how hard is it to get a research job

Career Paths

• Mar 6, 2024
• 11 min read

How to Become a Researcher (Duties, Salary and Steps)

You could uncover the next big thing in our lives.

Mike Dalley

HR and Learning & Development Expert

Reviewed by Chris Leitch

Everything important in our day-to-day life started as a groundbreaking piece of research.

Researchers make ideas come to life, and all of the things that we take for granted wouldn’t be here without research. Therefore, being a researcher offers a rewarding, challenging and varied career path .

This article takes you through the details of being a researcher, including what this exciting role entails, what the working environment and salary are like and, critically, what you can do to get started in the role.

What is a researcher?

A researcher collects data and undertakes investigations into a particular subject , publishing their findings. The purpose of this is to uncover new knowledge or theories. Researchers typically specialize in a particular field and follow rigorous methodologies in order to ensure their research is credible.

What are the different types of researchers?

There are many ways to categorize researchers, such as by their field, expertise or methodologies. Here are six basic types of researchers:

• Applied researchers use existing scientific knowledge to solve problems . They use this knowledge to develop new technologies or methodologies.
• Clinical researchers conduct research related to medical treatments or diseases. They often work in institutions like hospitals or pharmaceutical companies.
• Corporate researchers collect data related to business environments, with the aim to use this to benefit organizations.
• Market researchers gather data related to consumer preferences or an organization’s competitors.
• Social researchers investigate human behavior and the factors influencing this. Social research relates to fields like psychology , anthropology and economics.
• Policy researchers work with companies and governments to investigate the impact of policies, regulations or programs.

What does a researcher do?

Researcher work is quite varied. It begins with reviewing existing research and literature and formulating research questions . Researchers also have to design studies and protocols for their research, and diligently and thoroughly collect data.

Once the data is collected, researchers have to critically analyze their findings and communicate them . To ensure the research is reliable, researchers must embrace peer review , where their research is evaluated by other researchers in the same field, and draw conclusions accordingly. The entirety of this process must be bound by ethical considerations, as researchers have a duty to ensure their work is truthful, integral and accurate.

Researchers also undertake supportive duties, such as applying for grants and funding, and investigating new areas to research.

What is their work environment?

Researchers’ work environment depends greatly on the type of research they are doing and their field. The typical researcher environment can, therefore, vary considerably but might include time in laboratories, academic institutions, office spaces and IT workshops. There might also be the need to undergo onsite fieldwork or attend conferences and workshops.

Researchers work in collaborative environments, and teamwork is common. That said, they also need to undertake plenty of solo work that requires concentration and quiet. Consequently, they need to be happy in a variety of different work settings.

How many hours do they work?

The hours researchers work vary just as much as their working environment. Freelance or contract researchers might work atypical hours, whereas academic or corporate researchers might work more standard hours, such as a 40-hour working week.

Field researchers might have to work longer hours at times in order to collect data. This also might involve travel time.

All researchers might have to work long hours when deadlines are due, or when projects are time-sensitive. Finally, because of the idiosyncratic nature of research work, all researchers might have their favorite personal working style and work their hours in preferred patterns.

How much do they earn?

Owing to the nature of the role, researcher salaries can vary considerably. Based on current market data , the average salary is $82,276 per year .

One of the largest variables in researcher salaries is the field you decide to go into. Academic researchers are typically paid towards the lower end of the scale, as are government researchers. Industry or corporate researchers are paid a lot more, with computer and information research roles paying a median annual salary of over $130,000.

Researcher salaries can also vary based on the job level. Apprentices or research assistants have lower salaries, whereas research scientist or professor-level roles often pay over $100,000. Pay scales are connected to academic reputation, industry credentials, and the industry you work in. This also means that as your career in research progresses, you can expect to take home extremely good paychecks.

What is the job market like for researchers?

Some research roles can be extremely competitive, with tenure-track roles in academic research being highly in demand, as are positions in consulting firms. The labor market for corporate research and governmental research roles can also be very strong, but research is heavily impacted by economic conditions, and roles can be cut in times of recession.

In general, research roles are highly sought-after , and this means competition for them is fierce. This means that you need to have a strong network, undergo continuous professional development, work on your research portfolio, and ensure your résumé and other supporting documentation are up to date.

What are the entry requirements?

Starting your career as a researcher requires plenty of preparation. Here’s what you need to focus on in terms of education, skills and knowledge, and licensing and certification.

Higher education is essential to become a researcher; what degree you choose might depend on what field of research you are interested in. A bachelor’s degree will give you foundational knowledge , whereas a master’s or PhD offers more specialized knowledge and can lead to more career opportunities later in your career journey.

Skills and knowledge

Entry-level researchers need a rich mix of skills and knowledge to be able to fulfil their job duties . Skills to develop include analytical skills , critical thinking ability and solving problems, with other useful ones being IT and presentation skills . Knowledge of research methodologies and rationale, as well as database management, is very useful.

Licensing and certification

Licensing and certification requirements for researchers vary , depending on the field you are planning to go into. Academic credentials, as outlined above, are important, but being a member of relevant professional associations is also highly advised.

Some sensitive areas of research might require you to have specialist credentials, such as certification in Good Clinical Practice if you’re planning to undertake medical research.

Do you have what it takes?

Being a researcher is a labor of love. If your values, passions and talent are related to traits like curiosity, attention to detail, discovering more about the world we live in, and rigorous attention to detail, then being a researcher is the perfect job for you. You also have to have a lot of patience, honesty when it comes to reporting unwelcome results, and resilience.

If you’re not sure what kind of career your skills, interests and passions might lead to, then consider taking CareerHunter’s six-stage assessment . These tests have been developed by psychologists and assess your skills and interests in order to provide you with best-fit careers that you can really thrive in.

How to become a researcher

A lot of preparation is needed to become a researcher. If, after reading this far, you still feel that becoming a researcher is the perfect job for you, then read on to discover how you can make this career dream a reality.

Step 1: Choose your field

Try to choose your research field as soon as you can. This is important, because it might provide you with direction for your higher education. There are so many different research fields to choose from — for example: social sciences, humanities, business, healthcare, engineering , or simply focusing on research theory or methodologies.

It’s important to choose a field that you have a strong interest or passion in. Also, consider where your talents and skills lie, and let this guide your decision too.

Step 2: Get qualified

As we’ve covered already, education is an important first step to becoming a researcher.

Common degrees to focus on can be the sciences (biology, chemistry or physics), computer science , mathematics, or statistics . Alternatively, if you have decided on your chosen research field, then consider obtaining higher education that relates to this.

Being a researcher is a competitive career: good grades in leading institutions will be required if you want to work as a researcher in prestigious organizations.

Step 3: Develop your research skills

Whether it’s part of your higher education or simply learning in your own time, developing research skills such as new methodologies, quantitative and qualitative methods , strategic analysis, or data analytics will keep you professionally competitive.

Additionally, it’s useful to gain experience in using research tools and software. These can include statistics software like SPSS, as well as programming languages like Java and Python. Understanding data visualization and presentation tools can also be hugely helpful.

Step 4: Gain research experience

A great way to start your career as a researcher is to undertake undergraduate research. This could be your own independent research project but is most commonly achieved through research internships or assistantships . With these experiences, you can collaborate with academic leaders, mentors or established researchers on their projects, and learn from their experience and expertise as well.

Another way to gain experience is through volunteering in research-related roles in academic institutions, laboratories or other similar environments.

Step 5: Network with peers

Networking with fellow research professionals enables you to exchange ideas, resources and expertise . Your network might be able to support you in finding research positions as your career progresses.

Grow your network by attending conferences and seminars, and by leveraging your work experience. You can also grow your network by reaching out to researchers on LinkedIn, and by publishing your own research papers as your experience grows.

Step 6: Present and publish your work

Presenting your work and publishing your findings establishes and grows your credibility as a researcher. You can present your research at conferences or even online via websites like YouTube.

Being published or listed as a collaborator on research papers can impact your career hugely , and being featured on important or large-scale research works can truly establish you as a researcher and lead to larger projects or more funding.

Step 7: Develop your résumé

Ensure that your résumé links to your portfolio of published works , as well as your presentations. It should showcase to potential employers and academic institutions what you have done, and what you’re capable of doing.

Ensure your résumé also references your research skills in a way that relates to the reader, and that it can be parsed effectively in applicant tracking systems .

Step 8: Seek funding

Research requires time and money. By applying for research grants, fellowships, scholarships and projects, you’ll grow your experience and leverage your credibility . Many of these opportunities are competitive, and being able to showcase what you can achieve via your published work, portfolio or résumé is essential.

Applying for funding is a skill in itself, as researchers need to be able to write compelling and thorough applications. You’ll also need to use negotiating and influencing skills in order to secure the funding and get your projects off the ground.

Step 9: Apply for research jobs

Whereas being a researcher often means that you’re working on independent projects, freelancing, or affiliated with an academic institution rather than being employed by one, there are plenty of research jobs out there — and lots of companies have their own in-house research teams.

If you apply for these roles, ensure that your résumé is up to date and that you practice your interviewing skills for them. Research jobs are in demand, and being able to showcase what you do is essential for success.

Step 10: Never stop discovering

Being a successful researcher isn’t just about continuous learning; it’s about endless discovery as well. The best researchers stay curious about their field , exploring new research questions, learning and growing from failure, and asking new questions.

Researchers are passionate about discovery and believe that learning new things and overcoming challenges makes the world a better place. Enthusiastically discovering new things will also ensure that your career as a researcher keeps growing. You’ll also develop resilience and persistence, which are powerful skills to have.

Final thoughts

Being a researcher requires a lot of skills and knowledge, as well as you taking time to figure out exactly what kind of research you want to get involved with. The job is complex and detailed, and can be as frustrating as it can be rewarding.

Becoming a leading researcher requires a lot of career preparation, and hopefully this article can point you in the right direction if you feel this is the perfect job for you. Once you get started, choose your research projects carefully, and who knows? You could be the researcher that uncovers the next big thing in our lives!

Are you thinking about becoming a researcher, or want to share your experiences? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Weighing Up the Options

The pros and cons of a career in research.

Read a summary or generate practice questions using the INOMICS AI tool

Soon after the completion of a Master's degree or PhD , everybody is faced with the big question: what next? Although it may seem like a natural progression to continue with further research, there are many other careers open to academics in business, education, communications and journalism, to name but a few examples.

So how do you know if research is the right career choice for you? Well, like with most big decisions, a good way of figuring it out is to weigh the pros and cons of an academic career.

Travel and relocation

One big difference between a career in research and most other fields is the expectation of relocation. The first step for a Master's student or PhD who wants a career in research is to find a position at a university in a town, city or country where they are willing to relocate. It is typical for researchers to move to a new city or country every few years, particularly when pursuing postdoc positions. This is the natural consequence of there not being very many jobs to go around.

Pro: Moving around does have its advantages - it is a unique opportunity to travel to new places and experience life in different countries and cultures. One can meet new people and obtain contacts, both of which are extremely rewarding.

Furthermore, moving offers the valuable experience of working at various institutions, which can give insight into how cultures vary across universities. Being part of an institution like a university provides you a pre-existing network to explore, both professionally and socially, which can make settling down in a new region or country a whole lot easier.

Con: Arranging an international relocation is a lot of work, and it can be hard to make new friends and create a social circle in a new city. Moreover, relocating can be stressful on the mind, causing some to struggle, so having adequate support for a move is essential.

Particularly for those with families, relocation may be demanding for other reasons- your partner may also need a job in your new city and new schools need to be found for children, which can be a challenge. If your partner is also in research, some institutions offer dual career programs which help find research positions for both members of a couple.

Independence and interest

Pro: One great advantage of a career in research is how interesting the work is, and the independence one is afforded. If you are able to secure third-party funding, you can organize your own working schedule and priorities, and choose the topics of research which are of most pressing interest to you.

Within many research institutions there is also the possibility of flexible working hours, which can be especially advantageous to those with young children.

Security and career prospects

Con: One particularly difficult aspect of a research career is the lack of job security. Postdocs are typically employed on short-term contracts for two years, and at the end of this period they must find another position. For the ambitious and determined researcher, this can be an opportunity for fast career progression and the chance to work in a variety of labs.

However, this insecurity can be a source of stress for many researchers as there is no guarantee of long-term stable employment. Progressing from a postdoctoral position to a professorship can be extremely competitive, and the number of professor positions can be reduced due to budget cuts, so in tough times there will be even fewer openings available.

Overall, many more PhDs and postdocs are working than there are professorships available, so you must be extremely determined to follow this path.

Transferable skills

Pro: Although the competition for academic positions is so fierce that a career in research may seem risky, in fact the skills one acquires in the performance of research can be transferred to many other fields. Critical thinking skills are highly developed in researchers.

Besides these, researchers may acquire expertise in mathematics or statistics, in written communication, or in poster and oral presentation. All of these skills can be put to use in other jobs, so if a research position is not available, then you still have other career options open to you.

Whether a career in academia is for you or not will depend entirely on your own levels of determination and persistence, along with weighing the pros against the cons of research. In the end, only you can make the choice - but keep in mind the various advantages and disadvantages of going down this particular career path.

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Clinical Researcher

Navigating a Career as a Clinical Research Professional: Where to Begin?

Clinical Researcher June 9, 2020

Clinical Researcher—June 2020 (Volume 34, Issue 6)

PEER REVIEWED

Bridget Kesling, MACPR; Carolynn Jones, DNP, MSPH, RN, FAAN; Jessica Fritter, MACPR; Marjorie V. Neidecker, PhD, MEng, RN, CCRP

Those seeking an initial career in clinical research often ask how they can “get a start” in the field. Some clinical research professionals may not have heard about clinical research careers until they landed that first job. Individuals sometimes report that they have entered the field “accidentally” and were not previously prepared. Those trying to enter the clinical research field lament that it is hard to “get your foot in the door,” even for entry-level jobs and even if you have clinical research education. An understanding of how individuals enter the field can be beneficial to newcomers who are targeting clinical research as a future career path, including those novices who are in an academic program for clinical research professionals.

