Skip to main content
Education and outreach

Education and outreach

Changing your career direction

03 Oct 2001 Matin Durrani

So you’ve been made redundant or are forced into early retirement. Maybe you’re just bored with your current job. Matin Durrani looks at how to point your career in a new direction and finds that it helps to think carefully about your options before a crisis strikes.

John Clark had just returned from a business trip to the US in December 1993 when his boss at Alcan rang him at home. “He sounded nervous and I suspected that something serious was up,” recalls Clark, who was working as a mathematical modeller in the company’s R&D department. “I asked him if he was going to fire me, but he was evasive.”

Clark, who has a PhD in physics from Warwick University, knew that times were tough for the company. The aluminium market had been flooded with cheap ingots from a major Russian manufacturer that could no longer sell its products to the Russian military following the end of the Cold War. “Suddenly supply far exceeded demand and the price had collapsed below break even. Alcan had made a big loss for the third year running, which clearly was not sustainable.”

Clark drove to his office, where his boss called a staff meeting. Then, in time-honoured fashion, Clark was handed a white envelope informing him that he was to be made redundant. “That was then end of my career with Alcan. It was a severe blow, even though I half suspected it was coming.” Clark, who was then 38 and had worked at Alcan for over eight years, immediately began writing to potential employees. After sending over 200 letters, he eventually found work with London International Group (LIG), which makes Durex condoms, Marigold washing-up gloves and other rubber products.

Four years later he lost his job again. LIG was taken over by a rival and although Clark had done well in his job – he had saved the company millions of pounds by sorting out the thermodynamics of a particular production process – he was unemployed once again. But this time he was prepared. Clark quickly found work after a former boss at LIG, with whom he had kept in touch, invited him to join Bespak, a pharmaceutical firm that makes novel drug-delivery systems.

“The moral of the story is to keep in touch with old colleagues, especially upwardly mobile ones,” says Clark. “As the saying goes, be kind to people on the way up because you never know who you’ll meet on the way down.”

Breaking up is never easy

While some people make a conscious decision to forge a new career, many career changes take place in response to an external trigger. A university physics department might axe its astronomy research group to bolster activity in, say, condensed-matter physics. A government lab might find itself sold off to the private sector, or a company’s R&D department might be disbanded following a merger with a rival firm.

Changing career is rarely pleasant. “Redundancy or forced early retirement can come as a great shock to those who have dedicated their lives to science or engineering,” says Keith Marshall, principal of a specialist career counselling and outplacement consultancy. “The prospect of finding another job outside one’s immediate professional discipline is hard. For many physicists in particular, their subject has been their life.”

Marshall helps clients to take stock of their strengths and transferable skills. “I get them to pinpoint those times in their lives when they’ve felt good about themselves and achieved something,” he explains. “They then identify potential employers or look for other ways in which they can use those skills.”

Fortunately, physicists have many transferable skills, even if they rarely realize that they have these hidden talents. They are analytical, creative and persistent, as well as being good at problem solving, having an eye for detail, and being adept at managing their time. “What emerges from such stocktaking is a far wider range of options than they often thought,” says Marshall. His clients have included scientists who have become consultants, joined high-tech start-ups and gone into teaching, lecturing and science administration. Two have even founded their own gardening businesses.

The one thing that scientists are weak at, however, is knowing how to network. “Scientists are not used to marketing themselves,” says Marshall. “It goes against the grain to sell themselves to others.” He points out that scientists are used to writing research papers in the passive tense, using “we” rather than “I”, and of avoiding any mention of personal involvement. “Physicists must learn to lay claim to their achievements.”

Jobs aren’t what they used to be

The desire for change can sometimes be satisfied just by finding a similar role for another employer or by switching to a different job in the same organization. But if that is not enough, then it is important to decide on a completely new career. “Recall the best things you’ve done and then locate the venue and opportunity to do them again,” advise Stephen Rosen and Celia Paul in their book Career Renewal: Tools for Scientists and Technical Professionals (1998 Academic Press). Rosen, who trained in theoretical physics, is founder and director of Scientific Career Transitions, a consultancy that guides physicists and others through career changes (Physics World May 1998 pp15-16, print version only).

Their book and others – like the Changing Career Direction and Building Careers That Fit guides published by the Institute of Physics – suggest four key steps. First, analyse what you like doing and what you want from your career. Second, identify your current skills and those that you wish to develop further, whether through specific courses or by learning from experience. Third, explore options by looking where and for whom you can work. Finally, make a decision on your future direction and take the practical steps towards that goal – writing a good CV, networking, spotting openings, creating a career-development plan and so on.

Exploring new avenues

It is also important for older physicists to understand that the work place is very different now to what it was 20 or 30 years ago. The idea of a “job for life” is a thing of the past. Management structures are “flatter”, with fewer rungs on the career ladder to climb. There is a greater emphasis on transferable skills in addition to specific technical knowledge. Tasks such as R&D are “outsourced” to external firms and there is an increasing emphasis on maximizing productivity. Employers no longer guarantee long-term job security and instead try to provide employees with the experience and opportunities that will let them remain employed in future – even if that means with another organization altogether.

Redundancy can often be the route to new opportunities. Mike Lee, who produced the Institute’s Building Careers That Fit series, is another physicist who had to change career. After more than ten years as an academic, he joined GEC where he produced distance-learning courses in his role as head of open learning at the company’s management college. In the early 1990s, however, his unit fell victim to company cutbacks.

“With hindsight, redundancy gave me the push I needed to branch out into self-employment,” he recalls. “It has worked out pretty well, but it didn’t feel like an opportunity at the time. In fact, I started out looking for permanent jobs and sought short-term contracts only as a stop gap until the right employer came along.” Although he was good at finding work as a self-employed consultant, it was not until the Institute of Physics asked him to produce the Scientists in Business CD-ROM – a 12-month project – that he fully committed himself to self-employment. “I think I knew all along that deep down this is what I wanted to do, but it took a while to realize it.”

Lee believes that physicists must spend more time thinking about their careers and working out what they really want to do in their lives. “That way, when a career crisis does strike they will be in a far better position to decide how to respond,” he says.

As for Clark, he has plenty of practical advice. “Always have an up-to-date CV – you never know who you might bump into at a conference who might offer you a job or be a useful contact.” Physicists should also keep their network up-to-date, he advises, and apply for the odd job from time to time to keep their interview skills up to scratch. “But you should always have one thought at the back of your mind: what might I do if my current job no longer exists?”

  • Building Careers That Fit, Changing Career Direction and Scientists in Business are available from the Institute of Physics, e-mail alex.byrne@iop.org
Copyright © 2024 by IOP Publishing Ltd and individual contributors