You have a degree, a job, and a steady paycheck. But whether you’re a lab tech, an engineer, or a research scientist, you wonder if there’s a little more in store for your career. So what’s required to push you to new heights? A few online classes? What about on-the-job training, or a short course at a conference? Or, do you need to return to school, full time?

These are the questions that grappled with as a postdoctoral fellow in biology, studying liver diseases at the University of Texas at Austin. “In academia, I always had the feeling that I wasn’t close enough to the application of what I was doing,” he says. “I wanted that excitement of putting a product in the market.”

Luckily for Conde-Vancells, scientists in the US – and around the world – have a dizzying array of options when it comes to ways to pick up new skills, learn a new field, or get a new degree. The best path, however, depends on your goals.

When a PhD is the key

“Science is still an industry that has a high regard and respect for education, and specifically graduate-level education,” says of the Center for Biotechnology Education at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Massachusetts. A PhD, often followed by one or more postdoctoral fellowships, is the well-trodden road to a research career in either academic or commercial science.

But the average science PhD takes seven years – not including postdoctoral fellowships – and a third of graduates are left with student debt. Those are big commitments, particularly as revealed that only 16 per cent of science and engineering PhDs found a tenure-track job three years after graduation. PhDs do have a lower unemployment rate than the general public, but it’s this sense of job shortage that sometimes sends scientists back to school.

“There are too many PhDs out there, and academia cannot absorb all of us,” says Conde-Vancells.

Business time

Having already invested years in a graduate education, Conde-Vancells settled on a part-time, online, master of biotechnology enterprise and entrepreneurship program run by Johns Hopkins. The degree armed him with business skills while he was finishing his postdoctoral fellowship in Texas.

Langer, who helps run the master’s-level program, says more institutions are beginning to offer such focused but flexible courses. “It’s a new twenty-first century degree,” she says. “It’s really for scientists who want to expand their career options.”

It worked for Conde-Vancells. After developing a full biotechnology marketing plan in class, the same task came up in a job interview for UK biotech company Abcam a few months later. “I directly used the experience I’d gotten from the project,” he says. Just prior to his graduation from Johns Hopkins, he joined Abcam as a product marketing specialist.

Susanne Tranguch also sought a life outside the lab. She received a PhD in cell biology from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, but didn’t feel her research role was conducive to family life. She found a job editing grants at New York University (NYU), but like many scientists she didn’t want to stop learning.

“I figured that an MBA [master’s in business administration] would expand my scope and let me see how things work from a broader perspective,” she says. NYU helped cover the costs of Tranguch’s part-time program at the NYU Stern School of Business, where she graduated last year.

Around two-thirds of employers offer some form of tuition assistance or reimbursement for graduate-level courses or programs. Scientists working at universities may be able to get subsidized classes at their own institution, while those working in industry have a wider choice, but usually have to continue working at their company for a period after they finish school. In both cases, though, classes must be squeezed into an often already-busy work schedule.

Tranguch believes an MBA can teach scientists to take greater control of their careers. “I can speak both languages now – science and business. That is a real asset, regardless of where your career leads,” she says.

However, skilling up needn’t mean changing jobs, or committing to hefty obligations outside lab hours. Scientific associations, society and conferences around the country sponsor a huge array of single- to five-day courses, with , on topics from spectroscopy to leadership. The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, even offers a new week-long course covering science communication, entrepreneurship, teaching, mentoring and laboratory management skills.

Scientists looking to dip their toes into another field entirely can find degrees, certificates and individual college classes offering paths to science roles in public relations, teaching, medicine, or patent law.

Such intermediary courses are also open to people entering science from other backgrounds. After losing her father to cancer, Dawn Smith began working with a cancer-support non-profit in her free time. She had degrees in telecommunications and school counseling and was working as an academic advisor at a community college, but soon felt a calling to work in science and healthcare full time.

“I knew that to get any type of position in the healthcare industry, I would need to prove that I had some body of knowledge beyond my personal experience with cancer,” Smith says. She enrolled in a MOOC – a massive open online course – in pharmacology. More than 1,200 MOOCs are available from hundreds of academic institutions around the world. MOOCs are largely free – some charge for accreditation, but not attendance – and to date they have attracted more than 8 million student registrations.

MOOCs can be a useful introduction to a field or even highly specialized graduate courses that are offered at only a few universities around the world. “You can have amazing access to education that wasn’t available a few years ago,” says , a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, whose MOOC on global sustainability was taken by more than 35,000 people the first time it was offered. “And right now, it’s an order of magnitude cheaper than any other option.”

