Job Search Typology for Physicists

Every job search is different, but there are a few identifiable categories with degrees of difficulty ranging from easy to extremely difficult. Understanding which one your next job search falls into will help you prepare properly. Most of the tales of sorrow stem from ill-prepared people taking on very challenging job searches and, unsurprisingly, meeting with little success. Generally, the degree of job search difficulty can be mapped on three axes: candidate experience, market demand, and personal restrictions. Note that market demand means the demand for the people in the niche you are longing to work in. That may, or may not, have anything to do with the overall economic conditions reported in the news. Likewise, it is your experience relevant to the job you want that counts, not your age, general life experience, or lofty but irrelevant academic degrees. Finally, not everyone can make a big move, take a pay cut, or rearrange their schedule for a new job. There are also those that refuse to change their preconceived ideas about their career trajectory to find work. Here are some common situations that job seekers face:

Recent Graduates

• Hot Specialty and No Restrictions

Congratulations, you do not need this website (for now). This is the golden situation. You come out of college or graduate school with a shiny new degree in a hot field and no personal responsibilities to circumscribe your options. You have your pick of attractive offers. Just be aware that many people who face this fortunate situation when they start their careers run into problems later when they expect things to always come this easily and life does not work out that way.

• Willing to Take Any Job

The good news is that your odds increase if you are willing to go anywhere and take any job. However, you risk setting yourself up for a poorer career trajectory in the future. This is due largely to psychology. Taking a bad entry-level job or low-paid postdoctoral position can signal, to others and yourself, that you are willing to settle for what you can get. If you do need to take a lackluster position to pay the bills, treat it as a means of funding your search for something better. Networking your way to the job you want is a lot easier without the pressure of unemployment. 

• Low Demand or Personal Restriction

Coming out of school into a market with a low demand for graduates in your major can be very challenging. Personal requirements like the need to stay in a particular geographical area can make things even harder. When I finished graduate school, I faced a downturn in federal funding in my specialty and the need to stay on the West Coast of the United State for personal reasons. I also refused to take a low-paying academic postdoctoral position. I muddled through and eventually found a much better-paying national laboratory postdoc in an adjacent sub-field of physics, but, if I am being honest, it was more luck than skill. The techniques I learned later have made job hunting much more systematic and less of a throw of the dice. I recommend starting with my resume guide.   

Early-Career

• Two Body Problems

You can do the long-distance relationship thing for a while, but eventually you want to be a bit closer to that special someone in your life. Physicists love to joke about the “two body problem” when it comes to coordinating the career needs of both members of a couple. This is often as difficult as solving the typically chaotic three body orbit problem that the phrase references. Almost inevitably, one member of the couple gets the first geographic choice and the other must make do. I have been on both sides of that dynamic. If your work is largely computer-based, this might be no big deal in the remote work era. However, for those who are more hands-on, finding a suitable position within a small geographical area can be a big challenge. A vigorous networking campaign will go a long way toward solving this seemingly intractable scenario. Most of the hard situations like this I have mentored people through have had happy endings, but it took several months and a lot of persistence.

Mid-Career

• The Moderate Switch

You have worked at the same organization for several years, doing well, advancing in your career, getting raises, etc. Then something changes. Perhaps you must move closer to an ailing parent, or your spouse has an amazing opportunity in a new city. Maybe you are just tired of what you are doing or see your prospects dimming. In any case, it is time to make a significant, but not radical, change. In the moderate switch, you are still looking to “play the same sport.” In other words, you want to work in the same general field at approximately the same sort of job, but in a significantly new context. One example is the time I switched from fusion research to a defense job for a few years, but my day-to-day tasks and the technical issues in my new job had a greater than 50% overlap with those in my old job. Another example is a friend of mine who worked as a university professor for a decade and then transitioned to a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) but worked on similar problems in the same physics specialty the whole time. Moderate switches can be very wise career moves because they build on your past experience and training while broadening your horizons. However, such a move still involves convincing people that you are flexible and dynamic enough to make a moderate switch and thrive in the new environment. To succeed, you must prepare your story motivating your desire to change and tell it persuasively during your networking campaign and interviews. 

• The Radical Switch

Sometimes, shaking things up in a moderate way is not enough. Inevitably, a fraction of people will find themselves on the completely wrong trajectory in their professional lives. Often, this realization will look and feel like a midlife (or quarter-life) crisis. Examples include people I know who have decided to enter law after completing a PhD in the physical sciences. Radical switches are marked by significant changes between fields that require going back to school for a new degree or basically starting over from scratch in other ways. Think carefully about undertaking this sort of change, as the costs are very high in terms of the past time and effort put into your original career that you will largely write off. An extremely thorough networking campaign is in order to understand what your new field is really like before making any hard-to-reverse decisions. Professional counseling, both personal and professional, may be a wise investment as well.