We designed a survey to solicit information from students and alumni of an online academic clinical research graduate program offered by a large public university. The purpose of the survey was to gain information about how individuals have entered the field of clinical research; to identify facilitators and barriers of entering the field, including advice from seasoned practitioners; and to share the collected data with individuals who wanted to better understand employment prospects in clinical research.

Core competencies established and adopted for clinical research professionals in recent years have informed their training and education curricula and serve as a basis for evaluating and progressing in the major roles associated with the clinical research enterprise.{1,2} Further, entire academic programs have emerged to provide degree options for clinical research,{3,4} and academic research sites are focusing on standardized job descriptions.

For instance, Duke University re-structured its multiple clinical research job descriptions to streamline job titles and progression pathways using a competency-based, tiered approach. This led to advancement pathways and impacted institutional turnover rates in relevant research-related positions.{5,6} Other large clinical research sites or contract research organizations (CROs) have structured their onboarding and training according to clinical research core competencies. Indeed, major professional organizations and U.S. National Institutes of Health initiatives have adopted the Joint Task Force for Clinical Trial Competency as the gold standard approach to organizing training and certification.{7,8}

Recent research has revealed that academic medical centers, which employ a large number of clinical research professionals, are suffering from high staff turnover rates in this arena, with issues such as uncertainty of the job, dissatisfaction with training, and unclear professional development and role progression pathways being reported as culprits in this turnover.{9} Further, CROs report a significant shortage of clinical research associate (CRA) personnel.{10} Therefore, addressing factors that would help novices gain initial jobs would address an important workforce gap.

This mixed-methods survey study was initiated by a student of a clinical research graduate program at a large Midwest university who wanted to know how to find her first job in clinical research. Current students and alumni of the graduate program were invited to participate in an internet-based survey in the fall semester of 2018 via e-mails sent through the program listservs of current and graduated students from the program’s lead faculty. After the initial e-mail, two reminders were sent to prospective participants.

The survey specifically targeted students or alumni who had worked in clinical research. We purposefully avoided those students with no previous clinical research work experience, since they would not be able to discuss their pathway into the field. We collected basic demographic information, student’s enrollment status, information about their first clinical research position (including how it was attained), and narrative information to describe their professional progression in clinical research. Additional information was solicited about professional organization membership and certification, and about the impact of graduate education on the acquisition of clinical research jobs and/or role progression.

The survey was designed so that all data gathered (from both objective responses and open-ended responses) were anonymous. The survey was designed using the internet survey instrument Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap), which is a secure, web-based application designed to support data capture for research studies. REDCap provides an intuitive interface for validated data entry; audit trails for tracking data manipulation and export procedures; automated export procedures for seamless data downloads to common statistical packages; and procedures for importing data from external sources.{11}

Data were exported to Excel files and summary data were used to describe results. Three questions solicited open-ended responses about how individuals learned about clinical research career options, how they obtained their first job, and their advice to novices seeking their first job in clinical research. Qualitative methods were used to identify themes from text responses. The project was submitted to the university’s institutional review board and was classified as exempt from requiring board oversight.

A total of 215 survey invitations were sent out to 90 current students and 125 graduates. Five surveys were returned as undeliverable. A total of 48 surveys (22.9%) were completed. Because the survey was designed to collect information from those who were working or have worked in clinical research, those individuals (n=5) who reported (in the first question) that they had never worked in clinical research were eliminated. After those adjustments, the total number completed surveys was 43 (a 20.5% completion rate).

The median age of the participants was 27 (range 22 to 59). The majority of respondents (89%) reported being currently employed as clinical research professionals and 80% were working in clinical research at the time of graduate program entry. The remaining respondents had worked in clinical research in the past. Collectively, participants’ clinical research experience ranged from less than one to 27 years.

Research assistant (20.9%) and clinical research coordinator (16.3%) were the most common first clinical research roles reported. However, a wide range of job titles were also reported. When comparing entry-level job titles of participants to their current job title, 28 (74%) respondents reported a higher level job title currently, compared to 10 (26%) who still had the same job title.

Twenty-four (65%) respondents were currently working at an academic medical center, with the remaining working with community medical centers or private practices (n=3); site management organizations or CROs (n=2); pharmaceutical or device companies (n=4); or the federal government (n=1).

Three respondents (8%) indicated that their employer used individualized development plans to aid in planning for professional advancement. We also asked if their current employer provided opportunities for professional growth and advancement. Among academic medical center respondents, 16 (67%) indicated in the affirmative. Respondents also affirmed growth opportunities in other employment settings, with the exception of one respondent working in government and one respondent working in a community medical center.

Twenty-five respondents indicated membership to a professional association, and of those, 60% reported being certified by either the Association of Clinical Research Professionals (ACRP) or the Society of Clinical Research Associates (SoCRA).

Open-Ended Responses

We asked three open-ended questions to gain personal perspectives of respondents about how they chose clinical research as a career, how they entered the field, and their advice for novices entering the profession. Participants typed narrative responses.

“Why did you decide to pursue a career in clinical research?”

This question was asked to find out how individuals made the decision to initially consider clinical research as a career. Only one person in the survey had exposure to clinical research as a career option in high school, and three learned about such career options as college undergraduates. One participant worked in clinical research as a transition to medical school, two as a transition to a doctoral degree program, and two with the desire to move from a bench (basic science) career to a clinical research career.

After college, individuals either happened across clinical research as a career “by accident” or through people they met. Some participants expressed that they found clinical research careers interesting (n=6) and provided an opportunity to contribute to patients or improvements in healthcare (n=7).

“How did you find out about your first job in clinical research?”

Qualitative responses were solicited to obtain information on how participants found their first jobs in clinical research. The major themes that were revealed are sorted in Figure 1.

Figure 1: How First Jobs in Clinical Research Were Found

Some reported finding their initial job through an institution’s job posting.

“I worked in the hospital in the clinical lab. I heard of the opening after I earned my bachelor’s and applied.”

Others reported finding about their clinical research position through the internet. Several did not know about clinical research roles before exploring a job posting.

“In reviewing jobs online, I noticed my BS degree fit the criteria to apply for a job in clinical research. I knew nothing about the field.”

“My friend recommended I look into jobs with a CRO because I wanted to transition out of a production laboratory.”

“I responded to an ad. I didn’t really know that research could be a profession though. I didn’t know anything about the field, principles, or daily activities.”

Some of the respondents reported moving into a permanent position after a role as an intern.

“My first clinical job came from an internship I did in my undergrad in basic sleep research. I thought I wanted to get into patient therapies, so I was able to transfer to addiction clinical trials from a basic science lab. And the clinical data management I did as an undergrad turned into a job after a few months.”

“I obtained a job directly from my graduate school practicum.”

“My research assistant internship [as an] undergrad provided some patient enrollment and consenting experience and led to a CRO position.”

Networking and referrals were other themes that respondents indicated had a direct impact on them finding initial employment in clinical research.

“I received a job opportunity (notice of an opening) through my e-mail from the graduate program.”

“I was a medical secretary for a physician who did research and he needed a full-time coordinator for a new study.”

“I was recommended by my manager at the time.”

“A friend had a similar position at the time. I was interested in learning more about the clinical research coordinator position.”

“What advice do you have for students and new graduates trying to enter their first role in clinical research?”

We found respondents (n=30) sorted into four distinct categories: 1) a general attitude/approach to job searching, 2) acquisition of knowledge/experience, 3) actions taken to get a position, and 4) personal attributes as a clinical research professional in their first job.

Respondents stressed the importance of flexibility and persistence (general attitude/approach) when seeking jobs. Moreover, 16 respondents stressed the importance of learning as much as they could about clinical research and gaining as much experience as they could in their jobs, encouraging them to ask a lot of questions. They also stressed a broader understanding of the clinical research enterprise, the impact that clinical research professional roles have on study participants and future patients, and the global nature of the enterprise.

“Apply for all research positions that sound interesting to you. Even if you don’t meet all the requirements, still apply.”

“Be persistent and flexible. Be willing to learn new skills and take on new responsibilities. This will help develop your own niche within a group/organization while creating opportunities for advancement.”

“Be flexible with salary requirements earlier in your career and push yourself to learn more [about the industry’s] standards [on] a global scale.”

“Be ever ready to adapt and change along with your projects, science, and policy. Never forget the journey the patients are on and that we are here to advance and support it.”

“Learning the big picture, how everything intertwines and works together, will really help you progress in the field.”

In addition to learning as much as one can about roles, skills, and the enterprise as a whole, advice was given to shadow or intern whenever possible—formally or through networking—and to be willing to start with a smaller company or with a lower position. The respondents stressed that novices entering the field will advance in their careers as they continue to gain knowledge and experience, and as they broaden their network of colleagues.

“Take the best opportunity available to you and work your way up, regardless [if it is] at clinical trial site or in industry.”

“Getting as much experience as possible is important; and learning about different career paths is important (i.e., not everyone wants or needs to be a coordinator, not everyone goes to graduate school to get a PhD, etc.).”

“(A graduate) program is beneficial as it provides an opportunity to learn the basics that would otherwise accompany a few years of entry-level work experience.”

“Never let an opportunity pass you up. Reach out directly to decision-makers via e-mail or telephone—don’t just rely on a job application website. Be willing to start at the bottom. Absolutely, and I cannot stress this enough, [you should] get experience at the site level, even if it’s just an internship or [as a] volunteer. I honestly feel that you need the site perspective to have success at the CRO or pharma level.”

Several personal behaviors were also stressed by respondents, such as knowing how to set boundaries, understanding how to demonstrate what they know, and ability to advocate for their progression. Themes such as doing a good job, communicating well, being a good team player, and sharing your passion also emerged.

“Be a team player, ask questions, and have a good attitude.”

“Be eager to share your passion and drive. Although you may lack clinical research experience, your knowledge and ambition can impress potential employers.”

“[A] HUGE thing is learning to sell yourself. Many people I work with at my current CRO have such excellent experience, and they are in low-level positions because they didn’t know how to negotiate/advocate for themselves as an employee.”

This mixed-methods study used purposeful sampling of students in an academic clinical research program to gain an understanding of how novices to the field find their initial jobs in the clinical research enterprise; how to transition to a clinical research career; and how to find opportunities for career advancement. There are multiple clinical research careers and employers (see Figure 2) available to individuals working in the clinical research enterprise.

Figure 2: Employers and Sample Careers

Despite the need for employees in the broad field of clinical research, finding a pathway to enter the field can be difficult for novices. The lack of knowledge about clinical research as a career option at the high school and college level points to an opportunity for broader inclusion of these careers in high school and undergraduate curricula, or as an option for guidance counselors to be aware of and share with students.

Because most clinical research jobs appear to require previous experience in order to gain entry, novices are often put into a “Catch-22” situation. However, once hired, upward mobility does exist, and was demonstrated in this survey. Mobility in clinical research careers (moving up and general turnover) may occur for a variety of reasons—usually to achieve a higher salary, to benefit from an improved work environment, or to thwart a perceived lack of progression opportunity.{9}

During COVID-19, there may be hiring freezes or furloughs of clinical research staff, but those personnel issues are predicted to be temporary. Burnout has also been reported as an issue among study coordinators, due to research study complexity and workload issues.{12} Moreover, the lack of individualized development planning revealed by our sample may indicate a unique workforce development need across roles of clinical research professionals.

This survey study is limited in that it is a small sample taken specifically from a narrow cohort of individuals who had obtained or were seeking a graduate degree in clinical research at a single institution. The study only surveyed those currently working in or who have a work history in clinical research. Moreover, the majority of respondents were employed at an academic medical center, which may not fully reflect the general population of clinical research professionals.

It was heartening to see the positive advancement in job titles for those individuals who had been employed in clinical research at program entry, compared to when they responded to the survey. However, the sample was too small to draw reliable correlations about job seeking or progression.

Although finding one’s first job in clinical research can be a lengthy and discouraging process, it is important to know that the opportunities are endless. Search in employment sites such as Indeed.com, but also search within job postings for targeted companies or research sites such as biopharmguy.com (see Table 1). Created a LinkedIn account and join groups and make connections. Participants in this study offered sound advice and tips for success in landing a job (see Figure 3).

Table 1: Sample Details from an Indeed.Com Job Search

Note: WCG = WIRB Copernicus Group

Figure 3: Twelve Tips for Finding Your First Job

• Seek out internships and volunteer opportunities
• Network, network, network
• Be flexible and persistent
• Learn as much as possible about clinical research
• Consider a degree in clinical research
• Ask a lot of questions of professionals working in the field
• Apply for all research positions that interest you, even if you think you are not qualified
• Be willing to learn new skills and take on new responsibilities
• Take the best opportunity available to you and work your way up
• Learn to sell yourself
• Sharpen communication (written and oral) and other soft skills
• Create an ePortfolio or LinkedIn account

Being willing to start at the ground level and working upwards was described as a positive approach because moving up does happen, and sometimes quickly. Also, learning soft skills in communication and networking were other suggested strategies. Gaining education in clinical research is one way to begin to acquire knowledge and applied skills and opportunities to network with experienced classmates who are currently working in the field.

Most individuals entering an academic program have found success in obtaining an initial job in clinical research, often before graduation. In fact, the student initiating the survey found a position in a CRO before graduation.