However, employers might not feel such courses carry the intellectual clout of a traditional, full-time degree. MOOCs also have a high drop-out rate, which some researchers have attributed to the lack of face-to-face contact inherent in an online course. Smith, though, stuck with her pharmacology class and believes it helped her land a new job and progress in it – she’s now the director of communications for the University of Illinois Cancer Center.

“If you’re a scientist and you want to leave the laboratory, there are certainly multiple avenues you can go down,” says Langer. For scientists looking at life beyond the lab bench, or those hoping to dive into science for the first time, the range of options from master’s to MOOCs means there are plenty of options to dip their toes – or fully immerse themselves – in a new field.

When Lorraine Tracey found out she was pregnant with her first baby, her feelings of joy were mixed with anxiety. As a postdoctoral cancer researcher, Tracey worried that she might not be entitled to the paid maternity leave offered to faculty members. Even if she was, would taking time out from her research leave it in the dust? Would her career perish if she did not publish?

“My biggest concern was whether taking leave after having my son would impact how good or bad a reference I got from my adviser,” Tracey says.

She’s not alone. Almost half of female scientists say they have had fewer children than they desired in order to maintain their career, says at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

The same issues concern male postdocs, who also worry that taking time off will slow the progress of their research and their publication rate, which is key in finding future funding and jobs. According to a recent survey conducted by Ecklund and , sociologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, because of their career.

Another major challenge is that postdocs often lack the benefits that faculty members receive, says Ecklund. Last year, a National Postdoctoral Association (NPA) survey of 78 institutions found that rather than employees, which can mean lower pay, higher health insurance premiums, and no paid maternity or paternity leave or subsidised childcare.

Add to this the fact that most people take on postdoctoral research in the middle of their childbearing years, and you’ve got a perfect storm. “There’s always this sense that the tenure track clock is fighting against the biological clock,” says Ecklund.

Fortunately, there are ways to overcome the obstacles. It’s all about planning, says at the NPA.

“We recommend writing out an actual research plan to submit to your supervisor that manages all the way from the beginning of the pregnancy through your leave time and the transition back to work,” says Ehm. This plan should outline what you aim to get done before your baby is due and how much time you plan to take off. You should also suggest other people who could temporarily take over your project, and describe how you will manage the transition back to work.

Planning ahead will help ease any tensions with your supervisor about your leave and ensure you avoid falling behind with research and publications, says Ehm.

It is also worth planning for childcare. If both parents are postdoctoral fellows, paying for full-time childcare with a combined income of as little as $80,000 can be a stretch to say the least. An increasing number of institutions are beginning to offer subsidised on-site childcare – speak to your human resources department to find out what’s on offer.

Know your rights

Some postdoctoral researchers are covered by the , which allows new mothers and fathers to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave from work. Talk to your institution to find out if you’re covered.

Women who aren’t covered by the FMLA are still able to take between four and six weeks of unpaid leave after giving birth – the exact length depends on which US state your institution is in. If this is all you’re entitled to, you can still tack on any unused holiday or sick leave to maximise your time off.

As it stands, there’s little financial support for new parents on maternity and paternity leave, which can make starting a family an especially expensive decision for postdocs. That could soon change, though. In September 2011, the National Science Foundation (NSF), together with First Lady Michelle Obama, launched the – a 10-year plan to develop “workplace flexibility policies to support America’s scientists and their families”. The NSF has already started to offer financial help to temporarily cover principal investigators who take family leave.

Beyond that, the initiative mainly focuses on enforcing existing laws and investigating how scientists can make time for family life. As a result, the NSF and National Institutes of Health (NIH) have recently drawn institutions’ attention to the existing rule that .

It’s then up to the individual to make sure the rules are adhered to, as Maria Hernandez discovered. Hernandez, a pregnant postdoc at the in Albany, managed this in a couple of emails. While her work was funded by the NIH, a federal agency, Hernandez received her funding through an external agency, which refused her request to take time off. Knowing her rights, Hernandez emailed the NIH officer responsible for her grant. “They were absolutely amazing about the way they approached it,” she says. “My funding was frozen for a year and when I came back I had no problems.”

Perfect timing

Choosing the right time to start a family can be tricky when you’re juggling ongoing projects. In fact, Ehm reckons there’s no “perfect time” in a science career to have kids – it all comes down to when you feel ready.

