIn is an amazing tool to be able to find out more about organisations and roles within those organisations. It also allows you to connect with people that work there. Just input your search term in the search bar and use the filters to find what you’re looking for. To demonstrate how this strategy works, it can be helpful to run through a worked example. I’ll take an organisation from the career clusters and show you the tools you can use to expand your knowledge. The company that I’ve chosen is LettUs Grow, who can be found in the food and agriculture career cluster. They design technology for indoor and vertical farms. When you Google LettUs Grow, you not only find the link to their website, but you can also find what other people search for. In this example, you can see other similar equipment suppliers and related farming organisations.

When you visit the LettUs Grow website and enter the About Us section, you can find out more about their background story, their culture and ethics, as you can see. When it comes to business databases, in this example, I searched for LettUs Grow on the business database D&B Hoovers, and I’ve highlighted some things you can find here. They often list competitor organisations, which you can research; you can also click on the industry to find out more about which other organisations are present in this space. I’ve also highlighted the news section, which may give you more insight into the organisation. This is also something you can come back to when applying for a job, or before going for an interview. It helps to build your commercial awareness. In this slide, I shall search for LettUs Grow using the website Glassdoor. This website allows you to look at reviews from employees and get some insight into salaries. This could form part of your research; approach it with caution, as sometimes people have an axe to grind, or if there are only a few reviews, it might be hard to properly judge.

Finally, when you search for LettUs Grow on LinkedIn, you can view their LinkedIn company page to gain more insight; you can also see similar pages people also viewed, allowing you to identify related organisations. So once you’ve used these various tools for your research and recorded your findings, if you’re still interested, the next step is to use your connections to get more insight and expand your network. You can start off small, share your list of organisations with friends and colleagues, they might know of additional organisations and people that work there. This is also where LinkedIn comes into its own. Using the People tab on the organisation’s LinkedIn page, you can see who works there and what their job title is. Make a note of these to come back to. You can also see whether you know anyone there, or if one of your connections does. You can request to connect with them, as demonstrated on the next slide. On LinkedIn, you can also search for professional groups in your area of interest. By joining these groups, you can connect to more people and start to learn the language of professionals in this area.

Once you’ve made some connections, it’s a good time to ask for a chat and conduct an informational interview. So let’s look again at the LettUs Grow LinkedIn page to demonstrate how you could send connection requests to people who work there. When on their page, under the People tab, you can see who works there. If you don’t have any link to them, you could write a short message with your connection request. For example, ‘Hi, I’m really interested in your organisation and I was hoping to connect with you. If you can spare some time, I would love to ask you a few questions.’

Alternatively, you could just try to connect and see if they accept. You can then ask for a chat. If you have LinkedIn Premium, you can send in-mails to people you don’t know without connecting first. Consider adding any new connections to your network map. Be aware that people might not reply to your connection request and messages. Don’t take this personally, it’s just part of the process. Before we move on to the final strategy, this slide just gives an example of how you might track what you find. This is useful for all of the approaches discussed in the video. In this example, we’ve created a spreadsheet showing the organisation name, location, job roles, notes from your research, for example similar organisations that you find, people that you’ve contacted, outcomes of conversations, and other information, such as skills requirements, and then any next steps you might consider taking. Once it has been populated, you can zoom out and ask yourself some questions. Do any organisations or roles particularly stand out for you? Can you rule any others out? Is it still an area that interests you, or do you need to look elsewhere?

This is also the time to look back critically at what you know about yourself from reflection exercises to ask if your own skills, strengths, motivations and values match with the organisations you have found. I am now going to take you through the final strategy, which highlights how you can use job boards for career exploration, and how searching these job boards by skills can be a powerful approach to identify careers, organisations and roles that might suit you.

Let me introduce you to Tina Persson, a former academic, who later worked in the recruitment industry, and is now a career coach, author and entrepreneur. Given her background, Tina is perfectly placed to advise on career exploration for researchers. She’s an advocate for an agile job-searching strategy that can be used for research into different the career options. Tina emphasises the importance of searching by skills rather than job titles, as it allows you to be open to new areas and ideas that you might not have considered before. This approach is ideal if you’re not sure what you want to do, or you’re looking for some initial inspiration. It also allows you to familiarise yourself with using job boards, which you may use again when it comes to actually applying for jobs. It also gives you an understanding of the current labour market and trends, but keep in mind that this is always changing, so don’t be put off if you don’t find anything of interest immediately.

Revisit job boards regularly to see what comes up. Accompanying videos produced by Tina are available on the Prosper portal in the Explore section. These demonstrate how to use the agile job-searching strategy with specific examples. Here, I will summarise the approach. Three of the major job boards used in the UK are Indeed, Glassdoor and LinkedIn. For this strategy, you can use them in combination. Before I move on to describe the strategy in more detail, I just wanted to go back to job titles. With Prosper, we’re often asked by postdocs for lists of job titles as a means to start exploring. Tina’s advice is to keep them in mind; not to obsess about them. Job titles are constantly changing. They mean different things in different organisations and they may even limit you when it comes to career exploration because they narrow your search. Remember that employers hire you and the skills that you can bring. They might not always know exactly what they want, and your job title could change or be negotiated when you arrive.

It is a good idea to write down titles when you come across something you’re particularly interested in, especially if the same job titles come up again and again, but be openminded to what you find. When using this strategy, Tina advises to think like a head-hunter. By this, she means that head-hunters focus on the skills that a person possesses in order to find the match to what the employer is looking for. So why not adopt the same approach when looking for careers and organisations that might suit you? As the starting point for this approach, you first need to identify some of your transferable and technical skills, focusing on those that you particularly enjoy using, or are a particular strength of yours. Revisit the Reflect section of the portal to understand more about what your strengths are, and which skills you’re most likely to use day-to-day. Look back at your skills inventory, if you’ve made one, and also the frameworks that give names to the range of transferable skills.

For example, the Research and Development Framework or Eurodocs transferable skills. You can use these to help you decide on the skills that you’d like to input as search terms. This slide provides an overview of the strategy. Start by taking some of your preferred transferable or technical skills, two or three perhaps, and input them into one of the job boards. Indeed is a good place to start because it has the largest database of jobs. If you get too many hits with the skills that you input, one way to narrow it down is to also add in the term PhD and/or the broad discipline area. Although you won’t only be looking for jobs and organisations that recruit people with PhDs, it can help to reduce the number of hits returned. In the example here, I used Indeed to input supporting, communication and influencing, together with life sciences and PhD.

Once you’re happy with your search, scan the job ads to see which ones stand out for you, which roles and organisations are of interest. Then go to the job description within these ads. Can you find any additional skills or new terminology that you can use to repeat the search and find more jobs? The final step, much like the previous strategy to expand your knowledge of organisations, is to switch platforms to LinkedIn in order to identify people to connect with and arrange informational interviews. I can’t emphasise enough the importance of recording your findings. You might want to come back to it later on, or find something very specific to build upon. Remember to copy job ads of interest to you into your own personal documents because you will lose the ads once the deadline passes. If something does interest you, note down the reasons why, the name of the organisation and role. The job ad may even give a name and contact details for someone to find out more. You could note this down too. If you record job titles at this point, you can use them to identify people with these titles on LinkedIn. At this stage, don’t be put off by the job descriptions and requirements.

One, you’re not actually applying at this stage; two, remember that job descriptions are a wish list from the employer. It is very rare for anyone to tick all the boxes. When you switch platforms to LinkedIn, you can search for the organisation that interests you and identify people within that organisation, perhaps those with a similar role to the one you found in your initial search. You could look for people with PhDs. This not only shows that the organisation has employed people with PhDs before, but, as you have something in common with the person, this could trigger them to reply to a message or connect your request.

For larger organisations, look out for talent acquisition managers whose job it is to interact with potential recruits. They can give you more insight and tips. Send connection requests to people you’re interested in, as we discussed earlier. Consider adding them to your network map, if they do accept your request. I want to end the video by summarising the three approaches to career exploration that we have discussed. They have several things in common and can be used alongside each other. In all of the strategies, you can leverage your research skills to gather information, record it and reflect on what it means to you. Use this to your advantage. Not everyone possesses these research skills.

The first strategy relies on you understanding and mapping your own warm network to identify potential career areas of interest to you. If you find an organisation of interest using this approach, this can then feed into the next strategy. Or maybe you have seen an organisation in the Prosper career clusters that sparked an interest. Wherever you get the initial interest from, the second strategy gives tips on how to find out more about that organisation and related ones. In the final strategy, you use the skills approach to search job boards to identify careers, organisations and roles that might suit you. All of the strategies described converge on reaching out to people in order to gain greater insight and realise new opportunities. The Prosper portal has lots of resources on reaching out to others. This includes more details on using LinkedIn, tips on networking and overcoming barriers to speaking with others, plus how to conduct effective informational interviews. Thanks for listening. I hope you have found the video useful and you can give the strategies a try.