• Sonstein S, Seltzer J, Li R, Jones C, Silva H, Daemen E. 2014. Moving from compliance to competency: a harmonized core competency framework for the clinical research professional. Clinical Researcher 28(3):17–23. doi:10.14524/CR-14-00002R1.1. https://acrpnet.org/crjune2014/
• Sonstein S, Brouwer RN, Gluck W, et al. 2018. Leveling the joint task force core competencies for clinical research professionals. Therap Innov Reg Sci .
• Jones CT, Benner J, Jelinek K, et al. 2016. Academic preparation in clinical research: experience from the field. Clinical Researcher 30(6):32–7. doi:10.14524/CR-16-0020. https://acrpnet.org/2016/12/01/academic-preparation-in-clinical-research-experience-from-the-field/
• Jones CT, Gladson B, Butler J. 2015. Academic programs that produce clinical research professionals. DIA Global Forum 7:16–9.
• Brouwer RN, Deeter C, Hannah D, et al. 2017. Using competencies to transform clinical research job classifications. J Res Admin 48:11–25.
• Stroo M, Ashfaw K, Deeter C, et al. 2020. Impact of implementing a competency-based job framework for clinical research professionals on employee turnover. J Clin Transl Sci.
• Calvin-Naylor N, Jones C, Wartak M, et al. 2017. Education and training of clinical and translational study investigators and research coordinators: a competency-based approach. J Clin Transl Sci 1:16–25. doi:10.1017/cts.2016.2
• Development, Implementation and Assessment of Novel Training in Domain-based Competencies (DIAMOND). Center for Leading Innovation and Collaboration (CLIC). 2019. https://clic-ctsa.org/diamond
• Clinical Trials Talent Survey Report. 2018. http://www.appliedclinicaltrialsonline.com/node/351341/done?sid=15167
• Causey M. 2020. CRO workforce turnover hits new high. ACRP Blog . https://acrpnet.org/2020/01/08/cro-workforce-turnover-hits-new-high/
• Harris PA, Taylor R, Thielke R, Payne J, Gonzalez N, Conde JG. 2009. Research electronic data capture (REDCap): a metadata-driven methodology and workflow process for providing translational research informatics support. J Biomed Inform 42:377–81.
• Gwede CK, Johnson DJ, Roberts C, Cantor AB. 2005. Burnout in clinical research coordinators in the United States. Oncol Nursing Forum 32:1123–30.

A portion of this work was supported by the OSU CCTS, CTSA Grant #UL01TT002733.

Bridget Kesling, MACPR, ( [email protected] ) is a Project Management Analyst with IQVIA in Durham, N.C.

Carolynn Jones, DNP, MSPH, RN, FAAN, ( [email protected] ) is an Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing at The Ohio State University College of Nursing, Co-Director of Workforce Development for the university’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science, and Director of the university’s Master of Clinical Research program.

Jessica Fritter, MACPR, ( [email protected] ) is a Clinical Research Administration Manager at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and an Instructor for the Master of Clinical Research program at The Ohio State University.

Marjorie V. Neidecker, PhD, MEng, RN, CCRP,  ( [email protected] ) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Nursing at The Ohio State University Colleges of Nursing and Pharmacy.

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Research skills

By Benjamin Hilton · Last updated December 2023 · First published September 2023

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Research skills  

On this page:.

• 1.1 Research seems to have been extremely high-impact historically
• 1.2 There are good theoretical reasons to think that research will be high-impact
• 1.3 Research skills seem extremely useful to the problems we think are most pressing
• 1.4 If you’re a good fit, you can have much more impact than the average
• 1.5 Depending on which subject you focus on, you may have good backup options
• 2.1 Academic research
• 2.2 Practical but big picture research
• 2.3 Applied research
• 2.4 Stages of progression through building and using research skills
• 3.1 How much do researchers differ in productivity?
• 3.2 What does this mean for building research skills?
• 4.1 How to predict your fit in advance
• 4.2 How to tell if you’re on track
• 5.1 Choosing a research field
• 6.1 Which research topics are the highest-impact?
• 6.2 Find jobs that use a research skills
• 7 Career paths we’ve reviewed that use these skills
• 8 Learn more about research

David Iliff , CC BY-SA 2.5 , via Wikimedia Commons

Norman Borlaug was an agricultural scientist. Through years of research, he developed new, high-yielding, disease-resistant varieties of wheat.

It might not sound like much, but as a result of Borlaug’s research, wheat production in India and Pakistan almost doubled between 1965 and 1970, and formerly famine-stricken countries across the world were suddenly able to produce enough food for their entire populations. These developments have been credited with saving up to a billion people from famine, 1 and in 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Many of the highest-impact people in history , whether well-known or completely obscure, have been researchers.

Table of Contents

In a nutshell: Talented researchers are a key bottleneck facing many of the world’s most pressing problems . That doesn’t mean you need to become an academic. While that’s one option (and academia is often a good place to start), lots of the most valuable research happens elsewhere. It’s often cheap to try out developing research skills while at university, and if it’s a good fit for you, research could be your highest impact option.

Key facts on fit

Why are research skills valuable.

Not everyone can be a Norman Borlaug, and not every discovery gets adopted. Nevertheless, we think research can often be one of the most valuable skill sets to build — if you’re a good fit.

We’ll argue that:

Research seems to have been extremely high-impact historically

There are good theoretical reasons to think that research will be high-impact, research skills seem extremely useful to the problems we think are most pressing, if you’re a good fit, you can have much more impact than the average.

• And, depending on which subject you focus on, you may have good backup options .

Together, this suggests that research skills could be particularly useful for having an impact.

Later, we’ll look at:

• How to evaluate your fit for building research skills

How to get started building research skills

• How you can use these skills to have an impact once you’ve started

If we think about what has most improved the modern world, much can be traced back to research: advances in medicine such as the development of vaccines against infectious diseases, developments in physics and chemistry that led to steam power and the industrial revolution , and the invention of the modern computer, an idea which was first proposed by Alan Turing in his seminal 1936 paper On Computable Numbers . 2

Many of these ideas were discovered by a relatively small number of researchers — but they changed all of society. This suggests that these researchers may have had particularly large individual impacts.

That said, research today is probably lower-impact than in the past. Research is much less neglected than it used to be: there are nearly 25 times as many researchers today as there were in 1930. 3 It also turns out that more and more effort is required to discover new ideas, so each additional researcher probably has less impact than those that came before. 4

However, even today, a relatively small fraction of people are engaged in research. As an approximation, only 0.1% of the population are academics, 5 and only about 2.5% of GDP is spent on research and development . If a small number of people account for a large fraction of progress, then on average each person’s efforts are significant.

Moreover, we still think there’s a good case to be made for research being impactful on average today, which we cover in the next two sections.

There’s little commercial incentive to focus on the most socially valuable research. And most researchers don’t get rich, even if their discoveries are extremely valuable. Alan Turing made no money from the discovery of the computer, and today it’s a multibillion-dollar industry. This is because the benefits of research often come a long time in the future and can’t usually be protected by patents. This means if you care more about social impact than profit, then it’s a good opportunity to have an edge.

Research is also a route to leverage. When new ideas are discovered, they can be spread incredibly cheaply, so it’s a way that a single person can change a field. And innovations are cumulative — once an idea has been discovered, it’s added to our stock of knowledge and, in the ideal case, becomes available to everyone. Even ideas that become outdated often speed up the important future discoveries that supersede it.

When you look at our list of the world’s most pressing problems — like preventing future pandemics or reducing risks from AI systems — expert researchers seem like a key bottleneck.

For example, to reduce the risk posed by engineered pandemics , we need people who are talented at research to identify the biggest biosecurity risks and to develop better vaccines and treatments.

To ensure that developments in AI are implemented safely and for the benefit of humanity, we need technical experts thinking hard about how to design machine learning systems safely and policy researchers to think about how governments and other institutions should respond. (See this list of relevant research questions .)

And to decide which global priorities we should spend our limited resources on, we need economists, mathematicians, and philosophers to do global priorities research . For example, see the research agenda of the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford .

We’re not sure why so many of the most promising ways to make progress on the problems we think are most pressing involve research, but it may well be due to the reasons in the section above — research offers huge opportunities for leverage, so if you take a hits-based approach to finding the best solutions to social problems, it’ll often be most attractive.

In addition, our focus on neglected problems often means we focus on smaller and less developed areas, and it’s often unclear what the best solutions are in these areas. This means that research is required to figure this out.

For more examples, and to get a sense of what you might be able to work on in different fields, see this list of potentially high-impact research questions, organised by discipline .

The sections above give reasons why research can be expected to be impactful in general . But as we’ll show below , the productivity of individual researchers probably varies a great deal (and more than in most other careers). This means that if you have reason to think your degree of fit is better than average, your expected impact could be much higher than the average.

Depending on which subject you focus on, you may have good backup options

Pursuing research helps you develop deep expertise on a topic, problem-solving, and writing skills. These can be useful in many other career paths. For example:

• Many research areas can lead to opportunities in policymaking , since relevant technical expertise is valued in some of these positions. You might also have opportunities to advise policymakers and the public as an expert.
• The expertise and credibility you can develop by focusing on research (especially in academia) can put you in a good position to switch your focus to communicating important ideas , especially those related to your speciality, either to the general public, policymakers, or your students.
• If you specialise in an applied quantitative subject, it can open up certain high-paying jobs, such as quantitative trading or data science , which offer good opportunities for earning to give .

Some research areas will have much better backup options than others — lots of jobs value applied quantitative skills, so if your research is quantitative you may be able to transition into work in effective nonprofits or government. A history academic, by contrast, has many fewer clear backup options outside of academia.

What does building research skills typically involve?

By ‘research skills’ we broadly mean the ability to make progress solving difficult intellectual problems.

We find it especially useful to roughly divide research skills into three forms:

• Academic research

Building academic research skills is the most predefined route. The focus is on answering relatively fundamental questions which are considered valuable by a specific academic discipline. This can be impactful either through generally advancing a field of research that’s valuable to society or finding opportunities to work on socially important questions within that field.

Turing was an academic. He didn’t just invent the computer — during World War II he developed code-breaking machines that allowed the Allies to be far more effective against Nazi U-boats. Some historians estimate this enabled D-Day to happen a year earlier than it would have otherwise. 6 Since World War II resulted in 10 million deaths per year, Turing may have saved about 10 million lives.

We’re particularly excited about academic research in subfields of machine learning relevant to reducing risks from AI , subfields of biology relevant to preventing catastrophic pandemics , and economics — we discuss which fields you should enter below .

Academic careers are also excellent for developing credibility, leading to many of the backup options we looked at above, especially options in communicating important ideas or policymaking .

Academia is relatively unique in how flexibly you can use your time. This can be a big advantage — you really get time to think deeply and carefully about things — but can be a hindrance, depending on your work style.

See more about what academia involves in our career review on academia .

Practical but big picture research

Academia rewards a focus on questions that can be decisively answered with the methods of the field. However, the most important questions can rarely be answered rigorously — the best we can do is look at many weak forms of evidence and come to a reasonable overall judgement. which means while some of this research happens in academia, it can be hard to do that.

Instead, this kind of research is often done in nonprofit research institutes, e.g. the Centre for the Governance of AI or Our World in Data , or independently.

Your focus should be on answering the questions that seem most important (given your view of which global problems most matter) through whatever means are most effective.

Some examples of questions in this category that we’re especially interested in include:

• How likely is a pandemic worse than COVID-19 in the next 10 years?
• How difficult is the AI alignment problem going to be to solve?
• Which global problems are most pressing?
• Is the world getting better or worse over time?
• What can we learn from the history of philanthropy about which forms of philanthropy might be most effective?

You can see a longer list of ideas in this article .

Someone we know who’s had a big impact with research skills is Ajeya Cotra. Ajeya initially studied electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. In 2016, she joined Open Philanthropy as a grantmaker. 7 Since then she’s worked on a framework for estimating when transformative AI might be developed , how worldview diversification could be applied to allocating philanthropic budgets, and how we might accidentally teach AI models to deceive us .

Applied research

Then there’s applied research. This is often done within companies or nonprofits, like think tanks (although again, there’s also plenty of applied research happening in academia). Here the focus is on solving a more immediate practical problem (and if pursued by a company, where it might be possible to make profit from the solution) — and there’s lots of overlap with engineering skills . For example:

• Developing new vaccines
• Creating new types of solar cells or nuclear reactors
• Developing meat substitutes

Neel was doing an undergraduate degree in maths when he decided that he wanted to work in AI safety . Our team was able to introduce Neel to researchers in the field and helped him secure internships in academic and industry research groups. Neel didn’t feel like he was a great fit for academia — he hates writing papers — so he applied to roles in commercial AI research labs. He’s now a research engineer at DeepMind. He works on mechanistic interpretability research which he thinks could be used in the future to help identify potentially dangerous AI systems before they can cause harm.

We also see “policy research” — which aims to develop better ideas for public policy — as a form of applied research.

Stages of progression through building and using research skills

These different forms of research blur into each other, and it’s often possible to switch between them during a career. In particular, it’s common to begin in academic research and then switch to more applied research later.

However, while the skill sets contain a common core, someone who can excel in intellectual academic research might not be well-suited to big picture practical or applied research.

The typical stages in an academic career involve the following steps:

• Pick a field. This should be heavily based on personal fit (where you expect to be most successful and enjoy your work the most), though it’s also useful to think about which fields offer the best opportunities to help tackle the problems you think are most pressing, give you expertise that’s especially useful given these problems, and use that at least as a tie-breaker. (Read more about choosing a field .)
• Earn a PhD.
• Learn your craft and establish your career — find somewhere you can get great mentorship and publish a lot of impressive papers. This usually means finding a postdoc with a good group and then temporary academic positions.
• Secure tenure.
• Focus on the research you think is most socially valuable (or otherwise move your focus towards communicating ideas or policy).

Academia is usually seen as the most prestigious path…within academia. But non-academic positions can be just as impactful — and often more so since you can avoid some of the dysfunctions and distractions of academia, such as racing to get publications.

At any point after your PhD (and sometimes with only a master’s), it’s usually possible to switch to applied research in industry, policy, nonprofits, and so on, though typically you’ll still focus on getting mentorship and learning for at least a couple of years. And you may also need to take some steps to establish your career enough to turn your attention to topics that seem more impactful.

Note that from within academia, the incentives to continue with academia are strong, so people often continue longer than they should!

If you’re focused on practical big picture research, then there’s less of an established pathway, and a PhD isn’t required.

Besides academia, you could attempt to build these skills in any job that involves making difficult, messy intellectual judgement calls, such as investigative journalism, certain forms of consulting, buy-side research in finance, think tanks, or any form of forecasting.

Personal fit is perhaps more important for research than other skills

The most talented researchers seem to differ hugely in their impact compared to typical researchers across a wide variety of metrics and according to the opinions of other researchers.

