If you’re a life sciences researcher wondering where your PhD could take you, have a look at the above infographic created by Jessica Polka for The American Society for Cell Biology. It’s based on US data, but paints a similar (although, to quote the infographic’s author, “not as dire”), picture as previous UK reports: perhaps surprisingly, most Biology PhDs end up working outside of academic research.

The last in our series of guest blogs by PhD holders who work at IMS Consulting Group. You will find more information about PhD life science careers and IMS Consulting Group in our in our Careers in Clinical Research, Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals Forum for PhD/research students which will be held on 28th February 2012. Go to the Forum page on the Graduate School website for more details about this event.  We look forward to seeing you there!

Currently there are more PhDs in IMSCG than I can count. PhD students typically apply for consulting because they find that they can apply their problem-solving skills in new ways, work in team settings which can make a measurable impact, and be exposed to a variety of different projects in a short amount of time. In contrast to your PhD, at IMSCG we work on projects that are around 12 weeks long and often can be much shorter; as a result, the breadth of topics is extensive.

In addition to the formal introductory training, everyone in the organization, from peers to senior team members, is interested in your learning and progress. On projects, you will therefore receive on-the-job training and informal mentoring support, which greatly contribute to your professional growth. Furthermore, every new starter is assigned a coach who is part of the senior team – your coach offers mentoring support and advice, and tracks your progress within IMSCG in order to identify particular development needs.

One aspect of IMSCG that I have come to appreciate is that client management comes when you advance to consultant, which is significantly sooner than in other consulting firms. In addition, going to and presenting at client meetings often occurs at the analyst level, which offers the opportunity to witness firsthand how clients think. Given that as a PhD I had presented at few conferences and frequently at weekly scheduled lab meetings, I relished the opportunity to join and present at meetings, which I found to be a welcome challenge and a great opportunity for professional growth.

Overall the environment at IMSCG has many of the things I like about the university environment without the long, drawn out project work or failed experiments. At IMSCG, as in academia, you think of creative ways to solve a problem, you have a network of people who can support and you have the opportunity to work with really smart people.

Maria Kosmaoglou, IMS Consulting Group

Here is the 2nd of our series of guest blogs by PhD holders who work at IMS Consulting Group. You will find more information about PhD life science careers and IMS Consulting Group in our  Careers in Clinical Research, Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals  Forum for PhD/research students which will be held on 28th February 2012. Go to the Forum page on the Graduate School website for more details about this event.

IMSCG’s business is management consulting to the life sciences sector. So it makes sense that the company has two main priorities when recruiting:  the competencies required to be a management consultant and a strong interest in, and perhaps some background knowledge of, the life sciences sector. PhDs, especially those from the natural sciences, are therefore an excellent group in which to find promising candidates with this combination of characteristics.

The tendency for natural sciences PhDs to be interested in the life sciences sector is not surprising (although the emotive and pervasive nature of healthcare in our lives also attracts many PhDs from other disciplines). But what about the management consulting competencies?

A major part of the core skills of a management consultant is bringing objectivity, structured thinking and analysis to a complex and unstructured question. Consultants are curious people who enjoy problem solving. PhDs similarly tend to be curious by nature, interested in solving problems and combining objectivity and analysis in one form or another to a specific issue.

My PhD has definitely been a helpful starting point for these core management consulting skills. It gave me experience looking at a large and complex overall question and coming up with a way of approaching that question in individual steps. It gave me experience thinking about how to organize and present complex data and how to communicate the outputs of my research. And during my PhD, I took ownership for the outcomes of my own work, giving me a good sense of accountability.

That isn’t to say that my academic-type problem solving and analytical skills were enough on their own for management consulting at IMSCG. The thinking in consulting is much more explicitly structured and analytical than in academia; I therefore had to sharpen up on these skills before the interviews. I also had to learn how to do it in a much faster-paced environment, more intensively within a team, and with much shorter time periods for producing and showing people outputs of the work.

As my PhD was in the life sciences it also helped with understanding the more technical side of the life sciences sector. But if you don’t faint at the sight of words like atorvastatin or bevacizumab, then you can also learn that on the job!

Joel Hooper, IMS Consulting

In the lead up to UCL’s Careers in Clinical Research, Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals Forum which will be held on 28th February 2012, here is the first in a series of guest blogs by PhD holders who work at IMS Consulting Group.

I spent just under five fun, happy and, I’d like to think, productive years at UCL working towards my PhD in Neuroscience.  The first of year my PhD was actually a rotation year where I undertook three 3-month projects in labs at UCL, Kings and Imperial, following which I was able to choose where I wanted to spend the next 3-4 years for my main PhD project.  My choice was UCL, for a number of reasons:

Firstly, the campus has a great location in the heart of the city and most importantly it accommodates the majority of UCL’s degree courses on one large and single site. This gives UCL that rare feeling of a real campus university within London and creates a sense of community that is perhaps more associated with universities outside of the capital. Another attraction of UCL is its diversity, both culturally and academically. One day you might find yourself sitting in the Print Room Café alongside a Pharmacology lecturer from St Albans and the next day you’ll be sharing a table with a Law PhD from Greece. During my time at UCL, which was spent mostly in various laboratories and science buildings around the campus, I connected with a number of intellectually curious and academically brilliant people from all over the world with the same ambition to strive for excellence and challenge themselves; this is what makes UCL one of the world’s leading universities, particularly in life sciences.

The things I appreciated the most about UCL are things that equally drew me to IMS Consulting Group: people are proud to work at IMSCG and there is a strong emphasis on teamwork and community. IMSCG has a non-hierarchical structure which means that everyone’s opinion counts. Furthermore, people of all nationalities join the firm from both science and non-science backgrounds but one thing that is certain is that, like at UCL, all are welcome and all are appreciated. This opportunity to network with and work alongside so many great thinkers is something I had wanted to maintain upon leaving academia and thankfully this has been the case at IMSCG.  Our people continually challenge each other to better ourselves, though never to a level that creates competitiveness amongst peers. Because of our intellectual approach to project work, IMSCG continues to be at the forefront of the healthcare industry and is able to make a real impact on issues that our clients face and that will shape the industry for years to come.

Richard D’Mello, IMS Consulting Group

Find out more about life science careers for PhDs and IMS Consulting Group at the Careers in Clinical Research, Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals Forum.
To register for this event see the  PhD Employer Forum – Careers in Clinical Research, Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals page on the Graduate School website.