How to (De)motivate an Employee?
Can a raise in salary infuriate an employee? Yes, it can. Especially if that employee is an ambitious person with a PhD. And it’s all about the timing.
navigation on the job market
All the online resources for PhDs in transition to industry
The space of online resources for PhDs thinking of transitioning to industry is massive! This blog post lists courses, blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, content platforms, and online communities dedicated to helping PhDs in the job market.
The Signs
Are there any signs in heaven and earth that can tell us along the way what we should eventually be doing in our professional lives — these little cues thrown to our feet along the way that we tend to ignore until there are so many of them that the truth just becomes obvious?
Mum, Dad, I’m a YouTuber!
In the darkest times during graduate school, when I was completely out of energy and I saw no light in the tunnel, I used to think to myself, “Hey, don’t worry. It’s not that bad of a job. It could have been much worse — you could have been a YouTuber.” But, the irony will prevail.
What motivates you?
We are all home-grown psychologists. We have all heard about Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Zimbardo’s Stanford experiment, or Milgram’s experiment. But, have you ever heard about Alfred Adler? Well, maybe you should.
Safety vs freedom: the landscape of post-PhD careers
In this blog post, Natalia Bielczyk and Elisenda Bonet-Carne discuss the similarities and differences between different post-PhD career tracks. There is a whole landscape of possibilities!
Why is it cool to work as a career advisor?
The past few weeks were quite interesting — I had some strange symptoms. I lost a lot of weight, I was often blushing, I was putting on loud Tiësto music and jumping around my garage like a maniac and bumping into things (to such an extent that I was getting self-inflicted wounds), I was walking around the park and laughing to myself like an idiot, and I couldn’t sleep for more than 6 hours a day. In other words, I had some strong signs of affection.
The nosedive
For my whole youth, I was spending most of my time reading books and going through thousands of textbook assignments. In the end, after twenty years of torturing myself with books, articles, and never-ending assignments, I realized that being an egghead doesn’t really prepare you for life in the real world. So, I made a 180-degree turn: I took a dive from the ivory tower straight to the street level.
High-flyers
When working with academics planning their first post-PhD jobs in the industry, one pattern keeps coming back: the more accomplished the person is in academic terms, the more difficult time they have with finding their first jobs outside academia. The underdogs on the other hand — the early career researchers who are nowhere near that accomplished, and who are often disrespected by their bosses and considered poor academics — are much quicker and more accurate in finding their next career paths. Often happier there as well.
The jobs of the future
It’s not a secret that both the Millennials and the Z-generation are vision- or mission-oriented. Young people are no longer looking for a paycheck in their jobs, but also a broader purpose (or, from Japanese, ikigai). This can have really interesting long-term consequences for the job market. In particular, one new type of job that is going to emerge soon.