“There are still a lot of big questions and a lack of data regarding how to best make it work for postdocs,” she says. “But the best time for any person should be what works for them, their spouse, and their personal life.”

Balancing a family and a career can work to your advantage. Hernandez says that having to manage a family and a career has made her a more diligent scientist. “Now that I have more limited time to accomplish things in the lab, I’m actually much more focused and organised with my time at work,” she says.

Both Tracey and Hernandez say they have no regrets about the timing of their babies. “I don’t think life gets any less busy as you move up the ladder,” says Tracey. “I have less time and energy the older I’ve gotten. If having a family is something that’s a priority for someone, I would tell them to go ahead and do it.”

For Green and other geoscience consultants like her, the ability to travel is part of the job’s attraction, as is the fact that no two projects are the same. One might involve spending days on a boat in the middle of the ocean working out where to lay undersea gas lines, while the next could be investigating the source of arsenic-contaminated groundwater.

If this type of lifestyle sounds attractive, you are in luck. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicts that jobs for geoscientists will increase by 21 per cent between 2010 and 2020, compared with 7 per cent for all occupations in the US combined.

According to the BLS Occupational Handbook, most of these jobs will be in “management, scientific, and technical consulting services as more geoscientists are hired as consultants” as government agencies farm out work they once would have done in-house.

So what does it mean to be a consultant in this field, and what does it take to get a job?

As a geoscience consultant, your job is to study every detail of the geology and hydrology of a site – whether it’s the side of a mountain, a salt mine, an underwater plot of land or an empty field – for clients such as landowners, developers or potential buyers. You could be called on to analyse proposed building sites for poor drainage or stability, for example. If you’re investigating contamination, you’ll be looking at the nature and extent of the land or water pollution and proposing remediation options. If you work in the oil and gas industry, you’ll be analysing an area’s geology to determine where to drill for oil and gas.

Most employers expect a least a master’s degree in geosciences, says Samuel Gowan, president of Alpha Geoscience, a consultancy based in New York. When you start, it’s likely that you’ll be doing a lot of fieldwork: surveying areas of interest, sampling soil and water, and drilling below the surface to collect rock samples that paint a complete picture of a plot of land.

“We like to get the individual out in the field as much as possible early in their career,” says Gowan. “That’s how you learn to collect data, how to take good notes and how to process the data that’s collected.”

The field is “where the rubber meets the road,” says Green, an independent consultant based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s where the most excitement happens and where the skills and training of a geologist are put to the test, she says. Early in her career, she spent anywhere from a few days to nine months at a time living out of hotels near a field site, often working long hours.

“A young consulting geologist needs to get their head around a lot of field time,” she says. “But if you enjoy that, it can be a tremendous amount of fun and a huge learning experience. An adventurous nature is definitely needed to keep the interest alive.”

Patience is also a key quality, says independent geosciences consultant Kent Simpson, who is based in Canada but works on a consulting basis for organisations around the world. “There are rarely absolute start and end dates,” he says. “The projects are subject to weather conditions and equipment conditions. I’ve been on projects that, if everything went perfectly, could have been completed in a week but have taken five.”

Once data is collected, there are reports to be written, clients to speak to and presentations to be made. As you progress in your career, it’s likely you’ll do less fieldwork and more data analysis, if that’s what you’d prefer. Or, like Green and Simpson, you could launch your own consulting company. “What I like to see in young employees is the desire to progress,” says Gowan. “Get interested in professional activities outside your job; join professional societies. Don’t just take a job and sit in the corner doing your technical work.”

Silver lining

The health of the geoscience consulting sector is closely tied to the health of the construction industry – so as the housing sector rebounds after the global recession and the US economy grows, consultants should expect to see their work pick up. In many cases, however, this increased workload can be slow to be reflected in job openings. So while the BLS’s predictions aren’t necessarily being seen yet, analysts think that growth will pick up in the coming years as the economy gets back up to speed.

“Firms are cautious about making new hires before they’re sure that the increased work will stick,” says William Siok, executive director of the American Institute of Professional Geologists in Colorado. “There are jobs right now, but not necessarily for everyone who wants a job.” He advises budding consultants to be flexible in terms of where they look for a position, how much they are willing to travel and what size company they will consider. Both large and small consulting firms have unique benefits.

And if you’re not totally sure whether to swap academia for consulting, don’t fret. Young scientists can consider a consulting job to be an extension of their education, even if they’re not sure it’s what they want to do for life. “With every job, you’re solving a different geological puzzle,” says Green. “That’s what keeps me on my toes and keeps me interested.”

