If there’s one thing that physicists are good at, it’s being able to apply their skills and knowledge to new areas. Whether they realize it or not, physicists have many of the transferable skills that are highly valued by employers. They are analytical, creative and persistent. They are also experts at problem solving and have an eye for detail.

Even the so-called soft skills that physicists may have lacked in the past – the ability to communicate effectively or to work in a team – are increasingly being taught in undergraduate courses (p40, print version only). As this special issue highlights, a physics degree can open the door to a huge variety of jobs.

A wealth of opportunities

Despite the dot.com meltdown and the fall from grace of several high-tech high-flyers, many of today’s brightest physics graduates still follow a well trodden path to the giants of the computer and telecoms world. Physicists learn fast and are snapped up quickly by employers, as Eugene Loh of Sun Microsystems discovered (p33, print version only). He was on his way to a physics conference when he met someone from a small computer company who was looking to hire a PhD physicist. Loh took the plunge and has been surprised to find that the computing industry can be as intellectually stimulating as his research was. Bigger budgets and better facilities are among the other advantages that industrial R&D has over academic life, as Emma Walton of Sharp Research Labs reports on page 34 (print version only).

Other major employment sectors for physicists include the defence industry and medicine. Physicists, after all, were the brains behind radar plus a host of medical-imaging devices. On page 35 (print version only), Jennifer Morrison describes her experiences with BAE SYSTEMS, while John Kotre of Newcastle General Hospital explains that opportunities abound in medical physics (p46, print version only). And physicists hold many glamorous jobs in the media (p44, print version only).

Love and money

Most people who choose to study physics do so because they are fascinated by the world around us and not because they want to earn big bucks. That’s one reason why many physicists are happy to carve out careers in academia, where the money is good, but not great. The first step on the academic ladder is generally a stint as a post-doc – and on page 43 (print version only) Danny Hill, who left Britain for Spain, describes the virtues of a doing research in another country.

Some academic physicists, however, are so committed to their research that it literally becomes their life – so much so that they often end up in relationships with other physicists. While that can be rewarding – both partners understand the frustration and rewards of research – it can lead to difficulties. Particularly tricky is the so-called two-body problem, the challenge of finding two physics jobs in the same place (see article). Some couples spend years working hundreds of miles apart in order to further their careers, only seeing each other at weekends and at conferences. Another couple even marketed themselves as “a package with 24-hour lines of communication” as a way of staying together.

But if a job with a big pay packet comes your way, it’s going to be hard to ignore. That explains why many young and talented PhD physicists are lured away from academia for high-paying positions as “rocket scientists” and computer experts in the City and Wall Street (p47, print version only). Indeed, the latest salary survey from the Institute of Physics shows that financial services is the most lucrative sector for British and Irish physicists, who earn an average of £40 000 a year (see article). Meanwhile, we compare the earnings of physicists with scientists and engineers in the other fields (see article).

Calling all teachers

If there’s one profession that is crying out for physicists, it’s teaching. Last autumn just 205 graduates in England and Wales registered on teacher-training courses – down from almost 570 in 1993. Teaching certainly suffers from a bad image – 80% of graduates in the UK regard it as hard, unrewarding work. But teaching can be satisfying in ways that other jobs are not, as Kate Searle explains on page 36 (print version only). And the pay – in the UK at least – is not as bad as people might think.

But if you’re fed up with your job – maybe you’re a post-doc who cannot see a permanent job on the horizon or you work in industry and are worried about redundancy – then there is hope. Finding out what makes you tick is one of the keys to finding your dream job, say careers experts, who offer tips for CVs and interviews (see article). As one careers consultant says in our article on how to change career, physicists have “a far wider range of options than they often thought”.

Just ask Queen rock legend Brian May or world-record triple jumper Jonathan Edwards – two celebrities whose degree in physics has done them no harm (p52, print version only).