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Posts tagged career development
My weekly Mum Entrepreneur Interviews
Aug 23rd
As a regular blog segment I wanted to interview mums who have taken control of their career and started a business from home. As I juggle with child
care and full time work, my dream job would be to come up with a great idea or exploit a skill and be my own boss.
Although my degrees are science and technology, I doubt I will be coming up with a new invention or medical breakthrough (although if you have please contact me I would love to hear about it) anytime soon. I have met plenty of professional science and business entrepreneurs but the mum niche market is something different altogether. Over the series of interviews we will discuss challenges, tips and how mums around the world did it.
If you have a question to ask these mums please email me at lisad @ thelastdegree.com or if you would like to register you interest please go to my page “The Rise of the Mum Entrepreneurs.”
In search of Graphic Design
Aug 11th
Since re-launching my blog and finding new forums and reading some awesome blogs, I have had an itch to learn Photoshop, Illustrator and graphic design. My main motivation is to learn how to design a wonderful new Theme for my blog and take better photos. The library has a heap of online teach your-self text books but I want to do more. I have always said, “My only VHA (very high achievement) at school was Art and then I enrolled in science.” At the time I could not see a career as an artist and it’s only now do I have a real creative itch to do something. It’s not that I am busy enough but I have been researching what course options I have in Brisbane. There is TAFE, a private college, short courses at Griffith Uni College of Art or the Bachelor Degree of Graphic Art at almost all Universities.
All week I was looking forward to the Griffith University Open day last Sunday to have a look at their courses advertised and I confess we were really disappointed. The agenda advertised, “international food, creative markets by students, galleries, talks and demonstrations.” We got the girls ready in super cute jerseys, packed two single prams, paid for parking and off we went. The “International food” was the canteen, the creative market was one stall with nude art photos and the questions I asked at the design stall was quite depressing. Obviously it was a while since I left high school and when I queried about part-time, they looked at my pram and said I would have to work around childcare. All these parents accompanying their high school children and here I was with two prams. Never felt so out of place. Is uni really only for 18 year olds? I might just look into TAFE or short courses instead.
The story about Chlamydia
Jul 23rd
“You’re the only person in the world who has a folder on your computer hard drive titled Chlamydia,” my sister once said.
Now to get the story straight almost ten years ago I spent a year studying the molecular evidence of Chlamydia affecting our Koala population. It was my graduate science Honours degree and during the project I carried the scientific motivation and fascination for discovering something new although most of the year involved silently trying to spell Chlamydia correctly and pronouncing the species name C.trachomatis without embarrassment.
Now my results are not ground breaking (although I recently searched for my own publication and it has been cited a few times since – Whoopee fo
r bibliometrics) but I did discover and characterise novel uncultured Chlamydiales in Free-Range Koala Populations.
Although I no longer work in the laboratory, I have never been able to capture the same feeling of accomplishment as I did from that project.
What made this project different? Was it:
- The autonomy and problem solving,
- The opportunities to experiment with an idea,
- Having access to skilled and intelligent mentors,
- Strict deadlines which meant late night and weekends in the laboratory to try new experiments, theories and repeat results. Extra hours which for some reason I did not mind doing.
- The meticulous writing up of laboratory notes. Like a Vision diary creative expression is all in your laboratory books and lastly
- The satisfaction of having your results in print.
I often wonder if I should have continued with the curiosity that drives career scientists into a PhD and research. Instead I chose the commercial world. Today I wonder if I had continued on the research trajectory would I have been driven to discover something innovative and groundbreaking or even becoming an expert in my own niche of science and would it have been a more fulfilling career.
So what parts of that project I enjoyed most can I start to replicate again today?
On a final note, not to dampen my achievement in the paper “Molecular evidence for novel chlamydial infections in the koala (Devereaux etal Syst Appl Microbiol. 2003 Jun;26(2):245-53), can you see the different interpretation my father had as he would proudly report in public that his daughter “is named after new species of Chlamydia and had a publication to boot.”?
Seek Your Dream Career and Hit the Apply Button
Jul 21st
You spend most of your life at work so its best to find something you enjoy. Hence I am always interested to know how people got their dream job. Over the past fifteen years I have had jobs that helped me get through study, had the graduate jobs, and I have also been fired from a few (or in other words where I did not culturally fit).
Recently I was asked for my advice on how to get that DREAM JOB and this is my practise in action:
- Do an online career assessment. One of the best ones I have seen is based on the theme ‘Fish for your career’, this career test assesses your interest in over 170 occupations to determine the career and area of study that best suits you.
Find your ideal career with this popular online career assessment.
Take control of your career and put it into action every day.
Set up daily FREE email searches on Seek.com.au
This is how. Set up an account with seek.com.au (Australia’s no 1 job search engine or find equivalent overseas) and list all the dream job titles you want in the keywords. This strategy is not necessarily to apply for the jobs but to research and read the advertisements.
What it teaches you is:
- Where the jobs are (interstate, local, overseas etc).
- What is the demand for these jobs or skills? For an example is there a high need for people with these skills (represented by a lot of advertisements) or only a few?
- Are they permanent roles or cyclical, more casual and part-time or contract or consultancy preferred.
- What companies recruit these people? So you can do research on the companies, and even approach them for work experience? Get to know the companies! Especially for industry knowledge and competition in the market and if you ever meet people from these companies you will have something to talk about.
- What are the salary scales for junior entry to senior roles.
- Selection criteria! What do I need to do to get the skills required for these kinds of roles? And then integrate them into your career plan. If you are lacking in one key skill that a lot of advertisement ask for you know that is what you have to do so you can apply.
This is not a quick fix as it takes time to understand a particular job and industry market. I have been doing this for years since I worked in recruitment back in 2003.
Even though I have a good job now I still receive the Seek emails every day for keywords I am interested in like technology commercialisation and business development. It is always good to be up-to date in the market and know who is employing who. Keep your network up to date so you know where people leave jobs and where they are going too (i.e. Linked-in is good for that). It will take some time but worth the effort.
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