For Green and other geoscience consultants like her, the ability to travel is part of the job’s attraction, as is the fact that no two projects are the same. One might involve spending days on a boat in the middle of the ocean working out where to lay undersea gas lines, while the next could be investigating the source of arsenic-contaminated groundwater.

If this type of lifestyle sounds attractive, you are in luck. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicts that jobs for geoscientists will increase by 21 per cent between 2010 and 2020, compared with 7 per cent for all occupations in the US combined.

According to the BLS Occupational Handbook, most of these jobs will be in “management, scientific, and technical consulting services as more geoscientists are hired as consultants” as government agencies farm out work they once would have done in-house.

So what does it mean to be a consultant in this field, and what does it take to get a job?

As a geoscience consultant, your job is to study every detail of the geology and hydrology of a site – whether it’s the side of a mountain, a salt mine, an underwater plot of land or an empty field – for clients such as landowners, developers or potential buyers. You could be called on to analyse proposed building sites for poor drainage or stability, for example. If you’re investigating contamination, you’ll be looking at the nature and extent of the land or water pollution and proposing remediation options. If you work in the oil and gas industry, you’ll be analysing an area’s geology to determine where to drill for oil and gas.

Most employers expect a least a master’s degree in geosciences, says Samuel Gowan, president of Alpha Geoscience, a consultancy based in New York. When you start, it’s likely that you’ll be doing a lot of fieldwork: surveying areas of interest, sampling soil and water, and drilling below the surface to collect rock samples that paint a complete picture of a plot of land.

“We like to get the individual out in the field as much as possible early in their career,” says Gowan. “That’s how you learn to collect data, how to take good notes and how to process the data that’s collected.”

The field is “where the rubber meets the road,” says Green, an independent consultant based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s where the most excitement happens and where the skills and training of a geologist are put to the test, she says. Early in her career, she spent anywhere from a few days to nine months at a time living out of hotels near a field site, often working long hours.

“A young consulting geologist needs to get their head around a lot of field time,” she says. “But if you enjoy that, it can be a tremendous amount of fun and a huge learning experience. An adventurous nature is definitely needed to keep the interest alive.”

Patience is also a key quality, says independent geosciences consultant Kent Simpson, who is based in Canada but works on a consulting basis for organisations around the world. “There are rarely absolute start and end dates,” he says. “The projects are subject to weather conditions and equipment conditions. I’ve been on projects that, if everything went perfectly, could have been completed in a week but have taken five.”

Once data is collected, there are reports to be written, clients to speak to and presentations to be made. As you progress in your career, it’s likely you’ll do less fieldwork and more data analysis, if that’s what you’d prefer. Or, like Green and Simpson, you could launch your own consulting company. “What I like to see in young employees is the desire to progress,” says Gowan. “Get interested in professional activities outside your job; join professional societies. Don’t just take a job and sit in the corner doing your technical work.”

Silver lining

The health of the geoscience consulting sector is closely tied to the health of the construction industry – so as the housing sector rebounds after the global recession and the US economy grows, consultants should expect to see their work pick up. In many cases, however, this increased workload can be slow to be reflected in job openings. So while the BLS’s predictions aren’t necessarily being seen yet, analysts think that growth will pick up in the coming years as the economy gets back up to speed.

“Firms are cautious about making new hires before they’re sure that the increased work will stick,” says William Siok, executive director of the American Institute of Professional Geologists in Colorado. “There are jobs right now, but not necessarily for everyone who wants a job.” He advises budding consultants to be flexible in terms of where they look for a position, how much they are willing to travel and what size company they will consider. Both large and small consulting firms have unique benefits.

And if you’re not totally sure whether to swap academia for consulting, don’t fret. Young scientists can consider a consulting job to be an extension of their education, even if they’re not sure it’s what they want to do for life. “With every job, you’re solving a different geological puzzle,” says Green. “That’s what keeps me on my toes and keeps me interested.”

Every other week, biochemist Michelle Arkin sets up a videoconference before her lab’s group meeting. And when the lab meeting starts, she doesn’t only welcome her fellow scientists at the University of California, San Francisco. She also greets their remote collaborators: scientists from Pfizer or Janssen Research & Development, depending on the day. As the group reviews the latest data, everyone helps shape the project’s direction and suggests ways to improve the experiments.