For instance, when we surveyed biomedical researchers, they said that very good researchers were rare, and they’d be willing to turn down large amounts of money if they could get a good researcher for their lab. 8 Professor John Todd, who works on medical genetics at Cambridge, told us :

The best people are the biggest struggle. The funding isn’t a problem. It’s getting really special people[…] One good person can cover the ground of five, and I’m not exaggerating.

This makes sense if you think the distribution of research output is very wide — that the very best researchers have a much greater output than the average researcher.

How much do researchers differ in productivity?

It’s hard to know exactly how spread out the distribution is, but there are several strands of evidence that suggest the variability is very high.

Firstly, most academic papers get very few citations, while a few get hundreds or even thousands. An analysis of citation counts in science journals found that ~47% of papers had never been cited, more than 80% had been cited 10 times or less, but the top 0.1% had been cited more than 1,000 times. A similar pattern seems to hold across individual researchers , meaning that only a few dominate — at least in terms of the recognition their papers receive.

Citation count is a highly imperfect measure of research quality, so these figures shouldn’t be taken at face-value. For instance, which papers get cited the most may depend at least partly on random factors, academic fashions, and “winner takes all” effects — papers that get noticed early end up being cited by everyone to back up a certain claim, even if they don’t actually represent the research that most advanced the field.

However, there are other reasons to think the distribution of output is highly skewed.

William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor, gathered statistics on all the research employees in national labs, university departments, and other research units, and found that productivity (as measured by total number of publications, rate of publication, and number of patents) was highly skewed , following a log-normal distribution.

Shockley suggests that researcher output is the product of several (normally distributed) random variables — such as the ability to think of a good question to ask, figure out how to tackle the question, recognize when a worthwhile result has been found, write adequately, respond well to feedback, and so on. This would explain the skewed distribution: if research output depends on eight different factors and their contribution is multiplicative, then a person who is 50% above average in each of the eight areas will in expectation be 26 times more productive than average. 9

When we looked at up-to-date data on how productivity differs across many different areas , we found very similar results. The bottom line is that research seems to perhaps be the area where we have the best evidence for output being heavy-tailed.

Interestingly, while there’s a huge spread in productivity, the most productive academic researchers are rarely paid 10 times more than the median, since they’re on fixed university pay-scales. This means that the most productive researchers yield a large “excess” value to their field. For instance, if a productive researcher adds 10 times more value to the field than average, but is paid the same as average, they will be producing at least nine times as much net benefit to society. This suggests that top researchers are underpaid relative to their contribution, discouraging them from pursuing research and making research skills undersupplied compared to what would be ideal.

Can you predict these differences in advance?

Practically, the important question isn’t how big the spread is, but whether you could — early on in your career — identify whether or not you’ll be among the very best researchers.

There’s good news here! At least in scientific research, these differences also seem to be at least somewhat predictable ahead of time, which means the people entering research with the best fit could have many times more expected impact.

In a study , two IMF economists looked at maths professors’ scores in the International Mathematical Olympiad — a prestigious maths competition for high school students. They concluded that each additional point scored on the International Mathematics Olympiad “is associated with a 2.6 percent increase in mathematics publications and a 4.5 percent increase in mathematics citations.”

We looked at a range of data on how predictable productivity differences are in various areas and found that they’re much more predictable in research.

What does this mean for building research skills?

The large spread in productivity makes building strong research skills a lot more promising if you’re a better fit than average. And if you’re a great fit, research can easily become your best option.

And while these differences in output are not fully predictable at the start of a career, the spread is so large that it’s likely still possible to predict differences in productivity with some reliability.

This also means you should mainly be evaluating your long-term expected impact in terms of your chances of having a really big success.

That said, don’t rule yourself out too early. Firstly, many people systematically underestimate their skills . (Though others overestimate them!) Also, the impact of research can be so large that it’s often worth trying it out, even if you don’t expect you’ll succeed . This is especially true because the early steps of a research career often give you good career capital for many other paths.

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance.

It’s hard to predict success in advance, so we encourage an empirical approach: see if you can try it out and look at your track record.

You probably have some track record in research: many of our readers have some experience in academia from doing a degree, whether or not they intended to go into academic research. Standard academic success can also point towards being a good fit (though is nowhere near sufficient!):

• Did you get top grades at undergraduate level (a 1st in the UK or a GPA over 3.5 in the US)?
• If you do a graduate degree, what’s your class rank (if you can find that out)? If you do a PhD, did you manage to author an article in a top journal (although note that this is easier in some disciplines than others)?

Ultimately, though, your academic track record isn’t going to tell you anywhere near as much as actually trying out research. So it’s worth looking for ways to cheaply try out research (which can be easy if you’re at college). For example, try doing a summer research project and see how it goes.

Some of the key traits that suggest you might be a good fit for a research skills seem to be:

• Intelligence (Read more about whether intelligence is important for research .)
• The potential to become obsessed with a topic ( Becoming an expert in anything can take decades of focused practice , so you need to be able to stick with it.)
• Relatedly, high levels of grit, self-motivation, and — especially for independent big picture research, but also for research in academia — the ability to learn and work productively without a traditional manager or many externally imposed deadlines
• Openness to new ideas and intellectual curiosity
• Good research taste, i.e. noticing when a research question matters a lot for solving a pressing problem

There are a number of other cheap ways you might try to test your fit.

Something you can do at any stage is practice research and research-based writing. One way to get started is to try learning by writing .

You could also try:

• Finding out what the prerequisites/normal backgrounds of people who go into a research area are to compare your skills and experience to them
• Reading key research in your area, trying to contribute to discussions with other researchers (e.g. via a blog or twitter), and getting feedback on your ideas
• Talking to successful researchers in a field and asking what they look for in new researchers

How to tell if you’re on track

Here are some broad milestones you could aim for while becoming a researcher:

• You’re successfully devoting time to building your research skills and communicating your findings to others. (This can often be the hardest milestone to hit for many — it can be hard to simply sustain motivation and productivity given how self-directed research often needs to be.)
• In your own judgement, you feel you have made and explained multiple novel, valid, nontrivially important (though not necessarily earth-shattering) points about important topics in your area.
• You’ve had enough feedback (comments, formal reviews, personal communication) to feel that at least several other people (whose judgement you respect and who have put serious time into thinking about your area) agree, and (as a result) feel they’ve learned something from your work. For example, lots of this feedback could come from an academic supervisor. Make sure you’re asking people in a way that gives them affordance to say you’re not doing well.
• You’re making meaningful connections with others interested in your area — connections that seem likely to lead to further funding and/or job opportunities. This could be from the organisations most devoted to your topics of interest; but, there could also be a “dissident” dynamic in which these organisations seem uninterested and/or defensive, but others are noticing this and offering help.

If you’re finding it hard to make progress in a research environment, it’s very possible that this is the result of that particular environment, rather than the research itself. So it can be worth testing out multiple different research jobs before deciding this skill set isn’t for you.

Within academic research

Academia has clearly defined stages, so you can see how you’re performing at each of these.

Very roughly, you can try asking “How quickly and impressively is my career advancing, by the standards of my institution and field?” (Be careful to consider the field as a whole, rather than just your immediate peers, who might be very different from average.) Academics with more experience than you may be able to help give you a clear idea of how things are going.

We go through this in detail in our review of academic research careers .

Within independent research

As a very rough guideline, people who are an excellent fit for independent research can often reach the broad milestones above with a year of full-time effort purely focusing on building a research skill set, or 2–3 years of 20%-time independent effort (i.e. one day per week).

Within research in industry or policy

The stages here can look more like an organisation-building career , and you can also assess your fit by looking at your rate of progression through the organisation.

As we mentioned above , if you’ve done an undergraduate degree, one obvious pathway into research is to go to graduate school ( read our advice on choosing a graduate programme ) and then attempt to enter academia before deciding whether to continue or pursue positions outside of academia later in your career.

If you take the academic path, then the next steps are relatively clear. You’ll want to try to get excellent grades in undergraduate and in your master’s, ideally gain some kind of research experience in your summers, and then enter the best PhD programme you can. From there, focus on learning your craft by working under the best researcher you can find as a mentor and working in a top hub for your field. Try to publish as many papers as possible since that’s required to land an academic position.

It’s also not necessary to go to graduate school to become a great researcher (though this depends a lot on the field), especially if you’re very talented. For instance, we interviewed Chris Olah , who is working on AI research without even an undergraduate degree.

You can enter many non-academic research jobs without a background in academia. So one starting point for building up research skills would be getting a job at an organisation specifically focused on the type of question you’re interested in. For examples, take a look at our list of recommended organisations , many of which conduct non-academic research in areas relevant to pressing problems .

More generally, you can learn research skills in any job that heavily features making difficult intellectual judgement calls and bets, preferably on topics that are related to the questions you’re interested in researching. These might include jobs in finance, political analysis, or even nonprofits.

Another common route — depending on your field — is to develop software and tech skills and then apply them at research organisations. For instance, here’s a guide to how to transition from software engineering into AI safety research .

If you’re interested in doing practical big-picture research (especially outside academia), it’s also possible to establish your career through self-study and independent work — during your free time or on scholarships designed for this (such as EA Long-Term Future Fund grants and Open Philanthropy support for individuals working on relevant topics ).

Some example approaches you might take to self-study:

• Closely and critically review some pieces of writing and argumentation on relevant topics. Explain the parts you agree with as clearly as you can and/or explain one or more of your key disagreements.
• Pick a relevant question and write up your current view and reasoning on it. Alternatively, write up your current view and reasoning on some sub-question that comes up as you’re thinking about it.
• Then get feedback, ideally from professional researchers or those who use similar kinds of research in their jobs.

It could also be beneficial to start with some easier versions of this sort of exercise, such as:

• Explaining or critiquing interesting arguments made on any topic you find motivating to write about
• Writing fact posts
• Reviewing the academic literature on any topic of interest and trying to reach and explain a bottom-line conclusion

In general, it’s not necessary to obsess over being “original” or having some new insight at the beginning. You can learn a lot just by trying to write up your current understanding.

Choosing a research field

When you’re getting started building research skills, there are three factors to consider in choosing a field:

• Personal fit — what are your chances of being a top researcher in the area? Even if you work on an important question, you won’t make much difference if you’re not particularly good at it or motivated to work on the problem.
• Impact — how likely is it that research in your field will contribute to solving pressing problems?
• Back-up options — how will the skills you build open up other options if you decide to change fields (or leave research altogether)?

One way to go about making a decision is to roughly narrow down fields by relevance and back-up options and then pick among your shortlist based on personal fit.

We’ve found that, especially when they’re getting started building research skills, people sometimes think too narrowly about what they can be good at and enjoy. Instead, they end up pigeonholing themselves in a specific area (for example being restricted by the field of their undergraduate degree). This can be harmful because it means people who could contribute to highly important research don’t even consider it. This increases the importance of writing a broad list of possible areas to research.

Given our list of the world’s most pressing problems , we think some of the most promising fields to do research within are as follows:

• Fields relevant to artificial intelligence, especially machine learning , but also computer science more broadly. This is mainly to work on AI safety directly, though there are also many opportunities to apply machine learning to other problems (as well as many back-up options).
• Biology, particularly synthetic biology, virology, public health, and epidemiology. This is mainly for biosecurity .
• Economics . This is for global priorities research , development economics, or policy research relevant to any cause area, especially global catastrophic risks.
• Engineering — read about developing and using engineering skills to have an impact .
• International relations/political science, including security studies and public policy — these enable you to do research into policy approaches to mitigating catastrophic risks and are also a good route into careers in government and policy more broadly.
• Mathematics, including applied maths or statistics (or even physics). This may be a good choice if you’re very uncertain, as it teaches you skills that can be applied to a whole range of different problems — and lets you move into most of the other fields we list. It’s relatively easy to move from a mathematical PhD into machine learning, economics, biology, or political science, and there are opportunities to apply quantitative methods to a wide range of other fields. They also offer good back-up options outside of research.
• There are many important topics in philosophy and history, but these fields are unusually hard to advance within, and don’t have as good back-up options. (We do know lots of people with philosophy PhDs who have gone on to do other great, non-philosophy work!)

However, many different kinds of research skills can play a role in tackling pressing global problems.

Choosing a sub-field can sometimes be almost as important as choosing a field. For example, in some sciences the particular lab you join will determine your research agenda — and this can shape your entire career.

And as we’ve covered, personal fit is especially important in research. This can mean it’s easily worth going into a field that seems less relevant on average if you are an excellent fit. (This is due both to the value of the research you might produce and the excellent career capital that comes from becoming top of an academic field.)

For instance, while we most often recommend the fields above, we’d be excited to see some of our readers go into history , psychology, neuroscience, and a whole number of other fields. And if you have a different view of global priorities from us, there might be many other highly relevant fields.

Once you have these skills, how can you best apply them to have an impact?

Richard Hamming used to annoy his colleagues by asking them “What’s the most important question in your field?”, and then after they’d explained, following up with “And why aren’t you working on it?”

You don’t always need to work on the very most important question in your field, but Hamming has a point. Researchers often drift into a narrow speciality and can get detached from the questions that really matter.

Now let’s suppose you’ve chosen a field, learned your craft, and are established enough that you have some freedom about where to focus. Which research questions should you focus on?

Which research topics are the highest-impact?

Charles Darwin travelled the oceans to carefully document different species of birds on a small collection of islands — documentation which later became fuel for the theory of evolution. This illustrates how hard it is to predict which research will be most impactful.

What’s more, we can’t know what we’re going to discover until we’ve discovered it, so research has an inherent degree of unpredictability. There’s certainly an argument for curiosity-driven research without a clear agenda.

That said, we think it’s also possible to increase your chances of working on something relevant, and the best approach is to try to find topics that both personally motivate you and seem more likely than average to matter. Here are some approaches to doing that.