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So, hi, everybody, welcome to this session on commercial awareness skills. This session is brought to you by Prosper, which is a development programme for postdocs looking at careers beyond academia. My name is Sabina Strachan, I’m a collaboration expert, I’m a consultant – management research consultant – I’m a business adviser, I deliver a lot of training like this and I’m developing my own digital product with a partner, as well. So I’ve lots of experience around the area of commercial awareness and helping people generate more income and make more savings and grow more successful at businesses. Equally, commercial awareness is a thing that is very relevant running any kind of organisation or contributing to the success of any kind of organisation, and also if you want to go into freelance and self-employed careers, as well. So what we’re going to cover today, we’re going to look at the definition of what commercial awareness is. We’re going to look at key areas and follow through with activities that link to that around profitability, opportunity mapping and taking considered risks. Throughout, I’ll be explaining how you can gain these skills, and you may actually already have these skills, so it’s about how you go about demonstrating them, as well. So that’s what we’ll be focusing on throughout this session. We’ll have two points where you can ask me anything; I’ll be inviting questions and I’ll share my answers from my own experiences in the public, private and third sectors. There will be a key sheet, which I’ll be sharing with you shortly, and post-session there’ll be a workbook available too. Right, now I’m just going to share my social media handles in the chat area for you to see and I’ll also copy these into the workbooks that you’ll receive so that you can find out more about me if you’d like to. Fantastic. So to kick off with, what I would like us to do is go to a Menti link and to get you to answer a question there. So the good thing about Menti is that it captures your thoughts anonymously, and I’ll then share my screen and see what you think. So I’m going to put a link into the chat area for you to be able to do that first. There it is. The question’s going to pop up, which is: I want to identify and develop my commercial awareness skills so that… So that’s the kind of question that we have today. Before you do that, I’ll just read out a little bit of a definition about commercial awareness skills so that we’re on the same page when it comes to that. So commercial awareness means having the ability to spot opportunities, understand constraints and uncertainty and manage risks. Someone who is commercially-aware stays up-to-date with things that could affect their own profitability and the profitability of other people and understands the importance of financial sustainability and applies that knowledge. So that’s the kind of broad, general definition, which I’ll share with you shortly, but that’s what we’re talking about today. So if you could go to the Menti link and type in ‘you want to identify and develop my commercial awareness skills so that…’ and finish that sentence. A couple of thing that you guys are responding to that question on: it’s so that you’ll have a better understanding of work in a non-academic environment; so that you can tailor your CV, career applications and non-academic jobs; so that you can make better decisions about your future career; so that you can be prepared a new job role that is more commercially-focused; so that I can look for collaboration with an industrial partner; so that I know what other people are talking about in this area; and I can seek new opportunities and help others develop theirs – that’s good; so that I can attract funding to further grow a business I have started up – oh, that’s interesting; so that I can figure out what I could offer as a freelancer and at what cost. That’s all excellent. Thank you very much for sharing that. I would just say, as well, that I worked in the public sector for a total of about 14 years and, actually, commercial awareness is helpful in those settings, as well, including working at a university in professional services. So in terms of understanding what it is and how to identify it and finding out where your strengths in this and where you want to develop, it’s useful in academia too. So I just wanted a little caveat there, that if you stay there or in the public sector or in the charitable sector, this is a very relevant area as it’s about cost-saving, it’s about efficiencies, using resources and things like that, as well. Fantastic. So thank you for sharing that. So we’re going to go on to next to start looking at one key aspect of this, which is around profitability. It looks like that. In Google Drive, you can toggle between list view and grid view. So that’s list view and that’s grid view. I prefer grid view because I use a lot of illustrative things and it’s easy for me to find things that way. The PDF that I was referring to is called ‘Key Sheet – Commercial Awareness Skills’. So you can click on that and you’ll get a one-pager, and at the top of that, it’s the definition of commercial awareness that I read out just a minute ago. Then we’re going to be referring to different aspects of this as we go along, so I’ll be referring back to this document as we go along today. The profitability, we’ve got three different one-page worksheets, and we’re also going to be using a Jamboard later on. So the worksheet that I’m going to be referring to is this one called ‘Effort Versus Reward’, so it looks like a balancing scale. I’ll stop sharing that just now. I’m going to create a few breakout rooms for you to think about this a little bit more. I’m going to explain what to do there in a moment using the Jamboard. So that’s what we’re going to do next; we’re going to do a little bit of thought about what profitability actually means, and then we should have a good understanding of it, and it’s absolutely fundamental in relation to commercial awareness to have a good, rounded understanding of profitability. So that’s where we’re going to start. So when you go into the Jamboard, you’re going to see slides, I suppose is the best way to describe it, or frames is the technical term. So are people being able to join this? I’m looking at my gallery view just to check, with a few nods – excellent, thank you. I can see a few thumbs. Yes, great, I can see you, fantastic, thank you. So we’ve got a pair of weighing scales and I’ve actually written the instructions of what to do in the breakout room in the green box on the left-hand side. So it’s all there. So I’m going to explain it, but also it’s all going to be there for you to refer to when you’re in the breakout room, and it’s going to be breakout rooms of twos or threes. So, fundamentally, what you’re trying to do is you’re going to try and get more reward for less effort, and the difference between those two things is your profit. So I know that sounds really fundamental, but sometimes we can over-deliver and we can over-prepare, and, actually, we need to make sure we always maintain that gap between what we put into it, what resources that we use versus what we get back from it, which is monetary and other things, as well. So, actually, in this example all we’re going to try and do is have the opportunity to chat with someone else about what kinds of things constitute effort in a business context. So what do we mean by cost, what kinds of resources, what kinds of time do we need to expend, typically, to generate business benefits? What do we think? It’s not about being right or wrong; it’s about having the opportunity to think about this and to talk to someone else and to note it into this frame. Similarly, you’re going to do the same thing about what kinds of thing constitute reward. So that is the fundamental purpose of just starting to talk to each other about this. The thing that, when you’re having those chats, or as you’re coming back out from that, is to think about how you have already gained some of that understanding about effort versus reward, how you might be able to apply these concepts in your postdoc experience right now so that you can demonstrate that going forward. That’s where I want us to get to, to think about those types of things, as well. In the session, it’s really let’s try and put something on one half of the weighing scales and something on the other side of the weighing scales and let’s understand what needs to be expended in order to get the kind of gains that make sense in the business setting. So it’d be quite useful, because you’re all on Jamboards, so you can look at what the other rooms have said about this particular question by just moving along the menu bar at the top to see what room two, what room three, what room one said. So I’m quite interested to… Can I ask someone from room one if they’d be happy to share what they were thinking about in terms of how they might be able to gain some of that experience of how you focus on the profitability aspect of it once you start understanding what the difference has to be between the weighing scales. Would someone like to jump in from room one?

I don’t think we particularly understood the question, but in terms of the balance, obviously, it has to be more reward than effort, right?