“In my experience, scientists from industry and academia are most often on the same page,” says Arkin. “They have the same spirit and the same goals to advance the research.” Arkin and her colleagues at UCSF’s Small Molecule Discovery Center have made it a goal to collaborate with industry, as well as pursue independent research, since the center’s inception seven years ago. These collaborations – characterised by constant phone calls, FedEx shipments of reagents between the team members and shared group meetings – help keep their science focused on results.

Arkin’s set-up is by no means an anomaly in university labs today. As competition for federal research funding heats up and companies pare down their research and development budgets, there’s a shift happening in science. Funding rates at both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are at the lowest in a decade, with less than a quarter of proposals receiving money. And so, more than at any other time in history, scientists are embracing the chance to work with industry.

“There’s been this generational change,” says Anthony Boccanfuso, executive director of the US National Academies’ University-Industry Demonstration Partnership, which exists to promote such collaborations. “Thirty years ago, consulting for industry was seen to be not as pure as federal funding.” Now, he says, more scientists feel that working with industry will not only help their research make a more immediate difference to the public, it will also help keep them in the black.

Thinking differently

It’s not just the scientists’ attitudes that are changing. The entire nature of academia-industry partnerships is different to what it was a few decades ago. Today’s collaborations steer away from one-off grants and the straightforward exchange of money for research. Instead, long-term partnerships and multi-player ventures, in which all sides help direct the science, are the order of the day.

“It’s much more interactive now,” says Andrew Watson, interim director for technology transfer at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. “Researchers are talking weekly, sometimes even daily, with their industry partners about what’s going on with the science and the project.” This means that the company has more control over the day-to-day science, but also that the research is more likely to contribute to a successful drug, device or product. If the research hits a dead end, the project can be cut short, or its course can be changed quickly.

Setting up these collaborations is rarely a matter of waiting for the company to call because they’ve seen your latest brilliant, and totally relevant, journal paper. Things sometimes need a little lubrication, which often comes from your university. Many will mediate communication between a researcher and a company, but the most forward-thinking take a more active role. It’s not uncommon for a university, through its technology transfer or corporate liaison office, to assemble groups of researchers working on similar projects and advertise them to companies as a package deal. Some will even offer funds to help launch industry collaborations.

“When I approach a company today, we’re talking about the possibility of bringing to the table its money, but also money from the university and from government agencies,” says Wayne Johnson, assistant vice president for corporate relations at Caltech. “It’s a larger idea than a one-to-one relationship.”

Johnson has worked on the industry side of science for most of his career – at Raytheon, Microsoft and HP – and is now helping Caltech put together project proposals that will appeal to industry. A single proposal, he says, can take months to coordinate and is far beyond the reach of most scientists to assemble on their own. “You need to have the ability to understand the innovation ecosystem,” he says. “Who are all the players? What are the problems and issues you’re trying to deal with? What other universities are working in this arena that we could team up with?”

And for scientists coming out of industry, it’s not just in advisor-level positions where they can help universities. At MD Anderson Cancer Center’s new Institute for Applied Cancer Science in Houston, the focus is on accelerating the development of therapeutics for cancer. That means industry collaborations, but also performing some of the jobs that industry used to do, such as chemistry and compound development, under the auspices of the institute.

“What’s helping academia do this is the deconsolidation going on in industry,” says Giulio Draetta, the institute’s director. As industry cuts R&D jobs, academic institutions can hire industry chemists, for example, to work for them. “This helps to blend the cultures,” he adds.

Moving into collaboration

So what steps should academic scientists take if they want to get involved in industry collaboration? First, learn about the industry or company you want to work with and how your skills can contribute. Remember, collaborators will rarely come to you. Second, see whether industry collaboration in general – or with a specific partner – is right for you. Try to get access to small packages of funding that let you try out a partnership. Third, be sure to involve the technology transfer or corporate liaison departments at your university. “Don’t sign anything until you involve the appropriate office at your university,” says Watson.

Perhaps most importantly, you need to get used to a different way of thinking. “The biggest difference that researchers might experience in their daily work with industry collaborations is that projects must have a beginning, a middle and an end, as well as a reporting schedule and a budget,” says Tom Brzustowski, who is professor of the commercialisation of innovations at the University of Ottawa. “There are things that can be quite foreign when you are doing basic research.”

It’s also about networking – another thing that some scientists shy away from. “Industry collaborations are all about who you know,” says Watson. At scientific meetings, you should have a stack of business cards ready to give to industry representatives.

Once you’ve made contact with a company you’re interested in working with, follow up after the meeting with emails and phone calls. As Watson says, “Keep your name in front of them so that when they have an opportunity to collaborate, you’re the first person they think of.”