Using the problem framework

One approach is to ask yourself which global problems you think are most pressing , and then try to identify research questions that are:

• Important to making progress on those problems (i.e. if this question were answered, it would lead to more progress on these problems)
• Neglected by other researchers (e.g. because they’re at the intersection of two fields, unpopular for bad reasons, or new)
• Tractable (i.e. you can see a path to making progress)

The best research questions will score at least moderately well on all parts of this framework. Building a perpetual motion machine is extremely important — if we could do it, then we’d solve our energy problems — but we have good reason to think it’s impossible, so it’s not worth working on. Similarly, a problem can be important but already have the attention of many extremely talented researchers, meaning your extra efforts won’t go very far.

Finding these questions, however, is difficult. Often, the only way to identify a particularly promising research question is to be an expert in that field! That’s because (when researchers are doing their jobs), they will be taking the most obvious opportunities already.

However, the incentives within research rarely perfectly line up with the questions that most matter (especially if you have unusual values, like more concern for future generations or animals). This means that some questions often get unfairly neglected. If you’re someone who does care a lot about positive impact and have some slack, you can have a greater-than-average impact by looking for them.

Below are some more ways of finding those questions (which you can use in addition to directly applying the framework above).

Rules of thumb for finding unfairly neglected questions

• There’s little money in answering the question. This can be because the problem mostly affects poorer people, people who are in the future , or non-humans, or because it involves public goods . This means there’s little incentive for businesses to do research on this question.
• The political incentives to answer the question are missing. This can happen when the problem hurts poorer or otherwise marginalised people, people who tend not to organise politically, people in countries outside the one where the research is most likely to get done, people who are in the future , or non-humans. This means there’s no incentive for governments or other public actors to research this question.
• It’s new, doesn’t already have an established discipline, or is at the intersection of two disciplines. The first researchers in an area tend to take any low hanging fruit, and it gets harder and harder from there to make big discoveries. For example, the rate of progress within machine learning is far higher than the rate of progress within theoretical physics. At the same time, the structure of academia means most researchers stay stuck within the field they start in, and it can be hard to get funding to branch out into other areas. This means that new fields or questions at the intersection of two disciplines often get unfairly neglected and therefore provide opportunities for outsized impact.
• There is some aspect of human irrationality that means people don’t correctly prioritise the issue. For instance, some issues are easy to visualise, which makes them more motivating to work on. People are scope blind which means they’re likely to neglect the issues with the very biggest scale. They’re also bad at reasoning about issues with low probability, which can make them either over-invest or under-invest in them.
• Working on the question is low status. In academia, research that’s intellectually interesting and fits the research standards of the discipline are high status. Also, mathematical and theoretical work tends to be seen as higher status (and therefore helps to progress your career). But these don’t correlate that well with the social value of the question.
• You’re bringing new skills or a new perspective to an established area. Progress often comes in science from bringing the techniques and insights of one field into another. For instance, Kahneman started a revolution in economics by applying findings from psychology. Cross-over is an obvious approach but is rarely used because researchers tend to be immersed in their own particular subject.

If you think you’ve found a research question that’s short on talent, it’s worth checking whether the question is answerable. People might be avoiding the question because it’s just extremely difficult to find an answer. Or perhaps progress isn’t possible at all. Ask yourself, “If there were progress on this question, how would we know?”

Finally, as we’ve discussed, personal fit is particularly important in research . So position yourself to work on questions where you maximise your chances of producing top work.

Find jobs that use a research skills

If you have these skills already or are developing it and you’re ready to start looking at job opportunities that are currently accepting applications, see our curated list of opportunities for this skill set:

View all opportunities

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use these skills

• AI safety technical research and engineering
• AI governance and coordination
• Biorisk research
• China-related AI safety and governance paths
• Grantmaker focused on pressing world problems
• Research into global priorities
• Forecasting and related research and implementation
• Historian of large societal trends, inflection points, progress or collapse
• Expert in AI hardware

Specialist in emerging global powers

• Investigate a potentially pressing but unexplored global issue
• Research management
• Think tank research
• Research and advocacy promoting impactful climate solutions
• Improving China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risks
• Engineering
• Economics PhDs
• Machine learning PhDs
• Biomedical research
• Computer science PhDs
• Data science
• Philosophy academia

Learn more about research

• High Impact Science by Carl Shulman
• How to succeed as an early-stage researcher: the “lean startup” approach
• Podcast: Luisa and Robert Long on how to make independent research more fun
• A list of potentially high-impact research questions, organised by discipline

See all our articles and podcasts on research careers .

Read next:  Explore other useful skills

Want to learn more about the most useful skills for solving global problems, according to our research? See our list.

Plus, join our newsletter and we’ll mail you a free book

Join our newsletter and we’ll send you a free copy of The Precipice — a book by philosopher Toby Ord about how to tackle the greatest threats facing humanity. T&Cs here .

Notes and references

• “Green Revolution technology saved an estimated one billion people from famine and produced more than enough food for a world population that doubled from three to six billion between 1960 and 2000.” Archived link , retrieved 5-Nov-2018. ↩
• Turing, A. M. (1937). “ On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem “. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. 2. 42 (1): 230–265. ↩
• See Figure 1 of Bloom et al, (2017) ↩
• “We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore’s law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s.” Bloom, N., Jones, C. I., Van Reenen, J., & Webb, M. (2017). Are ideas getting harder to find? National Bureau of Economic Research. ↩
• The number of academics and graduate students in the world ↩

If Turing and his group had not weakened the U-boats’ hold on the North Atlantic, the 1944 Allied invasion of Europe — the D-Day landings — could have been delayed, perhaps by about a year or even longer, since the North Atlantic was the route that ammunition, fuel, food and troops had to travel in order to reach Britain from America. ↩

• Open Philanthropy is 80,000 Hours’ largest funder, as of 2023 ↩

Sir Andrew McMichael, leading HIV vaccine researcher

For the good person whose CV you just described, would you prefer their CV landing on your desk or an extra grant?

“It’s not a simple choice. If they’re that good, they’ll probably get their own funding at some point. You can take them on without huge risk. I would always take the person.” How about if you could have half a million pound grant?

“It’s hard to turn down half a million pounds. I wouldn’t know many groups who would. You could buy another machine or do another project that would be too expensive otherwise. It depends on how much money I’ve got there already. It’s fantastic to get good people though, no question.”

Can good researchers always get funding?

“Yes, reasonably easily. Everyone can get bad patches. It’s unusual to always be on top of everything. For instance, you can get a dip at the end of a line of work, while you’re getting ready to start something else. But on the whole they can.”

John Todd, a Professor of Medical Genetics at Cambridge

Would you prefer £100,000 per year or [a good person] working for you?

“Definitely the guy”

How about £0.5mn per year?

“I’d still take the person at £0.5mn. By £5mn, I’d prefer the money! There’s a cut off somewhere between the two.”

Why would you pay so much?

“It’s very difficult to find brilliant people who have the true grit to get things done, even if it takes a long time. Most of them end up in the city.”

“The best people are the biggest struggle. The funding isn’t a problem. It’s getting really special people. I call them the one percenters…If you have a good person, it’s easy to get the grants for them. I don’t think there’s a really good researcher out there who couldn’t get funding from the MRC or Wellcome Trust.”

“One good guy can cover the ground of five, and I’m not exaggerating”

Katie Ewer, a cellular immunologist

Is your impression that it’s harder to find good researchers or additional funding?

“In order for research to progress, you need lots of different types of people within an organisation. You need people who are very methodical in what they do and are capable of doing large volumes of high through-put work, and then you need a few people at the top with the creativity to pull ideas out of the sky that nobody else would ever think of and convince Bill Gates to give you £1 million. I guess if you have somebody like that in your institution who is that creative and has that amazing ability and insight, then you can probably convince people to give you £1 million. But funding is always limited. We could proceed our field more quickly if we had as much funding as the HIV field.”

“If you are uniquely gifted in scientific research, then you should probably be a scientific researcher. But for the other 99.9% of the population, they’re probably best going and earning £1 million elsewhere and funding research.” ↩

• “Differences in rates of scientific production are much bigger than differences in the rates of performing simpler acts, such as the rate of running the mile, or the number of words a man can speak per minute… a large number of factors are involved so that small changes in each, all in the same direction, may result in a very large change in output. For example, the number of ideas a scientist can bring into awareness at one time may control his ability to make an invention and his rate of invention may increase very rapidly with this number.” Shockley, W. (1957) On the statistics of individual variations of productivity in research laboratories . Proceedings of the IRE, 45(3), 279-290. ↩

Moving into your first independent research job

Vol. 52 No. 5 Print version: Page 76

• Funding and Grants
• Conducting Research
• Early Career

The transition from graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, or fellow to an independent research position can be daunting. Stepping out from under the wings of a principal investigator or lab director to pursue your own research ideas and funding while managing postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates can be intimidating and confusing.

To be successful, strong management and leadership skills are key. Psychology researchers at Washington University in St. Louis interviewed 52 federally funded researchers and found that cultivating a positive team environment, providing clear supervision and guidance, expressing lab values and expectations, and leading by example are all key aspects of running a lab (Antes, A. L., et al., Accountability in Research , Vol. 26, No. 3, 2019 ). However, the same researchers also surveyed principal investigators (PIs) in the field of genetics and found that most felt unprepared for their lab management responsibilities, with only three out of the 30 PIs they interviewed stating they felt confident in their abilities when they started their labs (Antes, A. L., et al., Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics , Vol. 11, No. 5, 2016 ).

This is also the case for many psychologists, who do not receive much training in management skills during graduate school. “As a graduate student or a postdoc, there are not as many formal opportunities to learn to lead,” said Chris Wahlheim, PhD, a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who launched his own memory and cognition lab in 2016. “When you step into a leadership position on your own, it really requires attention to how your behaviors are perceived and how to set the best examples.”

Wahlheim and other experienced researchers share tips and tricks they have learned on the job:

Observe your early mentors carefully

Find a good mentor during graduate school or your postdoc whose leadership style you admire and who will help prepare you for directing your own lab, said Luke Hyde, PhD, a clinical and developmental psychologist at the University of Michigan who founded a lab that focuses on the development of risk and resilience in children and families in 2012. “I was fortunate to have two different PhD mentors who had different styles, and I was able to take away great strengths from both of them,” he said. One, who had a larger lab, provided steady guidance and support on several larger and slowly evolving projects. The other, who had a smaller lab with more time-sensitive work, met with Hyde more frequently throughout the week but focused less on long-term planning. “Both helped me learn to balance between immediate opportunities and ideas and longer-term projects,” he said.

Now as an associate professor, Hyde has sought out seasoned faculty and staff at Michigan who can answer questions about lab management. “Make sure you get a mentoring committee or otherwise identify senior folks who you can bounce ideas off of,” he said.

Nazbanou Nozari, MD, PhD, a cognitive psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, was proactive at asking her postdoc adviser questions and kept a constant eye on how she ran her lab. “My adviser was really good at running a lab, and I modeled mine very closely after hers,” said Nozari, who has been running her language production and executive control lab, which started at Johns Hopkins University, since 2014. “I learned how to structure my lab, how to have lab meetings, how to divide the labor, how to approach projects and progress reports.”

Hire the right people

A big part of leading a lab is establishing good values and a healthy culture early on, which starts at the recruitment process. “In my first few years, I focused less on the science, but I focused a lot on infrastructure,” said Hyde. “I thought a lot about who we needed to hire, how we were going to collect the data, and how we could set up a lab where I didn’t need to do everything.”

Along with finding people whose training and expertise fit with the lab’s research questions, you want to hire individuals who get along, value collaboration, and are animated about the work. This is something Wahlheim thinks about when recruiting new researchers for his team. “I have an excitable personality, so during the recruitment process, what I usually do is let them see who I am,” he said. “I build that enthusiasm early, and you can tell when a student gravitates towards it, and you can tell when a student doesn’t.”

By creating a cohesive group, the other parts of running a lab—from data collection to writing institutional review board grants to submitting publications—will run a lot more smoothly. “That’s not something you talk about in grad school, but, ultimately, the infrastructure you set up and the lab culture you create is really important in terms of the vitality of your lab,” said Hyde.

Grow your leadership skills

Once you have hired the appropriate staff and students, the next step is to make sure you manage your team well. Barbara Stanley, PhD, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University who studies suicide prevention and has been principal investigator on several large grants, recommends creating distinct order in the lab. “Try as much as possible to establish a clear structure within the lab so that people know what their responsibilities and roles are,” she said. For example, set clear guidelines on how to be an author on a manuscript and the criteria for being first author. “By doing this in advance, it prevents a lot of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and anger.”

Keeping your team motivated is another challenging but essential part of leading a lab, said Wahlheim. “In academia, the reward structure is so delayed, and so you have to point out that any little victory is big,” he said. This includes everything from learning new software to analyzing a large group of data. “I always do my best to congratulate people on those small victories to help them realize that it’s not trivial that they’re learning these skills—all of it matters and all of it contributes to this much bigger goal that we have.” Maintaining this social component of the lab, especially during COVID-19 when many people are working remotely, helps build morale and boost productivity. “We are encouraging ways for folks to socialize in safe ways, like games on Zoom,” said Hyde.

Wahlheim also makes sure to emphasize the student-professor relationship and budgets a significant amount of his time to mentoring. Sometimes, this means helping a student publish a paper in a journal that is not high impact or giving up first authorship as the principal investigator. But this work builds team morale, is incredibly valuable to the student, and helps build a foundation for their career, said Wahlheim. “I’ve had to learn to be generous and patient with my time to help students toward the goals that we promised we’d help them toward.”

At the same time, it’s important to learn how to tell students no if you’re overbooked or need to dedicate time to fulfilling other PI duties. “You have to grow comfortable with disappointing people,” Wahlheim said. “I will do everything I possibly can to help my students, but at the end of the day, I can’t lose sight of what the university wants from me.”

Manage your budget strategically

PIs spend much of their time writing grants and managing their finances, and doing both well is crucial, said Stanley. “The funders follow along with what you’re doing, not just scientific progress, but what you’re doing with the funding.”

