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 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 -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 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 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 :?’ 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 :, 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 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.