Leaving academia for industry? Here’s how to handle salary negotiations
By Sarah Wild, Nature
In 2021, Branka Milivojevic prepared to leave academia for the second time. She wanted greater flexibility so that she could be available for her children and was tired of the instability of grant-based contracts. Five years previously, she had joined a neuromarketing start-up in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as a principal scientist to automate and standardize the analysis and visualization of neuroimaging data. But within a year, she had returned to a university research position, enticed by exciting projects. For her second move to industry, she drafted a list of what she wanted to negotiate for.
“I had a list of the top ten things I wanted for my job,” says the former cognitive neuroscientist, who is now based in Utrecht in the Netherlands. “Negotiating a higher salary is great, but salary is not the only thing that is important,” says Milivojevic, now a data scientist at the Dutch railway operator Nederlandse Spoorwegen. Her list formed the basis of her negotiations with potential industry employers — and reminded her what she was prepared to fight for. This included flexible working hours and a location close to home, or to have her commuting time included as part of her working hours.
Increasingly, academics are finding themselves negotiating industry salaries. In 2021, for example, only one-third of newly graduated mathematics and statistics doctoral students in the United States entered academic jobs, excluding postdoctoral positions, compared with almost 60% in 2001, according to the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates. In the social sciences, that proportion plummeted from 66% to 48%.
For many academic researchers, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a re-evaluation of their work life and the realization that they were discontent with their workload, career progression and work environment. According to Nature’s 2021 salary and job satisfaction survey, less than half of respondents from around the world were satisfied with their job prospects. Industry respondents (64%) were much more likely than those in academia (42%) to report feeling positively about their careers. That’s a marked shift from the 2016 survey, in which satisfaction levels across the two sectors were neck and neck (63% and 65%, respectively).
A 2022 report from the UK University and College Union found that more than half of its members were considering a career change. It’s unclear how many of these researchers will actually jump ship, but laboratory leaders are already struggling to fill early-career posts. For researchers wanting to move into industry positions for the first time, those who have already done so offer their insights and advice on what homework to do before negotiating, why to negotiate salary and which other aspects of the job are on the table.
Data scientist Tim Gravelle has moved between industry and academia for the past 20 years. “You need to get a sense of what it is that you value,” says Gravelle, who joined business consultancy firm Bain & Company in Toronto, Canada, as its insights data science director in November 2022. It is also important to know what skills and traits companies value.
Read more about Milivojevic's decision-making process and journey as well as other scientists in the original article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01299-0
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