1. In industry, your progress is measured accurately and consistently based on performance. In academia, your progress is measured inconsistently and often only based on seniority. Career advancement in academia can be a black box. You never really know how you are performing and you get very little feedback. In industry, on the other hand, your performance on assigned work and shared goals is used to accurately measure your progress. Your performance is also used for determining promotions, salary increases, and bonuses. Not only this, but there are specific people designated for measuring your progress and they are actually held accountable to it.
2. In industry, you are rewarded for being a leader and showing initiative. In academia, you’re rewarded for doing what you’re told and spending less money, which is why many academic projects drag on forever. Much of this is because most academic projects are attached to long-term grants and your principal investigator must continue to collect relevant data, even if YOU know the project is a dead-end. In industry, you’re rewarded for working quickly and effectively. The more time you give back to your boss or the company overall, like by making a particular workflow more efficient or by initiating a new product that puts the company years ahead of its competitors, the more you are rewarded.
3. You are part of a supportive and structured work environment. One of the biggest problems with working in an academic lab is that you feel very alone. Sometimes, there’s too much independence in academia. For example, when you’re a fifth year graduate student and your academic advisor won’t support you. In industry, every scientist has their own project. At the same time, ever scientist helps each other with their projects. They don’t just help in the academic way by letting you borrow a little bit of a reagent or showing you where the cold room is. They really help you. Everyone is trained to support each other. In fact, the ability to work well independently AND as part of a team is the main requirement of getting a job as a research scientist in industry.
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5 окт 2024