However, most researchers aren’t taught how to manage a scientific budget in graduate school. Wahlheim learned this the hard way when he started running his own lab, which was partially supported by state funds that had to be spent in a particular timeline—the first half in Year 1 and the second half in Year 2. “I had to work quickly to think about what I needed to do that would work in an environment I didn’t yet understand,” said Wahlheim, who successfully spent the allotted money. “If I had to do it all over again, I probably would have had a lot more open and frank conversations with other faculty in the department before I arrived so I could get a clear understanding of how to allocate that money.”

Depending on your research topic, it can also be overwhelming to decide what sort of equipment to invest in. In Wahlheim’s lab, for example, researchers use high-tech devices like an eye-tracking machine. Balance those major purchases that are absolutely necessary to conduct your research with plenty of resources for staffing, Wahlheim said. “You can buy as many computers and software programs as are available, but the work really requires people.”

For example, your wisest investment might be putting aside money to fund a graduate student during the summer who can help with some tough data analysis. Or you can bring on a postdoc who has prior experience working with human subjects and can greatly aid in data collection.

About once every 3 months, Nozari checks in on her finances to see how much money she’s spent. “As a faculty member, you need to be your own accountant,” she said. Her university does offer grant and financial workshops, but she’s found the best way to learn how to write and submit grants is to consult senior researchers who have successfully received funding in the past. “In the beginning, I asked as many questions as I could about the actual process,” said Nozari, who wrote her first grant for the National Science Foundation in collaboration with a colleague who could guide her through the process. “It was during the hands-on work with him that I learned how to write grants.”

In the end, nothing beats the tried-and-true saying: Practice makes perfect. “You won’t be successful unless you jump in it and start doing it,” Nozari said.

Model resilience, humility, and growth

It’s key to note that learning to lead is a never-ending process and nobody is perfect, said Nozari. This is particularly true when it comes to mentoring students. “As you go through your career, you’ll work with new people with new dispositions, so the learning never stops.”

As a result, being open to feedback and willing to acknowledge your mistakes is crucial. Creating a safe culture also boosts employee engagement, reduces workplace tension, and builds a sense of trust throughout the lab. “Don’t meet feedback with a negative response,” said Stanley. “Be open and respectful.” And just as you would wish for someone to give you professional, constructive criticism when you make an error, you should show the same respect to your employees. “We have to be willing as leaders not to be punitive when mistakes come up,” said Maryland Pao, MD, of the intramural research program at the National Institute of Mental Health, who oversees the work of 40 PIs from a range of disciplines.

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of being a PI or lab director is practicing self-care. For Nozari, a big part of that is opening up to her colleagues about her struggles and seeking help when she needs it. “That’s not emphasized enough” in research settings, she said.

Wahlheim agrees that you must “be kind to yourself.” “We set really high standards for ourselves,” he said. A lot of the decisions that determine one’s success in the field, like who wins awards, what publications get accepted, and who gets grants, are outside of your control and aren’t a direct reflection of your competency or abilities as a scientist, he added.

You must remember that everyone has been in the same boat, and the ups and downs of research are unavoidable. “If you look at someone’s good record, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes that a lot of people never get to see,” said Wahlheim. “Having a better understanding of how to be OK with those failures and not internalize those as reflecting one’s own inability—I think that that’s important to remain persistent and resilient.”

Starting your own lab National Institute of General Medical Sciences webinar series

Becoming a principal investigator: Designing and navigating your academic adventure Greer, P. L., & Samuel, M. A., Neuron , 2019

Recommended Reading

Contact apa, you may also like.

How to Get Research Experience

New section.

Working in a research setting can help make you a competitive medical school applicant and help you to determine if a career in medicine or medical research is right for you

How do I find a research position?

If you’re currently in college, check with your institution’s science or undergraduate research websites for opportunities to assist with faculty research projects. You can also review faculty bio pages and lab websites for more information. Next, reach out to your immediate network: express your interest in assisting with a research project to your science professors, academic advisor, and your pre-health advisor.

Try exchanging ideas with your peers and upper-classmen for advice on research opportunities at your institution. You can also ask peer advisors, resident advisors, or any fellow premedical students for introductions to principal investigators (PIs). You might even try the “Undergrad-Grad-PI” method. This is where you first reach out to undergraduate students in research labs to learn about their responsibilities; they oftentimes are more responsive. Then, reach out to the graduate or post-doc students to learn about the research question being investigated. After this, read the most recent paper or abstract the lab published. Once you complete these steps, you can approach the PI more confidently and more effectively demonstrate your commitment to and understanding of their project.

Your school’s career center or student employment office may know about research job openings, and they can also offer resume help and go over interview tips and techniques. Remember, opportunities may be on or off campus, full- or part-time, paid or unpaid, or part of a summer program. Once you find a position, you can connect with your school’s fellowships or awards office to inquire about research funding opportunities.

If you’ve already graduated, consider looking into open positions. Research hospitals, universities, and biotech companies are always looking for lab technicians or clinical research coordinators (CRC). Job opportunities are typically posted on the career pages of their websites.

When should I begin gaining research experience in college?

Some premedical students begin their research experiences during their first year of college, and others begin research positions after they have already graduated. On average, most students secure a research position junior or senior year. There are three big factors that will impact this:

• Your level of interest in pursuing research. If you are really excited to investigate a question under a mentor, you might find yourself reaching out to professors early and often. Other students may focus on gaining clinical experience, and therefore wait later in their academic career to start research.
• Readiness for the research project. Different PIs will have different expectations for preparation. A research project might require you to first take coursework in basic lab sciences, statistics, or another advanced topic specific to the project. Other PIs may prefer to train you “on-the-job” through their graduate or post-doc students. This will impact when you are ready to join a project.
• Finding the right research project. There is a process of reviewing different PIs and research projects to find the right fit for you. What subject do you want to investigate? Do you want your research project to take place in a lab or non-lab setting? Is there an independent question you want to investigate with the help of a mentor?

When is the best time to look for a position?

According to Kate Stutz, Ph.D., Director of Pre-Health Advising at Brandeis University, if you’re interested a research position during the academic year, the best time to look for positions is at the very beginning of the semester. There also tend to be a lot of research opportunities in the summer, both paid and volunteer, through set programs like the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REUs). It’s best to start applying for summer research positions in December-February for the upcoming summer. Remember, typically there are more applicants than available spots so get your applications in early. Each undergraduate institution will be different, therefore make sure to connect with your advisors and peers for feedback on when to start looking.

What’s the best way to apply?

The outreach email message that you send to potential research faculty is very important. This message should include a formal introduction of yourself, evidence that you are familiar with their research project(s), and a clear, specific ask. Identify what you hope to contribute to the project. Do you want to clean the glassware or analyze lab findings? Consider attaching your resume as well. Dr. Stutz stresses that networking and persistence are crucial to finding a position. Make sure you’re using all of your network, including your peers and professors, to find open positions. Don’t be afraid to send follow up emails; faculty are very busy and often overlook emails. Sometimes, it can be even more effective to stop by a professor’s office hours to hand deliver your materials and indicate your interest in person.

How should I prepare for an interview?

With any interview, it’s important to make a good impression. Be sure to dress appropriately. Come prepared with a resume. Use your campus career center for advice on proper attire and resume best practices.

Often during interviews, you’ll be asked about your career goals. It’s helpful to be able to speak about the steps you plan to take to meet those goals. Talk about classes you’ve taken, especially upper-level science courses. Speak about your skills, your knowledge of techniques, and the equipment you’ve used throughout your coursework. Be prepared to discuss the lab experiments you’ve completed. If you’ve done any sort of research—even in your coursework—keep track of it. This shows you have experience. Lastly, interviewers often ask candidates if they have any questions. Dr. Stutz suggests asking something that indicates you’ve done your own research into their project. You could ask where they see their research going in the next three years or what challenges they anticipate. You could also ask about expectations for undergraduate researchers; do they expect you to work 20+ hours a week? Full time over the summer? Do they require you to have work study or to sign up for research credits? Asking these questions ahead of time can help you plan ahead and determine if this position is the best fit for you. Check out these  interview resources  for more tips.

Does research experience have to be in a wet lab?

No! Research can be performed in any field or subject. We’ve had successful applicants with research in classics, sociology, history, and policy, as well as applicants with research in biology, biochemistry, and neuroscience. Medical schools value all types of research. Research can take place in a scientific lab that requires advanced devices and procedures to obtain data for analysis. Research can also take place in the humanities or social sciences where participant interviews or surveys are needed to obtain an individual's life perspective. The clinical research field is constantly investigating patient outcomes and how to improve care through clinical trials or analysis of patient data. As a premedical student, consider what question you want to investigate further. Do you want to learn more about how health inequities impact disadvantaged communities in your area, or perhaps you want to know more about the protein channels involved in memory cognition? Once you choose a direction, you can then partner with a research PI for guidance on how to navigate your question. Sierra Perez, Pre-Health Advisor at Brandeis University, shares not to be afraid to get creative with your research question. She has been impressed by the medical school applicants who have created independent questions that address the community needs. “Applicants are recognizing the critical needs of specific populations, such as homelessness, LGBTQ+, veterans, youth with disabilities, etc.,” she stated. “There is also a demand for translational researchers, or individuals who can take complicated bench topics and apply it to the clinical world.”

Is research experience required to be accepted to medical school? 

It depends. Some medical schools are very research focused; they may require a research thesis or have research time built into the curriculum. Other schools are more community or clinically focused; they would rather have an applicant work in a healthcare setting or volunteer at their local soup kitchen than be at the bench moving clear liquids from one test tube to another. Research experience (in whatever discipline) is helpful for developing some of the Premed Competencies , such as critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, scientific reasoning, as well as teamwork and oral communication skills. How much you should engage in research depends on how much you enjoy it once you try it!

The majority of accepted medical school applicants have some form of academic or clinical research at the time they apply. Competence in research has become increasingly important in the medical field to improve patient care outcomes.

You can also review medical school mission statements to see if research is a focus at a particular school. You can read each school’s mission, and the number of accepted students in their most recent class who had research experience, in the  Medical School Admission Requirements . Remember, it’s best to pursue experiences that you’re genuinely interested in, rather than just to check a box, but you may not know if research is for you until you give it a try.  

• Skip to content

Five reasons why research could be right for you

Ruairi Kavanagh &

Claire Farrugia

9 Oct 2023, 09:49

The supports available from the Irish Research Council mean that a career in research is rewarding, stimulating and engaging. Many highly qualified researchers apply each year, which means that the application and selection process is highly competitive, but why couldn’t you be one of them? Here are some of the reasons why people choose a career in research.

A career in research broadens your mind

The research community is collaborative by nature, and by meeting and communicating with other researchers, you can gain a better understanding of the holistic benefits of research. In one sense, doing research expands your vision as well as your content-based knowledge. You are constantly confronted with problems and hypotheses that challenge you to question your assumptions and to produce new outputs. At the same time, the collaborative nature of research broadens your mind by connecting you to like-minded people who contribute to the growth of your specific research in unforeseen ways. In this sense, the benefits of a career in research have a holistic element, involving adaptation, curiosity and teamwork skills. You will also gain an understanding of how research in particular areas can change and adapt, helping you to make sure your own research remains current and viable.

A career in research is challenging

The scope of recent Irish research breakthroughs reveals both the brilliance of researchers and the complexity of natural and human sciences, which do not give up their secrets easily. To become a good researcher, you need strong attention to detail, excellent complex problem-solving skills, resourcefulness and tenacity to validate your work. This is why the Irish Research Council funds projects based on the quality of the proposal and how it will contribute to knowledge.

A career in research can make a difference

The results of your research could have benefits across many areas of society, from addressing social, cultural and health issues to scientific and technological breakthroughs that could have benefits internationally.

A career in research can be fun

The work is hard and the standards are rigorous, but most researchers agree that their work is rewarding so you will enjoy what you do, and hopefully you will even find a way to express that through your work. Research allows you to try out new ideas, experiment with cutting-edge technology, meet interesting people and take part in engaging discussions.

A career in research is diverse

It includes natural and life sciences, engineering, as well as fields such as Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Research may range from statistical analysis to demographic investigations, such as the impact of technology on social inclusion or exclusions. Or, it may involve fine-grained analyses of philosophical or historical relevance. Yet other research projects may question how language and communication develop and influence our lives. Common to all fields, however, is the interdisciplinary character of research projects, which fosters collaborations across different disciplines. A career in research is valued: Being able to say you’re a researcher is rewarding in its own regard, particularly if you’re doing the right work to back it up. Being part of a broad network of people working towards better understanding and enhancing people’s lives is something to be proud of. Read about how you can apply for funding from the Irish Research Council or for a place on one of their postgraduate programmes and much more at www.research.ie .

Achievements in Irish Research

Each year the Irish Research Council recognises excellence in Irish research, and some of the notable achievements for 2022 included:

• Modern European history expert and professor of modern history, Professor Robert Gerwarth, who won the Irish Research Council Researcher of the Year Award 2022. He is an expert on 20th century European history with an emphasis on the history of political violence and armed conflict. He has published widely in the field. One of the main objectives of his work is to connect different national experiences in European countries. In light of the current geopolitical climate, his expertise in ‘war studies’ is crucial.
• Professor Judith Harford was awarded the Researcher of the Year: Impact Award. Her research focuses on gender and social class in relation to education. Her work has helped expose inequalities and raise awareness of gender and social class issues at a national level. Judith has served on several working group and committees of the Department of Education and the Teaching Council of Ireland. Her projects include a study into the under-representation of women in senior positions in higher education which led to a symposium on gender equality in higher education.

Aoife Doyle talks about her experience working with the Irish Research Council

Aoife Doyle, Employment-Based Postgraduate Programme, Irish Research Council

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• December 17, 2020

5 Ways to Get Research as a Pre-Med Student

Are you stressed out that you don’t have any research yet as a pre-med? 

I remember being really overwhelmed trying to get research experience as an undergraduate student.

Don’t freak out if you’re only a freshman/sophomore and haven’t gotten any yet! That’s okay!

First, I want to cover some FAQs I receive about research before we dive into the five ways to get research as a pre-med student. 