Absolutely. It’s fundamentally that. So the reason I asked you to do that is that usually there’s a lot of things on the effort half. People think, ‘Oh, there’s lots to do, there’s a lot to be done,’ and sometimes we can think about the reward as mostly covering certain kinds of costs. Sometimes, in an academic setting in particular, we’re talking about, ‘Okay, I need to cover venue costs for a conference aspect. I need to cover equipment costs. I need to cover material costs,’ but we focus less on the amount of time we, as individuals, or our team might spend on something. That’s an absolutely fundamental, key bit that’s important to think about in times of how much time and energy are we expending to get back something. So that’s quite an interesting way of thinking about it, and that’s really important in terms of profitability. So to give you an example in a consultancy setting, which I have quite a lot of experience of, the way we would approach a research consultancy project versus an academic research project could be very different. So the amount of time available to understand a particular issue or to gather some data on how we might go about it needs to be very time-efficient to make sure that the reward, the financial reward that can come back from that can cover a cost that’s affordable to the client. So we do things in quite a different way and we’re very hyper-focused on profitability in that context. So there’s actually quite a lot we can do in our either current settings or we can bring from other areas to demonstrate that we can have that understanding. So examples are that you might have some budget management opportunity. So even if you might not be the budget owner, you might have quite a lot of locus in a particular project or you could gain some locus on a specific mini-project within that project and have a handle on the budget associated with that and how you manage that budget, and explain how you’ve considered that and how you’ve sought to reduce certain costs or how you’ve been time-efficient with certain aspects of that. So that would be an example of an area that we can gain practical experience of as budget management. Also, in terms of things like funding success, so in commercial awareness, it would be… Let’s imagine that you could go for four or five different opportunities that are available to apply for some funding for whatever you’re doing at the moment. Being commercially-aware means that you’ve looked at the success rate of certain types of funding already, either from your institution or for a certain topic, and you’ve made choices about, ‘Actually, I’ll prioritise this one over that one because the chances of success of that is greater,’ for example. So that’s less effort versus the reward that you might get; you increase your chances of it. So that’s the kind of thing that we can actually do and the kind of things that we can actually talk about when we’re thinking about how do we demonstrate and talk about transferability from the experiences that you’ve gained so far in an academic setting. Several of you might well have experiences from other places, as well, I’m sure, and it ties up together. That’s a way of thinking about it. So as opposed to going, ‘I have time to apply for funding in that window, and that’s when that one’s deadline is, so I’ll go for that,’ so that’s a slightly more ad hoc decision-making process as opposed to a strategic, effort versus reward, success rate type of decision-making process, which is definitely something that we would look at from a business perspective. Does that make sense, some of the examples that I’m giving here? I just want to check with people. Are either of those or those kinds of things making you think about the kinds of experiences you’ve had to now and how they could be transferable or things that you could do slightly differently going forward that would mean that you could demonstrate some commercial awareness skills? You can either unmute yourself or type a few thoughts into the chat, just to make sure that I’m being helpful in this. Yet, go ahead.

Hi, Sabina. Yes, I think it does make sense, what you’re saying around looking at different funding calls and, yes, we tend to be a little bit, I think, in academia like, ‘Oh, there’s a call that’s come out. Can we think of an idea and just apply for it?’ but there’s not really much thought about, ‘Yes, what is the success rate of that? Is it actually worth the time, given the other activities that might have to go on the backburner to put that proposal together?’ Yes, I think what you just said there, certainly I could see how perhaps that could be put into practice to prioritise better, or just to take a step back and think about it and think, actually, is this what we really want to do and is that going to maximise the benefits, considering all the other activities that are going on at that point in time. So, yes, that makes sense to me.

