Many researchers eventually reach a point where the next step is not another experiment, grant, or paper, but a deeper question about career direction.
Staying in academia may feel secure. Moving into industry can feel uncertain, high-stakes, and tied to identity—what it means to see yourself as a scientist.
Earlier posts in this series explored core skills and the importance of initiative and mentorship. This third piece turns to a transition many scientists are actively weighing: shifting from academia to industry. It draws on insights from the JoVE webinar Shifting From Academia to Industry, featuring neuroscientist and entrepreneur Dr. Jennifer Perusini, CEO and co-founder of Neurovation Labs.
Her experience is not a template for every scientist, but it highlights useful patterns that can guide your own decision making.
Why This Transition Feels So Complex
PhD graduates entering non-academic roles often face identity uncertainty, limited visibility into industry paths, and confusion about how scientific skills translate. Many also experience a cultural shift, adapting to faster timelines, broader collaboration, and different measures of success.1
It’s a transition that can feel larger than a job change. For many, it is a shift in how they understand their professional identity.
What Dr. Perusini’s Story Illustrates
In the webinar, Dr. Perusini shared that the academic route “never felt right” for her. After her PhD at UCLA and during her postdoc at Columbia, she began exploring translational possibilities in her PTSD research. With her advisor, she mapped out how her findings might form the foundation of a company.
She then:
- ➡️ Spent a year building an advisory board, filing patents, and identifying collaborators.
- ➡️ Founded Neurovation Labs, which develops precision CNS therapeutics.
- ➡️ Discovered that timelines outside academia can be longer and more nonlinear—her rule of thumb was to add 10 years to whatever progress you expect.
- ➡️ Built a distributed research model using contract labs and secured multi-year funding from agencies such as the US Department of Defense.
What stands out is Dr. Perusini’s approach: recognizing a misalignment with academia, exploring alternatives early, and moving toward a structure that fit her interests and working style.
Your Skills Are More Transferable Than You Think
One common anxiety among researchers is that their training is too specialized to be useful outside academia. Evidence suggests the opposite.
A large survey of more than 8,000 PhD graduates found that many skills developed during doctoral training—data analysis, project management, teamwork, problem solving, and communication—are equally important in academic and non-academic careers.2
A recent scoping review reached a similar conclusion: doctoral graduates bring a broad set of competencies that employers value, even when job titles differ significantly from “researcher.”3
For career planning, it can help to group your skills into three categories:
- 🔧 Technical skills: Methods, tools, and domain knowledge. Examples include imaging techniques, coding, statistical analysis, regulatory knowledge.
- 🔧 Process skills: Project design, planning, troubleshooting, risk assessment. Examples include running multi-year projects, coordinating collaborators, adapting to constraints.
- 🔧 Communication and collaboration skills: Explaining complex ideas, teaching, writing, mentoring, stakeholder management.
These categories appear consistently across studies of doctoral “graduate attributes” and are closely linked to employability across sectors.⁴
The challenge is rarely whether you have these skills. It is whether you can name them clearly and connect them to real problems organizations need solved.
Practical Steps If You Are Considering a Move
If you are thinking about shifting from academia to industry, you do not have to decide everything at once. You can treat this like any other complex project and work in stages.
1. Clarify What You Want More Of and Less Of
Instead of starting with job titles, list:
- 💡 Tasks that energize you (experimental design, mentoring, writing, translating ideas for non-experts, working with patients, etc.)
- 💡 Tasks that drain you (grant uncertainty, frequent travel, heavy teaching loads, etc.)
Research on doctoral graduates outside academia shows that many report higher satisfaction with contract stability and career progression, while still valuing intellectual challenge.5 Knowing your own non-negotiables helps you evaluate roles more clearly.
2. Map Your Transferable Skills to Real Job Descriptions
Pick a few job ads in areas you might consider: industry scientist, data scientist, MSL, policy fellow, scientific writer, or product specialist. Highlight:
- 💡 Repeated phrases (stakeholder management, cross functional teams, regulatory knowledge)
- 💡 Skills you already use in your current work, even if described differently
Then rewrite your experience in the same language. This is how you show fit without changing what you have actually done.
3. Start Building a Network Before You “Need” It
In the webinar, Dr. Perusini described how she had been networking long before she realized it:
- 💡 Meeting people at conferences
- 💡 Staying in touch with contacts she met early in her career
- 💡 Reaching out directly when she needed advice or connections for her company
Her main advice was simple: “People want to feel useful at the end of the day, and asking for advice is never a problem.”
You do not need a huge network to start. A few honest conversations with people already working in roles that interest you can give you much clearer insight than generic job descriptions.
4. Run Low-Risk Experiments
Before committing to a major change, look for small ways to test your interest in industry-type work:
- 💡 Short internships or secondments
- 💡 Collaborations with external partners
- 💡 Volunteering to help with regulatory, outreach, or data projects in your institution
- 💡 Part-time consulting or scientific writing
Evidence from career development programs suggests that practical exposure helps researchers understand both the possibilities and the trade-offs of non-academic roles.6
Designing a Sustainable Science Career
Moving from academia to industry is not about leaving science. It is about choosing the environment where your skills, values, and ambitions can grow. Research and Dr. Perusini’s experience show that scientists thrive in many settings, not just academic ones.
And while the transition may feel like an identity shift, it does not require you to stop being a scientist. Your scientific identity comes from how you think and solve problems, not from a particular job title. As long as you continue applying evidence, curiosity, and critical reasoning, you carry that identity with you, wherever your career goes next.
- Mangematin, V., Mandran, N., & Crozet, A. (2014). Management of doctoral students: The missing link between training and research? Research Policy, 43(5), 927–942. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2013.12.006
- Sinche, M., et al. (2017). An evidence-based evaluation of transferrable skills and job satisfaction for science PhDs. PLOS ONE, 12(9), e0185023. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185023
- Skakni, I., Kereselidze, N., Parmentier, M., Delobbe, N., & Inouye, K. (2025). PhD graduates pursuing careers beyond academia: A scoping review. Higher Education Research & Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2025.2515211
- Smith, S., & Abegglen, S. (2021). Developing graduate attributes for employability: A review of contemporary doctoral competencies. Frontiers in Education, 6, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.1009106
- Garcia-Morante, M., Amilburu, A., & Leyva-Moral, J. M. (2025). Job activity and wellbeing of PhD holders beyond academia. Learning and Teaching, 14(1), 68–89. https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2025.140105
- Li, H. (2024). Exploring the identity development of PhD graduates transitioning to non-researcher roles. Higher Education Quarterly, 78(2), 421–435. https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12452