As we’ve seen in the previous video, life science trainees have many career options. If you haven’t had a chance to watch that video yet, we encourage you to do so now the current video is going to help trainees who are struggling to understand how to identify a good career match. In this short video, we’ll explore what makes a career match. We’ll explore how self-assessments can help you to understand fit as well as how job market research is essential for career planning and how a simple exercise with job post ings can help you to identify suitable career matches what makes a career match when we talk about career match we’re talking about finding a good fit between you and the job or between you.
And the organization that’s hiring, we’ll review three elements that are important to keep in mind when assessing your fit to a career or a role. The first is about you your values, interests, and skills. The second thing to evaluate is the job market needs that means what skills or requirements are necessary for a job that interests you or at large are their trends towards skill needs in the sector that you’re interested in in the role or in the company the third element to consider is the role itself do you understand what the day to day in a specific job looks like does it appeal to you when we speak about a match to self we’re starting from an expectation that you have assessed some of the following things your values your skills your interests and your personality.
This is important the reason why self-assessments are essential is that who you are is unique it’s the excellent set of values interests and skills that you come to a job with that make you either better or worse fit in short to identify a good career match you do have to have good knowledge of yourself similarly a career or a job that’s a good fit is going to either allow you to grow in an area that you want to succeed in or to use the talents that you already have and demonstrate them at a high level a lousy fit can lead to burnout or to increased stress and that would be characterized by having you work frequently in areas that you have a very low interest for or in areas where you have a very low ability or skill level all jobs are going to include some tasks that you either don’t like or that you find challenging or complex but the balance is essential to finding work that’s a good fit are you unsure about where to start to do a self-assessment let us suggest an online tool for you to use that’s going to be helpful for identifying career options.
As well the science my idp tool was designed for graduate students in order to provide you for with help navigating career options to do your self-assessment all you need to do is sign up for free and complete each of the values skills and interest assessments once you’re done check out the career match section on the menu bar and record your top three career paths those are the ones that will show up having a high interest and skill match we also recommend that you add in a fourth career match if there’s something that you always thought that you were perfect to do but it didn’t make it into your top three this list of career paths is a great place to start to read and learn more about each each job each career path you can do some of this research even on the my idp tool itself or by using resources at the university career center or elsewhere if you have difficulties contact us and we’ll help you get started with your research the next element that we want you to think about carefully when looking for careers that are a good fit are the job market needs this kind of task is going to put your research skills to good use some of the things that you’ll want to learn through your research are first what’s the job market is there expected to be growth in these sectors or roles are there more people applying for these jobs than there are jobs are there some profiles or jobs that don’t have enough candidates to fill and you’ll want to learn about the sector needs and trends so this might include broadening your understanding of the sector that’s of interest to you so for instance learning more about the life sciences sector either in ontario in bc or in quebec for others it might mean learning more about the non-profit sector or about key policy directions in the federal or the provincial government for others it might mean learning more about the funding of startups try to identify any future directions for sectors or roles that interest you your research for job market needs will never likely be done so even when you land a position you’ll want to stay up to date with what kinds of developments innovations are happening in the area that you work in to get you started these are some trends regarding hiring or employee skills in the life sciences industry first employers in industry are looking for candidates with competencies across different areas and that includes scientific skills familiarity working with regulations and standards sales management and organizational skills business intelligence and technology sales more information specifically about the level of competency and skill set required for specific job titles can actually be found in a report requested from munchau in avivo and we’ll link to that information below other workforce trends in the life sciences include the need for employees who have skills in business planning and operations project management regulatory affairs and quality management also the life sciences sector is turning towards employees that have the best soft skills soft skills like teamwork and collaboration skills that are critical for career success and last there are some in-demand positions to fill in this sector in the areas of clinical research product and our process development quality control and medical affairs do your research to well understand job trends this is really important.
Finally, we want to introduce you to a simple exercise that you can do with job postings to identify jobs that are a good match or fit and refine your searches. This exercise is provided by derrick attic, and if you want to read more, you can also see his full article linked in the resources section at the end of this presentation. In summary, what he suggests is that you first don’t look at job postings as though you’re going to apply to them for this exercise that’s not the purpose so ignore the education and experience requirements in the posting then imagine yourself in the job as it’s described what do you like what do you dislike do you understand what the role entails.
then use what you’ve learned about what you like in particular to search for new job postings and roles that may be a better match when you see job postings in this way or work with job postings in this way it can help you to clarify a role that’s a good match or fit once you can imagine yourself doing work that seems challenging you may be getting close to identifying some suitable career matches are you ready to explore your career matches well here is your homework make a plan a list of actions what are three things that you can do over the next six months to advance your career exploration that might include doing self-assessments doing career research looking into job or sector trends good luck and here are some resources to get you started for more videos information about life science careers follow us on Facebook and head to our youtube site and of course, we’re always reachable also by email.
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