Good, excellent. I used to work in research and development and it’s something I used to do. I used to go, actually, ‘Look, what do we look at? What’s my whole college looked at for a year and what’s the success rate been?’ There’s lots of things like sometimes some applications look more straightforward that are maybe more general and you know you can fit in your specialism to. You know you can work it on your own; you’re not dependent on someone else’s time and whether they’re available. They’re oversubscribed, significantly oversubscribed, but, actually, people are not necessarily appreciating or understanding that, or that’s not being shared with them, and they’re still putting their time and effort into that, but the success rate will be very small. Actually, the other things with a bit of support and forethought will lead to greater success, and that’s actually a better use of an individual’s time. So there are definitely things that I think you all can maybe tweak that, actually, it would mean that you have real examples, because you don’t even need to be successful in it; it’s the point you’ve thought about it. So you don’t have to have won that grant. When I went from the public sector the private sector, the fact that I’d applied for a two-million-pound grant, even though we didn’t get it, still showed I have commercial awareness skills because I’d worked out that we were eligible and I managed to persuade the boss that we should go for it in this way and I got priming money for things, and various things. It’s in the hands of the gods once it goes to the selection committee, and you’re not going to win them all. So that’s something to be mindful of. So it’s not necessarily about will that actually be successful; it’s have you thought about these things and have you applied them in a certain way. You can demonstrate that and people will go, ‘That’s fantastic. Thank you very much. Come and work with us.’ Okay? Fantastic. So the reason I asked you to do the effort versus reward is just to get a sense of where you’re thinking about with these kinds of things. So I’m just looking through it myself. Yes, so the reward… So someone changed it to cost versus benefit; that’s a slightly different thing because the benefits are for all beneficiaries, which includes, potentially, your clients, your customers, your partners, but I’m talking specifically about in a profitability sense to you as an individual or your company. So it’s slightly more narrowly-defined. It’s the same weighing-up scales. I would use the same scale analogy when I was thinking about cost versus benefit. It is about recognition and reputation; that’s an incredibly important part of commercial awareness. So sometimes you might go for something that you might have a slimmer chance of getting or it’s more complicated to go through a process to potentially win, but you know if you can achieve that, then actually it’ll be great for you to be able to get into a new market, it’ll be great for maybe moving on to the next thing that’s similar to it. So, actually, sometimes you expend more effort because the rewards are broader than monetary, so there’s got to be at least a breakeven, monetarily speaking, in a commercial sense for those kinds of things, but actually the benefits are even greater. So those are the kinds of things that are important to be mindful of. Again, just having thought about it and gone through a thinking process on this and being able to articulate that is really you demonstrating commercial awareness skills, if you’re willing to that, or you’ll be able to explain and give an example of going forward. Let’s see what else is in the third box. Yes, lots of things here about being able to start a new stream or being able to grow, gaining some different publicity. So it’s broader than the, ‘Yes, we’ve covered our costs and we’ve been able to pay our bills,’ type thing. So that’s brilliant. Thank you very much for doing that exercise. Good. I want to show you a little thing on… Now, I’m going to share my iPad screen with you, so it’ll pop up on the main screen and be recorded, as well. I just want to show a little bit more about this; it’s something else that you can do proactively. So imagine this scale… It’s the same – it’s effort versus reward – but actually, this time what I’ve done is I’ve put a pie chart on the left-hand side for effort and I just want to through a bit of an example with you to explain time. Time is a key one. It’s really important to think about you as a resource, as a cost when it comes to commercial awareness and then follow that on through your team or to your colleagues, and that helps you keep a good eye on profitability. So I’m just going to use a quick chart to explain that. So in return for mainly financial reward, you need to cover time costs. This biggest piece of the pie chart is delivery, so you’re delivering the project or product, or whatever it might be, or you can buy. Actually, there’s a whole nearly half of that pie chart in other areas that needs to be covered, but it’s not about the project you’re delivering, it’s just about running the business or contributing to the business; you don’t have to be a business owner. So examples are things like… I’m just going to write over the top of this and you will get copies of this drawing afterwards, as well. So it’s things like marketing, business development, research and development, training and development, so personal training and development, and there’s always admin. Actually, the money that you’ve gained from other places has to cover the time expended on this half of the pie chart, as well. Sometimes we under-appreciate that and we might be focusing on, ‘Okay, what can I give to my client,’ in a public/private, whatever setting, ‘That directly translates into what I’m giving them?’ Actually, from a commercial perspective, you have to cover other places. This is where you’re predominantly getting your revenue from to be able to do that. So that has a link back to pricing. So just an awareness, and what you can do is think about yourself and your time. So you can think about yourself as a postdoc and the delivery of the research and doing the experiments, and things, but, actually, having a pie chart that works out other aspects like this… You come into this session as training and development, and so that would need to be covered somehow because that increases your skills and efficiencies going forward, so those have benefit. You would have to market or contribute to marketing in a commercial context. You’d have to try and find new work, so that’s what the business development quadrant is about. It’s just quite useful to think about that in that broader way. Okay? I’m going to stop sharing that screen just now. Is that okay; does everybody understand that, as well? So that’s something you can do, you can literally do that now, you can draw a rough circle on your notebook and you could try and divide it up and think about what categories you would be thinking about. Again, to be able to explain that you understand that and where the efficiencies can come and that that is part and parcel of it is really great for transferable skills, as well, and being able to demonstrate it. Good. So just have a look at what we’re going to do next. Yes, so I want to continue on with the skills theme. So we’re going to start looking and breaking down commercial awareness skills a little bit and you’re going to see how many of these skills you already have, in fact, and it’s about demonstrating them and explaining them in a certain way. So if you go to back to the key sheet. So you’ve got that in the Google Drive folder, so that’s the reference point now. So if you go to the key sheet – I’ll just share that again briefly – you’re going to see there’s a heading ‘Which core or soft skills underpin commercial awareness?’ and I’ve broken them down into eight headings. And for the purposes of in the workshop, we’re going to look at the first four – problem-solving, flexibility, managing risk and decision-making, okay, and there’s little definitions about what each one is in there. Then in the Jamboard we’re going to capture where we think we’re at just now with those four skills. So if you don’t have the Menti link handy, I’ll just repost it – it’s the same one as you worked on before – and it’s asking you how well-developed do you think your current skill under those four headings are. It’ll generate a little bit of a chart and then I’ll share the screen once you guys have all had a chance to do that. It generates a little bit of a graph here. So what you’re seeing is, in the solid bar, is the average out of five, and then in the shaded area it’s the range. So that means that five people picked four and two people picked five, and that’s the example there. So we’ve got problem-solving, we’ve got flexibility, we’ve got managing risk, and this is one we’re going to do an exercise on in the second half today, so that’s good because none of these are static. We can choose to develop any of these ones that we want to, and outwith the workshop you have the opportunity to think about where you’d score yourself on the other four commercial awareness skills that I’ve listed, as well, and then decision-making. Decision-making links a little bit to what we’ve just been talking about, which is about how do we decide what funding pot we go to, did we work out as to what the success rate looks like, is that something that I thought about in my decision-making, so have I applied certain criteria? We can decide to do that, then do that and then we develop our decision-making capability. So there’s lots we can do in these areas. Nobody ever, including myself, is a five, five, five, five across everything; that would imply they were just not a very diverse bunch, and we are. So the aim isn’t to do that. The aim is to identify already where you’re really strong and be able to articulate that, but if there’s one or two areas where you want to spend some time increasing and developing, to know that you can. Your core skills or soft skills are not static; you can choose to develop them through taking action. Basically, that’s how they get developed. Fantastic. So what I want to do now is invite you to… Is there anything that you’ve thought of – any questions you want to make sure that I do tackle in the second half, things that you have been thinking about, things that you thought about before you signed up for the session? I want you to put some questions in the chat area now, and I’ll give you a few minutes to do that, then I’ll think about them during the break, and then I’ll answer your questions when we come back. So before the break, I invited some questions. Lots of interesting questions, and I’m going to respond to them one by one, or I’ve grouped some that I think are quite similar to one another. So one of the questions was in terms of CV – I think there were two or three questions about this – how do I demonstrate my commercial awareness skills? As postdocs, we do have opportunity to already be using our commercial awareness skills, so how do we show that they are transferable, how we gain them? So we started to talk about that; we’re going to be talking a lot more about that in the second half. In terms of a CV – and I’ve actually hired lots of people in commercial roles, so I’m talking from a perspective as an employer, as well – it’s thinks like that you’re actually describing your decision-making process, you’re describing your thinking process, how you’ve gone about something. You can do that in a CV. Your CV isn’t just about having bullet points of publications or things, something like that. There’s a covering letter opportunity, and things like that. It’s about what you pick out and what you emphasise, which would be particularly relevant to specific roles. So being able to describe your decision-making process to get a certain outcome, you can all do that. To show that you’re able to persuade or influence other people. It can be in any context, but it’s really important from a business development aspect of working in a more commercial environment. So business development and persuasion and influencing isn’t specifically commercial awareness, and the word ‘awareness’ doesn’t relate to that, but it is something that people look for. So you would have examples of how you persuade someone of a different route to go down and how did you do that, how did you go about that – how did you gather your evidence, how did you approach that situation, etc? Another big one – and this is one that lots of people from a research background will be able to demonstrate fairly straightforwardly – is show that they keep up-to-date with current developments in their area and that they can use your research skills to understand where the trends area. In a commercial setting, it’s about understanding, oh, actually, the government is looking at this specific area that’s likely to increase the spending in this particular area that I’m involved in or could become involved in, and actually just show that you’ve understood that and that you’re looking to the future in that way. It’s kind of the ‘so what’ question. So you’ve understood something, so what have you done with that information? So commercial awareness is that second half. So it’s not enough to have understood something. It’s okay that I’ve actually changed my approach to something because I’ve understood something better or I have networked more in this new area because I’ve new understood that. These are the kinds of things that we can be doing and gaining at any point, but if we’re able to describe them or discuss them in a CV or an interview, then it shows our commercial awareness. The last one I’ve thought of in response to that question is that you’ve been able to find creative ways to find new resources or ways to do things, ways forward, ways to overcome difficulties despite the constraints that you’ve faced. That’s definitely something that I was able to show when I moved into a more commercial environment, to go, ‘Well, actually, no, this job didn’t come with a budget, but I got funding for this and I was able to persuade my boss that we should match-fund that and I went ahead and did that, and that one was successful.’ It’s moving forward in that way, so not just how you respond to a, ‘Well, this is just the way it is.’ It’s actually, from a commercial awareness perspective, it’s not accepting this is just the way it is and let’s see if we can do something differently, and how you’ve gone about that. So those are the standout things that I would point to, that if people are trying to get into a more commercial setting were distrusting things and describing things in those ways, I think you would definitely stand out, come up the top of the pile, as it were. Does that answer the questions about where you could go with your CVs, because that was quite a common question? Was that helpful bits of advice there? I just want to check. Yes, I can see some nodding. As I say, we’re going to be looking a little bit more at this as we go along. I was asked about a specific industry and what you could use to demonstrate in that. I would say it depends on the job you’re going for in that industry as to how I would answer that question, but more generally… This is relevant across sectors, because commercial awareness is a skillset that is relevant across sectors; it’s not specific to a sector. It’s things like good management of time and resources, can you demonstrate that, because that is about time efficiency and, therefore, resource efficiency and, therefore, being able to be more profitable, and that’s something that we can all look at how we’re managing that now and do something differently if we need to to be able to show that we’re being more efficient in this area. We’ve thought of ways to make savings and we’ve implemented those ways that we’ve thought about. You’re able to show that you found some new opportunities, and how did you go about doing that, and how did you gain them, how did you go about that. That would be relevant across industries. To show that you’re particularly well-networked or have made connections in that sector that you’re interested in moving into, but, actually, that it has led to some results. So it’s not enough to say, ‘I’ve got all these connections.’ It’s like what did you do with that, what did that mean, what happened as a consequence, how did you approach that in a strategic way. So I would say that’s more generic but, actually, the amount of commercial awareness skills you need to show will depend on the role that you’re going for. So the answer’s more specific with that little bit more information. Okay? I was asked about a couple more questions about project management approaches. So, yes, I’ve done PRINCE2 for ten years, which is a type of project management. I’ve used lean, I’m aware of Scrum and agile, and things. These are just all ways of doing something and they’re all linked more to project management and how you make savings, and things like that. It’s an approach. The important aspect of it is how you’ve applied it. So are you able to show that you’ve applied it as opposed to that I’ve got it already? It only matters if you’ve got that qualification, or something, already is if the job is looking for it, if it’s an essential or a desirable thing that you have some accreditation in these areas. I would say in my own experience, and I’ve managed projects for over 20 years, it’s pretty mixed about the processes. You could use one process or another process; it’s about how well you apply it to the given situation and that those changes are sustainable, and it’s how you approach that and how you find ways to go forward and how you influence people to make the changes that you might recommend through any of those processes. So I would say it depends on whether or not in your own sector, in the kind of job roles that you’re interested in, that you start looking at job descriptions and looking to whether or not they’re asking for specific professional qualifications as either essential or desirable. Otherwise, I would say that they, in and of themselves, don’t demonstrate commercial awareness; they demonstrate that you have an understanding of how to apply a particular type of approach and not necessarily the same as whether you are doing something in a more efficient way or are finding improvement mechanisms, and things like that through that approach. Does that make sense? Fantastic. Last question was, I think, about… Oh, no, two more – I’ll try and answer these quickly: how did I get my fast first entry job into a more commercial area? It’s an interesting thing. I think people assume that if you’re going into a new area, that you have to go down and do something in a more entry, a more base level to prove yourself. This is a bit about confidence; this is a different topic! I went in at at least the same level, if not higher, from the public sector and the private sector because I made a concerted effort in my public sector job that I did want to move on from at that moment in time to spend roughly six months to a year to think about what can I do differently in the job that I have now to enable to be more employable across more sectors. I consciously thought about this. So my job didn’t come with a budget, so did I create a budget. I didn’t have a team that I managed; how do I create a team? I found funding for internships, and things like that. A way to create a team, I could show that I was influencing national policy, I could show that I was influencing my CEO in the strategic decision-making processes, I could acquire a budget that I then could manage, so I had evidence of budget management. I did all this as a very, very strategic and purposeful thing in order to improve my CV in financial management and other areas and it was irrelevant, really, that I was moving from one sector type to another sector type. It was more high I approached my job and that I actually followed through and implemented things that meant that I was suitable or felt to be suitable in a new sector by a new employer. So it was a very purposeful thing. Don’t feel that the only way to do it is to go down and work your way up, but, actually, think about what you can do now to make parity more possible. You’re all incredibly successful folk. I’ve not done a postdoc, by the way; I stopped at PhD, so you’re already ahead of the game than I was when it comes to academic qualification. Equally, you can approach this in a bit of a different way and you can bring other areas apart from what you’ve been doing in your postdoc to be able to demonstrate some of these, as well, so other experiences you’ve had, other voluntary things that you might have done, other jobs you might’ve done. So it’s a whole group of things. It’s not a knowledge economy the way academia is. It’s a how do you approach things, what do you actually do and how do you do it, not how much do you know about something. That’s an important distinction to make, because you’re all able to find out stuff, you’re all very good researchers, so that’s a given, but how do you approach things, how do you apply things, how do you imagine new possibilities. It’s just about spending time thinking about that and then capturing it and then trying to gain some more evidence of it if you feel that you actually need to gain a bit more evidence so that you can talk to those introduce-your-CV situations. Is that helpful, guys – kind of broad brush? Someone asked me about references. There’s a few more references on the key sheet that’s in the Google Drive folder. I like short blogs and podcasts, and stuff. I’m not one for saying you need to devour a whole book to be able to understand some of these. Also, a lot of books in this area are very corporate and very written by the prospective of, let’s say, male-dominated perspective of coming from a slightly more privileged position, to be very honest about it. So I wouldn’t rush to recommend a specific book because of that, but I would definitely look at what I have suggested you look at as useful bite-sized ways of starting to understand how you might gain some examples of this. Especially, I think, somebody here said they were thinking about starting their own business in that, so quite a lot of that information is useful in that context, as well. Okay? It’s the way it is. As a more diverse woman, I will write my own book one day and recommend that. So that’s all of the questions for the moment. So thank you for that. These are really avenues. I want to make sure that we look at opportunity mapping, because the thing about these things is about just practicing it, so knowing that here’s a way of doing it, now apply it to your situation, then you can say that you’ve used opportunity mapping going forward on your CV. The thing about this, all of this stuff takes 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes – it not a huge amount of expenditure of your time to use certain techniques in your settings. It’s very practical and less theory when it comes to this area of things. So I’m going to show you what I want us to do first on the iPad screen and then we’ll go to the Jamboard. Okay, so what we’re going to do is think about our core… We would call it core business when we’re doing this in a business setting, but you could do this in a different way just to practice it. So you could do it in a kind of what’s your core expertise. So you could practice it using that, so that’s what I’m suggesting you do in a Jamboards exercise in a moment. So that would be your core market, and the profitability, we’re just going to put it in the bottom corner at the moment because this is about expansion and change, okay? What I’m going to ask you to do is to try and think about sticky notes, try and think about another thing that you could do differently, or a product or a service you could offer if you think about it in that way, or a different type of project that would result in greater reward for less effort, therefore it would be less profitable. So you’d put that up there, so it’s in the same market and it’s more profitable. So that would be opportunity number one. You would do the same, but in an adjacent market. So think about your own sector specialism or your subject specialism; what would be an adjacent subject specialism to your own. So that would come over here. Profitability, well, we don’t really have to think about that in times of effort versus reward, but let’s just put another sticky note next to it here. Then you’ll be thinking about a brand-new market completely. So for me, my market is higher education and cultural and creative industries, but right now I’m trying to develop a new marketplace for my training services in the offshore and renewables sector. That’s a completely different sector. That would definitely be in the new box. So that would be an example of new. We can put that over here somewhere, okay? So I’m only asking you to think about things. You don’t know the definite answers. It’s just to imagine, so you put something on this chart. There’ll be at least two of you, maybe threes for some people, in the breakout room. It’s okay to double up. So because there’s two of you, you might put two sticky notes for three, or whatever, and you can start talking about it. This technique as opportunity mapping is very common. There are other slightly varying models for this, but I want you to start thinking about it that way. So if you were applying this to, say, a funding round, you could think about it as, ‘Okay, what do I normally do? What’s my core?’ or, ‘What can I do differently that relates to it?’ or, ‘Could I develop an interdisciplinary team?’ and look at this in a very different way, and, ‘That’s my adjacent area.’ So you could apply that thinking into different settings, as well. That is a typical way of thinking about it and I just want us to practice that. You can also vary the size of these boxes or the sticky notes in the Jamboard based on how profitable you think it might be. What’s the scale of the opportunity? So you can vary the size of the sticky notes when you start thinking about that, as well. I’m just going to stop sharing the screen now. You should have a look at what other people have done, as well, in other rooms if you’re coming out already. Can I just check by a nod of heads/show of hands, is that one that you think you could use again in a workshop with your own things quite straightforwardly? Did you get the point of that chart? Let’s just have a check. How did you find that experience? You can either jump in off the mute or you can type what you thought in the chat – it’s up to you. Is that something you think you could use again?