• “Do I need to do research as a pre-med student?” I would suggest that all pre-med students be involved in research in some capacity, whether it is undergrad or during a gap year!
• Is it required to do research to get into medical school? No. However, do most pre-meds applying to medical school have research on their application? Yes. Do not let the lack of research on your application be the thing that stops you from getting into medical school!
• Does the type of research matter? No. The type of research you do does not matter… it could be in the field of biology, psychology, chemistry, physics, etc. It could be bench lab research or clinical research. The most important part is that you are involved in the research project and able to explain it in your application and interviews. Medical schools want to see that the research you are doing is helping develop your analytical skills that you will use as a physician one day.

Now that we have covered the frequently asked questions about research as a pre-med student, let’s dive into 5 ways you can secure research opportunities! 

1. Find the research lab’s website and send an email to the professor stating that you’re interested in their lab

Sending emails to a professor that you have never met is probably not something that you would do normally.

When people told me to do this, I did not know whether to trust them or not.

However, this is an EXTREMELY common way to get research as an undergraduate student.

Professors understand that there are lots of pre-med students at their university who need research experience. 

The first step would be to check out their website and read some of their recent publications on PubMed. Then, send an email to the professor introducing yourself: 

Dear Prof X,⁣

My name is Kelly and I’m a sophomore at UCLA majoring in Physiology and a pre-med student. I found your website/heard about your lab from X person and I am interested in the research that you do on migraines. I read some of your recent publications about migraines and found XYZ extremely interesting. I was wondering if you had any research opportunities or lab positions available. I have attached my resume to this email. (In your resume, include ANY research experience you have, even if it’s just from high school)

You might need to email multiple labs in order to get a response. And that’s totally okay, don’t give up! 

2. Utilize pre-meds who are older than you for connections 

I asked pre-meds who were older than me what research they were involved in.

I was in a sorority at UCLA as well as other clubs where there were juniors and seniors who were pre-med students who belonged to a lab. 

I asked them if they had any openings, or even how they got their research, and that was a great way to network!

3. Check out your university’s clubs or research minors that can set you up with research opportunities! 

Lots of universities have clubs that are specifically tied with research opportunities.

I know at UCLA there was a club that focused on stroke research at the nearby hospital that let you volunteer there and do research. 

Another awesome opportunity that UCLA had that I am sure lots of other universities also have was a biomedical research minor.

The minor literally connected you to a research lab that you could work at and then earn grades through research papers and assignments!

I never did this minor because I had already found research ahead of time, but this is something I definitely recommend pre-meds check out. 

4. Utilize your TAs! 

Pretty much every science TA at a university is involved in some sort of research lab because they are working on their master’s or PhD. 

TAs who are teaching general biology classes, or even upper division biology classes, will be in a research lab that might be more applicable to pre-med students.

The first thing I would do is go to office hours frequently to get to know them so that you can be on a first-name basis with them.

Once you have established a relationship, towards the end of the semester you could send them an email or ask them in person if they are in a lab or know of any labs with any openings. 

5. Contact a physician to see if they have any opportunities  

Another great and easy way to get involved in research is through a physician. Most physicians working at large academic hospitals are involved in research in some capacity.

One thing that you can help with as a pre-med student would be data collection or assisting with chart reviews. I would suggest trying to email physicians or even ask medical students if they know of any research projects involving review articles or clinical trials that you could help with. 

Here’s the bottom line…

Finding research as a pre-med is difficult and does take some perseverance. I hope that these tips were helpful and that you are able to find a great research opportunity with them.

If you liked the tips that I provided, feel free to follow me on Instagram at @heykellyellen. I post premed tips there daily and show my followers what life is like as a medical student. I also have a blog where I blog about premed and college topics as well!

Are you preparing to take your MCAT? If so, click here to discover why UWorld is the industry leader in high-stakes exam prep. Our online learning tool will have you thoroughly prepared and supremely confident on test day. With stakes, this high, nothing short of the best will do. Discover UWorld today!

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Research Scientist Skills

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Top Soft Skills for Research Scientists

Fostering innovation through critical thinking, collaboration, and resilience, while leading with emotional intelligence and meticulous organization.

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Interdisciplinary collaboration, advanced data analysis and interpretation, scientific communication and public engagement, grant writing and fundraising acumen, problem-solving and critical thinking, technical proficiency in emerging technologies, project management and organizational skills, adaptability to scientific paradigm shifts.

Show the Right Skills in Every Application

Research scientist skills by experience level, important skills for entry-level research scientists, important skills for mid-level research scientists, important skills for senior research scientists, most underrated skills for research scientists, 1. interdisciplinary knowledge, 2. intellectual curiosity, 3. resilience, how to demonstrate your skills as a research scientist in 2024, how you can upskill as a research scientist.

• Deepen Your Expertise with Specialized Courses: Enroll in advanced courses that focus on cutting-edge topics within your field to deepen your expertise and stay abreast of the latest scientific breakthroughs.
• Master Data Analysis and Statistical Software: Become proficient in the latest data analysis tools and software, such as R, Python, or specialized bioinformatics software, to enhance your research capabilities.
• Collaborate on Interdisciplinary Research Projects: Seek out opportunities to work with professionals from different scientific disciplines to broaden your perspective and foster innovation through cross-pollination of ideas.
• Participate in Scientific Conferences and Seminars: Attend and, if possible, present your research at national and international conferences to stay informed about recent developments and network with leading scientists.
• Contribute to Peer-Reviewed Journals: Writing and reviewing articles for reputable scientific journals will not only contribute to your field but also refine your critical thinking and writing skills.
• Engage with Research Funding and Grant Writing: Develop your skills in writing grant proposals to secure funding for your research, which is a critical component of a successful scientific career.
• Adopt Open Science Practices: Embrace open science by sharing your data and findings openly when possible, and using open-source resources to promote transparency and reproducibility in research.
• Develop Teaching and Mentoring Skills: Take on roles that involve teaching or mentoring to improve your communication skills and give back to the scientific community by helping to train the next generation of researchers.
• Stay Informed on Ethical Research Practices: Ensure that you are up-to-date with the ethical considerations and regulations in your field to conduct responsible and credible research.
• Invest in Soft Skills Development: Enhance your soft skills, such as teamwork, leadership, and problem-solving, which are invaluable in collaborative research environments and when leading projects or labs.

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How to Get a Scientific Research Job in the US (If You Are Coming from Elsewhere)

Growing up in Australia, I remember a common phrase: ‘only in America’. Sometimes this was in reference to bizarre cultural events or phenomena but it was generally accepted that the USA was an extraordinary place, where everything was bigger, brighter, and more outrageous. America has fostered a culture of big ideas and innovation, partly because…

Published June 19, 2019

Growing up in Australia, I remember a common phrase: ‘only in America’. Sometimes this was in reference to bizarre cultural events or phenomena but it was generally accepted that the USA was an extraordinary place, where everything was bigger, brighter, and more outrageous. America has fostered a culture of big ideas and innovation, partly because starting a business is relatively straightforward and an unsuccessful business venture is not necessarily seen as a failure. Life sciences and biotech in America can also take advantage of fast delivery times and increased reagent availability, as many companies producing research products are headquartered in or have a significant presence in the USA.

Based on 2017 statistics , there are 1.4 million employees in life sciences in the USA and more than 2500 biotech companies. Of these 2500 companies, some will be small startups with only a handful of employees while the ‘pharma giants’, such as Pfizer and Merck, employ tens of thousands of people. Add to this the number of prestigious universities and other non-profit institutions conducting research and it’s clear that there’s plenty of potential opportunities for job-hunting scientists in the USA. However, you may be wondering how a non-US citizen can go about finding employment, especially if you’re located in a far-off country.

You’ll hear it 100 times during any job search – network , network , network .

First, make sure that your LinkedIn profile is up to date, accurate, and showcases your skills and experience. No spelling errors, a professional-looking photo, and a short summary about yourself will show that you’re serious about finding a good position. LinkedIn acts as your online resume and allows you to present your best professional face to potential recruiters . Unlike Facebook, it’s perfectly acceptable to connect with people you don’t know personally if their experience is relevant to your own.

Secondly, monitor news in your scientific field. Which academic lab has funding, who raised startup capital, which company has just decided to focus on a drug or product highly relevant to your expertise? A physical presence in the USA could be helpful if you are able to line up contacts to visit while you’re there, but without any job leads it’s a long and probably expensive trip to simply go door knocking.

Online job postings are helpful but don’t be discouraged if you apply and hear nothing back. If you see jobs that don’t quite match your skills but are in your area of interest, try contacting the advertiser to see if they have any other potential positions. This is particularly true for industry jobs, where a company may be hiring multiple people to develop an existing team or project. If the job has been posted by a recruitment agency, the recruiter may be involved in hiring for other companies with similar positions.

If you’re able to connect with a potential employer and secure a job interview, that’s great! If you’re not already in the US, a phone interview is the most common first step. Make sure you are well prepared by taking the time to research the company or institution and the kind of work they do. Always think of several (intelligent) questions to ask your interviewer , as many of your questions will be answered during the interview. If you are being asked to use an app you’re not familiar with (Zoom, Skype, BlueJeans, etc.), make sure you install it on your computer ahead of time and know how to use it.

I’ve recently had an insight into the recruiting process at a small-to-medium size biotech company. If you get an interview, the company or lab is probably already satisfied that you can perform the techniques required for the position (unless you lied on your resume – please do not lie on your resume). The most important considerations are teamwork, integrity, a great attitude and being able to adapt . You may well be asked ‘situational’ questions and it’s great to practice these for any stage of your job search. Don’t just present your skills and experience like a shopping list, give examples: when did you demonstrate teamwork? In what situation did you demonstrate grace under pressure? Don’t be afraid to sell yourself, and practice until you’re able to fluently describe yourself both on paper and in person as a fantastic potential member of a team, not a pipetting machine.

If you are offered a position in the USA, congratulations! However, there are a few more things you need to consider before going ahead.

It’s OK to negotiate when you receive your offer letter. If your new position is in industry, it’s almost expected. An academic salary may be dictated by grant funding or University regulations but that doesn’t mean negotiating is out of the question.

For an industry job, check Glassdoor or other resources to see the average salary for similar positions. Keep in mind that the salaries also reflect the high cost of living in areas such as Boston or San Francisco!

You may be offered a relocation bonus if you’re coming from far away. If you’re not offered relocation expenses, ask if this is possible to help cover the costs of moving to a new country.

When investigating job opportunities or attending interviews, it is acceptable to enter the USA on a visitor visa or ESTA waiver program. However, make sure you have booked your travel to leave the USA and have this information ready if it’s requested when you arrive. Don’t book a one-way ticket into the US unless you have proof (i.e., a visa) of ongoing employment. You may not start work until you exit the USA and obtain a visa and you can’t transition from visitor status to a work visa while inside the USA. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) takes these laws extremely seriously – never perform any work, paid or otherwise, unless you have the appropriate visa.

If you’re not a US citizen, you’ll need a work visa. Generally speaking, you need at least a Bachelor’s degree in the relevant field to qualify for a work visa in a scientific setting. Relevant field means directly related to the job you’re applying for – a degree in Business is not sufficient for a position in Neuroscience. Most life sciences institutions or companies, except for small startups, will be experienced in this process and most have their own lawyers to deal with visa applications. Even so, it’s a good idea to have some background information on the visa process.

Keep in mind that the visa process will take some time. A company or university can sometimes apply for premium processing when petitioning the US government for your visa, which will expedite your visa application for an additional fee. However, completing paperwork, scheduling interviews at the US consulate in your home country, and waiting for your completed passport may take weeks or even months.

You need to bring plenty of enthusiasm and flexibility to the table when dealing with recruiters or potential employers. Hiring a foreign national means extra expense and paperwork. Depending on the visa, there may be significant costs to the university or company. Keep in mind that it is illegal for your potential employer to ask you to pay visa filing fees! Both you and your employer will be in breach of the law if you do this, so never deal with any employer that asks you to cover filing fees in any way or implies that your salary will be reduced to compensate. I have been audited by Homeland Security while working as a postdoc and this is the first question I was asked.

It’s also a good idea to consider where in the USA you would be living. The biggest and busiest areas in life science industry are Cambridge, Massachusetts, the California Bay Area, and Seattle. Smaller but still important areas include San Diego, Los Angeles, and various major cities in Texas. Keep in mind that these are some of the most expensive cities to live in the world. As much as postdocs often survive on small stipends, foreign nationals are required to prove that they will have enough money to live on during their stay. If you apply for a visa with an offer for a job that pays very poorly and no existing savings or funds, USCIS may not be convinced that you can support yourself. If you are bringing family with you (husband or wife, US immigration does not recognize unmarried partners), they may be able to work in the USA but obtaining work authorization can take many months.

To conclude, the USA offers fantastic opportunities for scientific job-seekers and living on the other side of the world is not necessarily a barrier to securing a job. Keep in mind some important points:

• Learn how to sell yourself. In general, Americans are very happy to hear about your accomplishments and it’s not seen as poor taste unless you overinflate your abilities or bend the truth!
• Many jobs are never advertised – don’t be afraid to politely approach recruiters, companies or institutions if you feel there could be opportunities
• Without US citizenship, you will require a work visa. Be aware that this process may take time, and never break the rules

With determination and a little bit of luck, you might just find your dream job stateside.

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September 16, 2022

A Massive LinkedIn Study Reveals Who Actually Helps You Get That Job

Acquaintances, more than close friends, show the strength of “weak ties” when it comes to employment

By Viviane Callier

10'000 Hours/Getty Images

If you want a new job, don’t just rely on friends or family. According to one of the most influential theories in social science, you’re more likely to nab a new position through your “ weak ties ,” loose acquaintances with whom you have few mutual connections . Sociologist Mark Granovetter first laid out this idea in a 1973 paper that has garnered more than 65,000 citations. But the theory, dubbed “the strength of weak ties,” after the title of Granovetter’s study, lacked causal evidence for decades. Now a sweeping study that looked at more than 20 million people on the professional social networking site LinkedIn over a five-year period finally shows that forging weak ties does indeed help people get new jobs . And it reveals which types of connections are most important for job hunters.