Yes, I think it’s very usable, make you the time to think about, especially what is adjacent to you or what can be totally new.

Fantastic. It’s opening the mind. Having to put something in those other white areas forces you to think in that way. Then how long did I give you? I gave you ten minutes. It’s a really good idea to do it with someone else, because through the discussion and the conversation, many people think better, it frees it up. Equally, many people have said the best ideas come on a walk. I would say you need to frame that you’re going to think about this and that you have a way of thinking about it and then let the ideas pop in and make sure you note them down. When I started my own business, which is now nearly four-and-a-bit years ago, I spent the preceding six months working out what my business was going to be about, what could I sell. It was going to be very different to what my academic experience was, I knew that. How I was going to do it, and things like that, what my branding was going to be, lots of train journeys about this. Actually, lots of chatting to friends and connections about what the options might be, and just to make it more real and more possible, because that’s to do with confidence and imposter phenomenon, which, as I said, is another topic!

Yes.

Please use these types of things. You’re going to get a workbook with them, and I really explained how to use them, and do it again with yourself or with a friend in a few weeks from now. That’s the way to develop your skill and opportunity-mapping, because it is a skill area and it is very transferable and very applicable to your current situation. Even if you’re not thinking about careers, and things, you can apply it to your project, as well. Okay? Thank you for sharing that, that’s fantastic. So the last key activity and key area we’re going to look at is about risk. I was just speaking to the Prosper representatives here and there was some other training you might have accessed that talked about risk a little bit, and I’m going to do that, as well, so that’s really important in terms of commercial awareness. So iPad-screen-sharing time; I’ll just get that to explain risk in a graphical way. Okay, so we’re going to be looking at risk. Now, I said earlier it’s good to understand yourself in terms of how risk-averse you might be and sometimes it’s about to move that forward into being someone who’s more likely to take risk, because that is important for commercial awareness. It’s having a simple way to assess a risk and having a simple way to work it into intermediate steps. So that’s what we’re going to do next. So in terms of a risk, you might put something like ‘insufficient clients take up my offer’, or something like that. So that’s in kind of your own freelancing, or something like that. That might be a risk type. You would then indicate how likely that might be to happen. Well, when you’re just starting, that is a significant risk. So it might happen. It depends what you’ve put in place, but let’s just, for the sake of practicing this tool, we’ll go for that it’s very likely, which would make it into this area. So this little chart is indicating low, medium and high through colours, like it’s a little bit of a dial, shall we say. How likely is that to happen? Yes, okay, it’s fairly like that may happen – maybe put it into the ‘medium’. So you really need for likelihood and impact, it’s out of the green zone, out of ‘low’. You need to have a control or a mitigation. A control means that you’re trying to reduce the likelihood of it happening at all, and the mitigation is if it happens, what do I do to reduce the impact or the severity of that risk on my business in this example. So it might be things like… Oops. Mitigation, sorry, I’m just trying to re-establish the pen here. Controls and mitigations might be around that you’ve done some market analysis to make sure that your offer fits well. You might have done a lot of networking to socialise your new offer. You might make sure that you develop quite a big number of leads, so let’s say ten, so that if only two actually happen, that’s okay. Lots of things that you could do to minimise likelihood of that happening or reduce the impact if it did. The next bit is managed impact. So what you’re doing is taking an account of what your controls or mitigation are, thinking about the impact of that now that you’ve put that into place. So perhaps it’s more into the medium category, or something, by that moment. If there’s anything in the ‘medium’ or ‘high’, there might be still further actions that you might take. So it’ll be things like review market that you’ve targeted, work with a partner – there’s lots of things like that. In the context of today, you can put something really specific to the situation you’re in at the moment because you have more information within which to complete that assessment. To actually just make up some things, it’s going to be quite difficult, potentially, to come up with the controls and mitigations. You could do that around a project risk or a conference that you’re planning or an experiment that you’re working on. You can practice risk management at any scale, and from a transferable skills point of view, it’s showing that you have understood what risks are and that you have done an assessment and you have managed them effectively. It’s not necessarily about having done it in a business setting or a commercial setting. The thing about taking risks, you have to take risks to access opportunities or to innovate, but it’s not an optional thing, it’s a necessary thing and it can feel really scary. So even if you’ve done an assessment and you said, ‘Actually, it’s worth taking this risk, it’s worth taking it forward,’ still it might feel like quite a big thing to move forward on. So what to do is to break it down into steps of what you can do to move certain things forward. So it might be to do with the way you network, it might be to do with creating a pilot, it might be to do with method you might use to do startup, whatever it might be, but it’s breaking it down into more manageable intermediate steps that enables you to actually take that risk. Does that make sense? So that’s what we’re trying to do, but something that you feel that you’re more comfortable with in terms of being able to describe a risk. Again, we’ll be in pairs or threes to do this, so you might just pick something that one person wants to workshop and work through it that way, that’s absolutely fine, but the key thing is maybe to try and break down how you would actually take the risk itself, because you need to to be able to harness the opportunity or to achieve some innovation if that’s the… Again, if you want to go between the different rooms that you weren’t in just to see what other people are putting in, you’re very welcome to do so. Don’t worry if you felt, anybody in a room, one in particular, you felt you might’ve run out of time to break it down. You can still do that as an exercise after the session; you don’t have to worry that you didn’t get it all done in the time I gave you. So these are fantastic. So just to say that you can assess risk in quite a straightforward way. It doesn’t take long necessarily and using those types of headings is quite useful. The key thing to then take the risk in order to harness opportunity is breaking down those things into small steps and then taking the first step. So making it manageable in that way, because we’re all risk-averse to a degree in certain areas, but it’s really important in terms of commercial awareness that you demonstrate that you take calculated risks, not that we’ve procrastinated about something for a very long time or we’ve gone around in circles or we’ve taken the risk because someone has pushed us over a cliff to do it. We want to be showing that we’re thinking strategically about risk and that we can take that forward. So these are fantastic suggestions that you guys have put in the Jamboard. I’ll export the whole of the Jamboard as a PDF and you’ll get a copy of that, as well, to refer back to after the session, as well. So thank you for that. We’re in the last, oh, 10/12 minutes of the session today and so what I want to do is do a couple of things. I want you to think about any other questions that have occurred to as a consequence of what we’ve done in the second half, particularly around how you demonstrate value to potential stakeholders or partners or employers, any questions like that. Anything about applying or thinking about the different skills that we’ve looked at and how you might develop some of those. Anything new that you’ve got questions about, pop them into the chat just now and I’ll respond to them. Do you have anything, either off mute or in the chat, to contribute about how have you found that exercise about risk? What did you think?

Yes, actually, I was typing, but better is…

That’s okay.

I was thinking about, obviously, related to show – actually you had these scales. For example, in my case, I’ve been working in two different countries. Is this showing that I’m willing to take risk because, obviously, I don’t know the language when I’m over there, a totally new culture, new people to interact with?

Yes. I would say that you would want to show how you came to those choices, so what did you take into account to then make that decision and then to do it and what did you gain from that, what made you think about moving again. So it’s not the actual fact of having moved; it’s what the process you went through to make that decision. Are you able to articulate it? Can you put it down on a bit of paper? You can demonstrate that in a CV. If you were in an interview, having pre-prepared that answer, that would be a useful thing to be able to refer back to, as well. So that’s how I would approach it. Yes, there’s lots of things in our own personal lives. So, for example, I started my own business while starting a major renovation of my house and did the project management of it. If I wanted to demonstrate project management and juggling things, I could use that example and that would be totally okay, that would be totally valid to do that. Good.

Thank you.

Then what else have we got in here? Good comments in the chat if people want to have a look. So people talk about Simon Sinek a lot. So Simon Sinek’s thing is about start with why. He’s not the only person and it’s not a totally new concept, shall we say. Start with why is about the so-what question. I would describe it as what are the ultimate outcomes that you are trying to achieve through a process and how you would design your project to achieve those outcomes, not ‘these are the list of things that I want to do, and I did them’. So that’s just about listing resources and listing outputs, but actually focusing on outcomes. If you do that, you’re kind of talking to what he’s talking about, but, actually, it’s a bit more rounded than that and it’s a very well-thought-through way of doing it. So that answers that point a little bit. Then you like the different tools, as well. So some of them are based on other people, some of them are my own. It’s one of the main things that I do is produce lots of these types of visual tools. There’s quite a lot of this in the design thinking world, so what I will do is I will put an extra reference. I’ll update the key sheet with an extra reference of – it’s called a DIY toolkit, it’s called, or something like that, from Nesta, who are – it’s all about design thinking. There’ll be different things to do with how you understand a problem and how you work out the root causes, all these different things, and some of those are really helpful to be quick and visual and apply that kind of thinking to things. There’s no suite of commercial awareness tools that exists, put it that way, if that’s what the question is, but there are plenty of visual tools that help you move forward, and we use lots of different techniques in the many jobs that I’ve done that are tried and tested, but they don’t take very long. It’s part of the efficiencies that we talked about, and time management stuff. So I will share an example of that with you. Good. Okay, so the last few things I would like us to do is go to a new Menti link, so that’s come into the chat area. I want you to think about the answer to this question, which is: to develop or demonstrate my commercial awareness skills, I will… So what will you do differently after today? It can be things like, ‘I will look at applying the tools that Sabina shared with me. I will stop and think more strategically about how I make decisions. I will write down what my process was, decide to change countries.’ It can be small things, but it’s very difficult to move forward with skills development unless you take some action, and, in fact, it’s impossible, so you have to take some action. So that’s what this question is about. I came as someone who has a PhD in architectural history and I’m now a business adviser and a research and management consultant, so we can make those shifts if we want to make some dramatic shifts. Absolutely, there are transferable skills from having undertaken a research degree and how to undertake consultancy work in business, etc. You’re all expert learners and expert researchers and a lot of working out what your opportunities are is applying your research skills to that particular question. Let’s have a look at some of the examples that you’ve already put in. So someone’s going to have another go at filling out an opportunity chart – fantastic. Someone’s going to outline how I made a decision needed to complete a recent project – oh, that’s a great idea. Someone will go through their CV, and you’ve emphasised the so-what part of my actions. Yes, so what were the consequences? What difference did it make? That’s the way to think about it or frame that answer. Brilliant. ‘I’m going to use the risk management tool to evaluate a potential job opportunity.’ Fantastic. What the risks would be if I applied, etc. Also, you will then be able to demonstrate that you have been able to manage risk. So that’s an extra benefit of you using it for this purpose, which is brilliant. ‘I will look at my journey so far and try to identify how I was able to do it.’ Fantastic. ‘I will use the tools we’ve used today to my current project.’ Fantastic. And, equally, because you will have done that, you can demonstrate that you’ve done it in the future too – future employers, and things like that, or if you want to start your own thing, you can reuse these things. So applying it, absolutely, all of these tools have been given to you in such a way that you can apply it to your current situation, so you have enough information to input into that tool to make it worth doing, but the point is you’ve then practiced the tool and, therefore, you’ve developed your skills and, therefore, you can use them in other situations and show that you can and you have. It’s a lovely snowball effect. Look, as I mentioned, and I’ll export some other of the things we’ve created in the live workshop that you can review as well. So thank you for watching.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

Great to meet you. So I’m Elizabeth. I am a career development coach. This session is all about informational interviews and, although that might seem like quite an intimidating thing to say, it’s actually just a fancy way of saying having a chat with people to find out a bit more about jobs or find out a bit more about sectors or opportunities or kind of what you might want to do next. So it definitely doesn’t have to be the big thing that it perhaps feels like. This session is all going to be about how to find the people to network with, how to find people to do the informational interviews with, what to ask, how to approach them, how to make most use of the time and how to follow up and take action as a result. Hopefully, as a result of today, you’ll be able to go away and do some of these informational interviews yourselves. If you were to do one this afternoon and you got to ask your dream person about their job, what kind of things would you want to ask? What are the things that you maybe don’t get to hear about when you go to large-scale careers events and people are presenting or recruiters are presenting? So how did you get there – the road map, that journey? How did you become this? What does your typical day look like? How did you get here? What is the least enjoyable part of your job? What skills helped with that? What the challenges will be in the future? That’s a good one. What’s the main limitations? What do you wish you knew before you started this job? What are the most and least enjoyable parts of your job? What I really love about all of these questions is that they’re lovely, open questions that give a lot of opportunity for exploration. I think what you find is that people really love talking about themselves. It might seem really intimidating to approach someone and ask them to give up their time to do an informational interview, but I think once you get people talking with questions like this and just having a few questions like that ready, people get into a flow and they love to talk about their jobs and themselves. What I want you to do now is just grab a paper and pen and we’re going to do a quick network mapping exercise just to get you thinking back to previous contacts that you might have maybe lost contact with or have not been in touch with recently. Maybe now’s a chance to reconnect with them. So if you draw yourself in the middle of a bubble diagram, the middle of the paper, do a quick mind map with some of the contacts from either your PhD or a previous postdoc or a previous job. Who are the people that might have good networks and that you might want to reconnect with? A friend of a friend who you could maybe ask about, ‘I’m looking for interesting jobs that might be useful or might be appropriate for me.’ You get your best networking opportunities from people who aren’t the closest people around you, the closest contacts, but maybe slightly weaker ties. So who would you want to reconnect with from a previous job or PhD or postdoc? Who are connecting people in your lives, so the people that know loads of people? Maybe it’s an old PhD supervisor, maybe it’s someone who you know has met lots of postdocs or any of these other people who actually have met a lot of researchers over the years or seen people move into a variety of different roles. Maybe there are some research managers, some administrators in your department who actually keep in contact, technicians, great people for keeping in contact with lots of other people or who just might have seen where other people have gone on to and they can say, ‘Oh, yes, I remember someone went and did teaching.’ Who are these connecting people in your life or how might you connect with alumni from your institutions? That might be PhD alumni or it might be former postdocs. Are there any schemes that help you connect, careers advisers, particular people who run events? Is there a postdoc network? Are there postdoc reps or people from that wider disciplinary network – people you’ve met at conferences, professional bodies, industry collaborators, community organisations? Who are those other people around about you who might have some ideas of where people with backgrounds like yours might go to or what sorts of jobs and opportunities there might be out there for you? So these are the people that you will be able to have a chat to. They might not be people that you want to interview as an informational interview, but they might know someone who fits the bill of what you need and they might be willing to introduce you and share their contacts. Remember it doesn’t have to be always the most senior person that you’re looking to approach or the HR person in an organisation – just anyone at different levels of the organisation might be able to offer you some insights into a particular role or sector. It’s also worth remembering that what they offer is just their perspective. It’s their view on the world – one datapoint. They won’t have seen everything in their organisation and they’ll be bringing their own filters, the same way as you will be. Maybe what’s important to them and what they’re excited about in the company culture or the way of working isn’t necessarily going to be the thing that’s important to you. So although they can be a really useful source of information, just take it in that wider exploration of getting to know lots about different jobs. There might be lots of ways I’m looking for information about jobs in medical writing, say, ‘Do you know anyone?’ You’d be surprised the number of people that know other people in this sector. I’ve never found a question that, working in a university, I couldn’t find the answer to – whether I wanted to go to Kyrgyzstan and I wondered if anyone knew any Kyrgyz or I wanted to fix my mountain bike suspension. Always just by asking around, I could find people who knew other people. I think I was in a lucky situation of being central in the university and knowing a lot of people, and if that’s not you, you need to find the people that know a lot of people, so the people like me in my former role. I used to work at the University of Glasgow in researcher development; I knew loads of people. So find those connecting people. Talk to them about what you’re interested in. You could use Twitter, ask if anyone in your network knows someone who works in X role. So, hopefully, you’ve got a few ideas of how you might get to find out if there’s people that you’d like to talk to or find out about jobs from. My own experience of this was when I moved down to Cumbria. So I worked in Glasgow, I worked in a university. There’s no universities here. I didn’t know how I was going to find a job down here, but I asked around, ‘Does anyone know what sorts of jobs they have in the west of Cumbria apart from Sellafield?’ because that’s the only place that I knew of. Actually, a few people I knew, it turned out they’d lived here and they had friends and relatives who were still here, they had professional connections and they actually put me in touch with a few people who I approached through… So they put me in touch with them through LinkedIn and I approached them through sending them a LinkedIn message. I sent them a request and then a message. Everyone got back to me and said, ‘Yes, happy to talk to you,’ and these weren’t people that I knew, but they were all happy to talk to me. In the end, two people did and one person never really followed through, but that’s fine; you might get some rejections or some people that just don’t have the time to answer you. It doesn’t really matter. The people who did, I just did a really, really short conversation with them and it was incredibly inspiring and encouraging for me to realise that there were loads of jobs out there and jobs that I could do that I could be excited about, and there was just a whole world in West Cumbria that I just didn’t know about. So definitely the opportunities to expand your horizons to do informational interviews are huge and I hope you’ll take them up. So here’s my top tips on how to make an approach to someone. I think the best thing to do is to make sure that it’s really time-bounded in your request. So you’ve found someone that you think, ‘Wow, they’ve got an interesting job or an interesting back story/background. They’ve got skills/experience like mine,’ get in touch with them through Twitter or LinkedIn or by email if you possibly can, get a recommendation if you can. Get in touch and say, ‘I’d like 20 minutes of your time.’ That’s an easy request for people. It’s long enough to give you lots of information, but it’s not too long in their day – a quick Zoom coffee. ‘Could we have a 20-minute Zoom coffee?’ Make it clear that you’re not looking for a job from them, because that’s going to be tricky for people; they might not feel in the position to offer you a job. Just be up front and say, ‘I’m not looking for a job. What I am looking for is X, Y, Z – information on these types of jobs or where I might fit in your type of organisation.’ Tell them why you’ve contacted them. That might be obvious if someone’s offered you a recommendation or made a connection for you, or maybe it’s about something in their organisation or because they’re an alumnus of your previous institution. It’s not rude to follow up, obviously not the same day or the next day, but give them a few days, just follow up and say, ‘Just wondered if you’d missed it, if you’re available.’ No worries if not. Also, be really respectful of any contacts that people have shared. I think it is quite a big deal to pass on your contacts. I share contacts with people freely because I think that what goes around comes around and people have helped me in my career; I want to help others. Most of the people that I work with have also wanted to do that helping. If I offer up some of my contacts, I want to know that they’re going to be treated with respect, because that reflects badly on me if they’re not. So just remember that. There might be people that just don’t feel that comfortable in sharing their contacts, and that’s fine also too. Maybe they’ve been burnt in the past. Make it obvious who you are, and that might be in your message, but also they might google you, so make sure that your online profile is up-to-date and congruent with whatever you’re talking about. Make sure it’s obvious what you’re interested in. What is it that you want to know more about and maybe what it is that you’re passionate about or excited about? What are your strengths and expertise; will they show up if someone looks at your Twitter profile or your Academia.edu or your LinkedIn profile? That’s almost like your online calling card or your business card. I want you to write down a time when you’ve helped someone. So just write that down on your bit of paper so that you remember that these people might be giving up their time to help you, but there’ll have been a time where you have definitely helped someone. It might be a PhD student, it might be another colleague, someone that you’ve given up 20 minutes for to help. It’s definitely a karma thing. So I’ve got a video here of a postdoc talking about their own approach to doing some informational interviews while looking at exploring different job opportunities.

I got in touch with, I think, four or five people and with two or three of them, I had the chance to have an actual chat, which was, I think, okay, it’s a good start, people that you ask, they do answer and they’re happy to chat. There were always very useful information because I wanted to have an idea what’s the type of the job, what it can pay, how is the daily business, I would say. Then it was useful even to understand how they got there from a PhD having previous postdoc experience to getting a job outside academia. Yes, I think I made some notes about what I wanted. Of course, you can’t ask a person for a chat and then not have any questions to ask, but usually it’s very flowing; people want to talk and you can ask them extra questions you didn’t think about before. So they were always very pleasant. As I said, people want to help if they can, and it’s the same for us. If some, I don’t know, PhD asks you for advice or career advice, we are always friends, so it’s the same with people you know outside academia, I would say. The other thing is that you really realise, in general, in Prosper, I would say the fact that we’ve got many, many skills that we don’t put down in our academic CV which are really valued. So I think I got a clear idea also about that – all the management skills or the communication and relationship-building, the writing, as well. These are all things that are very, very valued and it’s something you get a clear idea when you get in touch with employers or employees that do jobs that you’re interested in.

So Ale makes a great point there about understanding what skills you’ve got, and I think it’s so common when you’re just surrounded by lots of other amazing people in your research and you’re all busy getting on with the project, that you just don’t take time to sit up and think, ‘Wow, what are the things that I’m really good at?’ Maybe it’s because everyone else is already busy doing them, as well, but what might be amazing skills to take to another organisation. So getting that sort of feedback, that asking people what’s valued, what skills are valued in their organisations and if they employ PhDs and postdocs and if they know about the skills and experience that you bring. They might not; they might not know what that is. They might just not be aware. So it gives you a bit of extra information if it comes to applying for a job, because you know how much you need to explain or what you can assume is knowledge. So once you’ve found someone to interview, you’re going to want to make use of that 20 minutes. So introduce yourself briefly, and we’re going to come back to that, because you do want to make sure that you introduce yourself in a way that they’re going to remember who you are and know who to refer you on to. If the opportunity ever came up, they might be like, ‘Oh, yes, I remember someone was looking for MedComm careers and, actually, I’ve just seen an opportunity.’ So ask lots of open questions, those kind that you shared in the chat earlier. You want ones that will lead to more creative and expansive thinking rather than just ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Maybe they’re ones that will lead to other opportunities, other organisations that you might want to go away and look up, they’re people networks. Approach it with a way of curiosity and data collection. You’d never make a research decision based on just one datapoint, so make sure you’re just there to get some information, be curious, be open-minded, don’t make value judgements immediately, don’t feel the weight of a burden of thinking, ‘I need to make a massive career decision based on this one interview.’ Just an exploration; find out what you can. Then end it by making sure that you know what you want them to take away about you; what is it that you’re passionate about, what do you want them to know that you’re excited about or know that you’re looking for? So have a think now. What are those keywords that you want them to take away about you? Write them down. They might be technical words, they might be skills that you have. They might be things that you’re passionate about, so it might be community engagement, it might be sustainability. What are the things that you want to have in your future career that if someone was going to say, ‘Talk to Jimmy. He knows about X,’ what do you want people to take away from you – at least three keywords. Your takeaways from today are to make sure that your online profile reflects those words and also to be able to practice how you introduce yourself to people for these informational interviews, but also for conferences or anything else where you think you might have an opportunity for someone to pass your name on to someone else. Some of you might have come across this diagram before. It’s from the Japanese meaning ‘purpose for life’, ikigai, and reason for being. It’s four circles. One is what we love, one is what we’re good at, one is what the world needs and one is what we can be paid for. The idea is that you’re trying to move towards the centre of that, and that’s like the perfect flow state where everything’s amazing and you’re living your best life. The reality is we’re unlikely to all get there, certainly not immediately, and there will be compromises along the way, but by reflecting on these different areas, you’re going to get a sense of what’s important to you and what might be something that you want to ask about in an information interview. So when you’re thinking up your questions for your informational interview, you need to be thinking about what is it in your workplace that’s going to be important to you so that you can ask questions like: how often do you get to be creative; how often do you get to interact with other people; how much control do you have over decision-making; how often do you get to see the impact of your work? If those are the things that are really important to you in the workplace, those are the things you want to find out about. I think there was one earlier about work/life balance, maybe one about flexibility, yes, what hours does everyone work. You could also ask, ‘How does it look if people have kids? Do they leave to pick up their kids at 3:00?’ I think questions like that can be quite insightful, so actually asking, ‘What does that look like?’ because I think if you ask anyone from HR in an organisation, they’re going to say, ‘Oh, we’re committed to work/life balance, diversity,’ all of those things, but, actually, if what matters to you is being able to drop your kids off at 9:00, so you can ask. So you can continue to think about the questions that you might want to ask. Here are some of my suggestions. So asking people about the transition, how their research background – if they have one – helped them in this role. It might not be the things you expect. It might not be the hard technical skills; it might be more their abilities to think through problems. I think we’ve already had that suggestion: what do you enjoy most or least? How much time do you get to spend doing different aspects of the job? That could be an important one if you don’t want to be behind a desk or at events all the time, if you don’t want to be travelling. How much freedom of thought do you have? That’s a good one, I think, particularly if you’re making a shift from academia into other types of roles. How much control do you have over the direction of your work? What other jobs did you consider? Where do you see yourself going next? Just getting a bit more sector information. Finding out how they stay up-to-date with what’s happening in their field. Are there mailing lists that you could join? Where do they find jobs in their area? What are the professional standards or codes or organisations, bodies, training, any other expectations? What’s the company culture or work/life balance like? Who else should you speak to? So after you’ve done the interview, it’s good to get in touch and thank people, just a short note. It helps them remember you, it helps them know that their time was valued. They’re more likely to say yes to other people in the future. Take some notes. Make sure you reflect on the skills that they mentioned as well as the facts about the job or the websites to go to. What did they talk about; what were the different things? Write it all down because you will forget. Keep in touch if you can, if appropriate. Definitely let them know if you’ve got a job. Everyone wants to know that they helped someone get a job, they helped someone be successful, even if it’s just a really quick LinkedIn message just thanking them for that interest, and pay it forward to someone else, be prepared to help someone else with those kinds of interviews and situations. So I have another video here from Zohra, who was also part of Prosper last year, and, I think, took part in quite a number of informational interviews and they actually led to her getting a job.

Before that, I undertook quite a number of informational interviews and this all came about from accessing the career clusters on the Prosper portal, listening to various employers around the region talk about the company culture and explaining some of the job roles that they have within their company. That was great and it was quite nice to then use that link to then initiate a conversation with them, reaching out to them via email or LinkedIn and just having a bit more of a chat about – essentially, asking the question where do they see me in their company. I think often when you engage with these informational interviews, yes, it’s information-seeking about the company and the job roles, but at the same time the person that you’re speaking to often encourages you to give them a background of yourself, to explain yourself in a nutshell. They can use their experience as hiring managers or people who have led teams to really give you some insights of where they think you might fit in or what job role would be suited to you. Actually, following a series of informational interviews after briefly explaining the sort of sector and job that I was interested in, one of the people that I was talking to suggested, ‘Oh, well, have you ever considered this as a career?’ Yes, I’d like to say that I hadn’t heard of that career, but then that just… I guess it spurred an interest into – and I did some more research. So, yes, so you never know where those conversations are going to take you and it was following those conversations where I then really tailored my job search, taking the advice of the people that I’d spoken with and, again, using my own research to apply for those jobs that I believed that would truly be suited to me.

So that’s a really lovely story, and it sounds from Zohra that it was quite an effective use of her time. Rather than just going wholesale into applying for jobs that she didn’t even know if she wanted, she actually started to home in on what the job was that she really wanted and that she was really suited for through those short conversations and conversations where she talks a little bit about herself but also learns about the organisation. So I think just going in politely, professionally, but being friendly – they are real people – and I guess, at the end of the day, you want to know whether it’s an organisation that you would fit in with if you’re interested in a job there. So I think you need to be yourself and just approach them in the way that you would with anyone else. If there’s a job being advertised, quite often they’re happy to have a chat with you about an opportunity – an informal chat before you make your application. I absolutely recommend this because it can give you tons more information on what they meant. Quite often when people have to write job descriptions, they agonise over how to get 10 different perspectives into one bullet point. So you can get the back story of why that’s important to them. So if you can get those kinds of contacts, do. I think it’s better to get a recommendation or to go through someone you know. I’ve definitely met people who have just got in touch with people who are alumni from their institution and just said, ‘I noticed that you are a Liverpool alumnus working in this particular area. I wondered if you wouldn’t mind having a chat with me.’ That’s slightly tricky on LinkedIn unless you have a premium account, because you can’t message people without it, but you can get a free trial for a month, so if you did want to give it a go. I’ve certainly in other jobs done a lot of random messaging of strangers on LinkedIn and, although I thought that was really weird, coming from academia, and I didn’t really want to do that, the industry contacts that I messaged just thought it was normal, and I get lots of industry LinkedIn requests from people who I don’t know but who want to connect with me because of what I do and they think that I might be useful in their business. I get messages from people who think I might be useful – passing on opportunities. So I think LinkedIn’s maybe less personal than you think it is, so you can message people that you don’t know, but trying to get a specific name, at least, is definitely useful. Don’t underestimate the power of your networks and Prosper’s networks, as well. When you go away, think more, think more deeply about your networks. Just be on the lookout for people who have interesting jobs or interesting backgrounds – people that you might want to reconnect with. Just drop them a message, say what you’re interested in, find out whether they know anyone in that field, or look at other networks that you can make yourself and ask whether or not someone knows someone that might be of interest. Have a look at your online profile, if you have one. Check that it’s got those keywords in it. Check that it’s the sort of thing that represents you well. Have a think about your values – what’s important to you in a career. What is it that you really want to ask about in these informational interviews? Work out who you’re going to contact and get in touch. I know that I’m saying that like it’s easy and I appreciate it’s not, but it is actually easier than you think and I definitely have confidence that you can all do it. Please feel free, as well, if you want to send me a LinkedIn request and you can broaden your network that way.

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