The strength of weak ties “is really a cornerstone of social science,” says Dashun Wang, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who was not involved in the new study. For the original 1973 research, Granovetter interviewed people late in their career and asked them about their experiences with job changes. Before his groundbreaking paper, many had assumed that new positions came from sources such as close personal friends who would put in a good word, headhunters who would seek out strong candidates or public advertisements. But Granovetter’s analysis showed that people actually got new jobs most frequently through friends of friends—often someone the job seeker had not known before they started looking for a new position. “That really shook people up because assumptions about how people find the best jobs in life doesn’t look to be true—it looks like actually strangers might be the best contacts for you,” says Brian Uzzi, also a professor at the Kellogg School of Management, who was not involved in the new study.

What gives strangers an edge over friends? Granovetter posited that close connections—people in the same circle—largely have the same facts and professional options at their disposal. But people who belong to different communities can offer a whole new set of information and helpful connections. A mutual friend can act as a bridge, connecting the job hunter to a contact in a different group, which provides new opportunities.

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This explanation was based on observational data showing a correlation between weak ties and job mobility. But correlation is not causation, and in the nearly 50 years since Granovetter first set down his idea, researchers had not proved that an applicant’s weak ties are the specific thing that causes them to nab that new job. Two decades ago, when he was a graduate student, Sinan Aral could not help noticing that gap. “There’s a 500-pound gorilla in the middle of the room of this literature, which is that we don’t have any causal evidence for any of these theories,” says Aral, senior author of the new study, who is now a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We don’t know whether weak ties are correlated with goodness [such as new jobs] because weak ties themselves are good or because people who make weak ties have some unobserved characteristics that also make them more productive, have good ideas and get better jobs, promotions and wages.” As Wang puts it, “People use this theory and associated concepts to explain a wide range of phenomena, but there has not been a causal test for whether weak ties are causally linked to job opportunities. And that’s what this paper does.” The study was published in Science on Thursday.

Developing experimental proof of this theory is extremely challenging. To test causality with the rigor of a randomized clinical trial, researchers would have to take two equivalent groups of people, experimentally manipulate their social networks by giving one group more weak ties and the other fewer and then observe whether the groups experienced different outcomes. But Aral and his colleagues discovered that LinkedIn had already done something almost as good. As engineers for the professional networking site tweaked the algorithm for recommending “People You May Know,” they ended up conducting many natural social experiments. In one case, LinkedIn would randomly vary the number of weak-tie, strong-tie and total recommendations that it displayed for users, where the strength of a tie depends on the proportion of mutual to nonmutual connections. This provided a perfect experiment to test Granovetter's idea. The researchers, led by LinkedIn applied research scientist Karthik Rajkumar and M.I.T. graduate student Guillaume Saint-Jacques, analyzed five years of these data, comparing LinkedIn users who were algorithmically assigned more weak-tie recommendations (and therefore formed more weak ties) with those who were assigned more strong-tie suggestions. Next, they estimated how adding a strong or weak tie affected subjects’ subsequent job mobility. Thanks to LinkedIn’s algorithmic experiments, the team could distinguish the influence of tie strength from that of the total number of new ties.

The results not only supported Granovetter’s theory but also added several refinements. First, not all the weak ties were equally helpful. If the strength of a tie depended on the number of mutual contacts, then moderately weak ties where two people shared roughly 10 acquaintances mattered the most. But ties’ strength can also be measured by interaction intensity, or the frequency with which you contact your weak-tie acquaintance. When the researchers examined this metric, they found that the most useful ties were the ones that people did not interact with very often. Finally, the team found that these effects varied by industry: weak ties on LinkedIn were particularly beneficial in digital industries, which tend to involve machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotization, software use, and remote and hybrid work, compared with “analog” industries that require in-person presence.

These results could benefit job seekers pondering how to build and evolve their social networks. For instance, when it comes to LinkedIn’s suggestions of people to connect with, “you may not want to ignore those,” Aral says. “And if you get a recommendation for somebody, and you don’t see what the connection could possibly be,” they still might be worth exploring. “Those are the ... weak ties that might actually be the source of your next job,” he adds.

Despite these results, it’s important not to neglect strong ties, Wang says. This study focused on successes—that is, people who got new jobs. But it did not examine all of the failures and rejections that happened before the success. To persist in a grueling job search, we need strong ties to provide social support . “Only observing successes is going to tell us only part of the story,” Wang notes. “In order to really be successful in the end, you really need your strong ties.” These strong ties are vital for groups such as immigrants, who often form tight-knit communities to deal with the discrimination and other pressures they experience. But this also means that they may have a harder time accessing weak-tie opportunities. “Some of the things that hold immigrant groups or disadvantaged groups back is the very fact that it’s harder for them to have these weak ties,” Uzzi says.

Along with job seekers, policy makers could also learn from the new paper. “One thing the study highlights is the degree to which algorithms are guiding fundamental, baseline, important outcomes, like employment and unemployment,” Aral says. The role that LinkedIn’s People You May Know function plays in gaining a new job demonstrates “the tremendous leverage that algorithms have on employment and probably other factors of the economy as well.” It also suggests that such algorithms could create bellwethers for economic changes: in the same way that the Federal Reserve looks at the Consumer Price Index to decide whether to hike interest rates, Aral suggests, networks such as LinkedIn might provide new data sources to help policy makers parse what is happening in the economy. “I think these digital platforms are going to be an important source of that,” he says.

More From Forbes

Still struggling to find a job here's why it is so hard.

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Job hunters feel they have to try harder to find a new job in this economy. Nearly 70% of people ... [+] said their current job search was more challenging than their last one, according to Aerotek.

If you are struggling to find a new job, you are not alone. More than 70% of job seekers believe that the current labor market is not conducive to landing a new employment opportunity, with job hunters feeling they have to try harder to find a new job in this economy, according to talent solutions provider Aerotek. Nearly 70% of people said their current job search was more challenging than their last one.

Research by human capital advisory firm Josh Bersin Company and workforce solutions business AMS found that the duration for global hiring is at an “ all-time high .” The recruitment process now averages about 43 days, which the report calls “unsustainable if companies are to remain competitive and keep pace with the fast-changing needs of their industry.”

Why Has The Hiring Process Become So Unbearable?

When the economy and overall mood are positive, businesses generally expedite the hiring process, so as not to lose out in the war for talent. Conversely, geopolitical concerns, supply chain disruptions and high inflation and interest rates create a perfect storm of economic turbulence, leading employers to cut back on spending and take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to hiring.

The tech industry, in particular, has seen a reversal of trends that were favorable for employment, such as increased hiring to meet consumer demand and the ability to raise capital and invest in growth due to slashed interest rates. The layoffs that have taken place in this sector since mid-2022 were part of a market correction, as companies adjust their staffing levels to align with their current revenue and growth projections.

A competitive white-collar job market, caused partly by many displaced workers due to job cuts, gives companies the green light to take their time selecting candidates. In this hiring environment, employers have the upperhand, while job seekers typically hold less bargaining power.

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Additionally, as businesses compete in the artificial intelligence arms race, they are actively redirecting resources and budgets from other divisions to fund and prioritize AI-based projects and hiring the talent to work on these specific teams.

Moreover, the layoffs that followed the Great Resignation hiring boom disproportionately impacted human resources professionals , which means that organizations are also working with less HR firepower, and may explain why the hiring process has felt disjointed.

Candidates for white-collar positions must endure a seemingly unending number of interviews. The pandemic ushered in video interviews, displacing in-person meetings. This online trend has made it easier for recruiters to request and conduct more and more rounds of interviews compared to the prior process of setting up an appointment and going into an office.

Employment Data

The United States economy added 272,000 jobs in May, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Although more jobs were added last month than predicted, in contrast to April’s disappointing numbers, the growth was mainly driven by three predominant sectors: healthcare (+68,000), government (+43,000) and leisure and hospitality (+42,000). Jobs created in these three sectors alone accounted for more than half of the employment gains in the U.S.

The unemployment rate climbed to 4%, the first time it has reached that level since January 2022.

Additionally, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey published last week by BLS revealed that U.S. job openings declined more than anticipated in April, with the number of available roles per job seeker at its lowest in nearly three years. Job openings, which are a benchmark of labor demand, fell 296,000 to 8.059 million , the lowest level since February 2021.

When Your Job Search Isn’t Working, Do This

While the hiring environment may be working against you, there are things you can do in your job search to change course and better position yourself to acquire a new job. If you are not having success in your job hunt, it may be time to engage in self-reflection.

Take time to evaluate your job search approach. You don’t want to keep doing the same things and expecting different results. Continually analyze your failures objectively and identify mistakes, knowledge gaps, lapses in judgment and areas you can improve upon for the future.

Reflecting honestly can help you learn and grow. Recognize failures as feedback and opportunities for growth—not signals to give up. Setbacks prepare you for later wins, if you can learn from them.

Your Action Plan

Once you gain a better sense of self and where you can personally develop, write out your career goals and define a daily game plan to achieve them. This will help in holding yourself accountable.

Identify and compile a list of potential target employers that align with your goals. Tap into your professional network, attend industry events and connect with people who work in your desired sector. Seek advice from mentors, coaches, sponsors and truth-tellers who will offer feedback, constructive criticism, advice and guidance. Reach out to recruiters who specialize in placing people in your sector.

Ensure that when you are applying for jobs that your résumé clearly addresses the needs and wants of the job descriptions, so that the candidate fit is obvious. You should be tailoring this document for each role you apply for. Instead of just listing your responsibilities, your résumé should demonstrate your value and how you were impactful in your previous roles. It should outline a clear progression in your career and tell a story.

During an employment gap, you must always work on developing your skills and qualifications. You can go back to school, take online courses, attend workshops or volunteer to gain relevant experience.

Before a job interview, do your homework. You must familiarize yourself with the company’s products, services, business models, achievements and mission statement. Craft your elevator pitch and prepare by practicing answering frequently asked questions aloud. If you can, do a mock interview with an individual you trust and ask for feedback.

One of the biggest problems that job seekers have is that they carry around the baggage of their past failures and rejections. When people feel resentment and bitterness toward their current situation, it’s painfully obvious to others. The professionals involved in the interview process sense the hostility and get turned off by it. The hiring personnel will then pass on your candidacy and move on to other applicants.

Before continuing on in your job hunt, you need to check in on your mental health and ensure that you have a positive mindset. Do the necessary work to put any bad feelings behind you and not let your past rejections define you. Stop carrying this burden around like a weight on your shoulders. You want to exude positivity, confidence, drive, enthusiasm and motivation throughout the interview process.

Keep meticulous track of each and every victory, no matter how small it may seem. Celebrate every gain you make in your job search. With all the small wins, your confidence will grow and people will notice it.

If you are still having no luck in your job search, you may want to consider a career reinvention or pivot.

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How difficult is it to get a research job in industry?

• Thread starter grantwilliams
• Start date Jun 18, 2012
• Tags Industry Job Research
• Jun 18, 2012
• New computational microscopy technique provides more direct route to crisp images
• New method for generating monochromatic light in storage rings
• Updating the textbook on polarization in gallium nitride to optimize wide bandgap semiconductors

There are many research jobs in industry. They are fundamentally different from research jobs in academia, though, in that the researcher has less control over the research topic. They may be interested in building a better battery, not string theory.  

grantwilliams said: How difficult is it to obtain a research job in industry? Do they pay enough to support a family, say a wife and 3 kids?

I was massively disappointed by my research job in industry. I worked as a supposed mathematical modeller. My supervisor had a BS in engineering and didn't know how to take a basic limit of the kind you learn as a first year undergrad, yet called himself a mathematical modeller. The job involved putting data into spreadsheets and doing a series of random types of analysis until one gave the answer that they wanted to have. They then gave these fabricated numbers to funding bodies in order to get research grants (it was a renewable energy company). Sorry if this comes across as a rant. My point is that you may be seriously disappointed if you expect industrial research to be anything like academic research. Then again this was just one company, there may be better companies out there.  

lisab said: One skill that seems like a good bet is programming.

Madness what sort of degree do you have if you don't mind me asking?  

A masters degree in mathematical physics. There were a few PhDs at the company, but they entered at the same level as someone with a BS. I think I was the only non-engineer at the company.  

Well so far everything i have found has been a little disheartening. I really want to do some sort of original research, but i guess industry doesn't sound so bad. Maybe i could work for the computer industry and help with the physics of making more efficient transistors or a similar job.  

• Jun 20, 2012

grantwilliams said: What sort of programming languages would be best to learn? I am currently teaching myself Java, but I think maybe C++ could be more helpful? Or possibly something like python?

Soveraign Would you recommend taking classes or just self learning the material? I took AP programming AB & BC in high school so I think I would have a decent base in java to teach myself?  

I suppose that depends. Are you still an undergrad? In grad school? If an undergrad, taking classes certainly wouldn't hurt. Full disclosure: I have degrees in both comp sci and physics so I'm biased. I have found the comp sci background to be extremely useful since I encounter multiple languages and large software structures daily, and I plan to leverage that when I finish my Ph.D. in the next year or so. Of course the reality is programming in any language can be self tough if you have good resources and the dedication (or just really enjoy it). The drawback is that you might learn bad habits or not get exposed to large scale thinking.  

I am actually an incoming freshman so I can easily squeeze in some comp sci classes  

• Jun 21, 2012

Soveraign said: I suppose that depends. Are you still an undergrad? In grad school? If an undergrad, taking classes certainly wouldn't hurt.

Related to How difficult is it to get a research job in industry?

1. how competitive is the job market for research positions in industry.

The job market for research positions in industry can be highly competitive. Many qualified candidates with advanced degrees and experience apply for a limited number of positions. It is important to have a strong research background and relevant skills to stand out in this competitive job market.

2. What qualifications do I need to have to get a research job in industry?

To secure a research job in industry, you typically need a graduate degree in a relevant field, such as biology, chemistry, or engineering. In addition, having research experience, publications, and relevant technical skills can greatly increase your chances of getting hired.

3. Are there any specific industries that are easier to get research jobs in?

The availability of research jobs can vary across industries. Generally, industries that heavily rely on research and development, such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and technology, tend to have a higher demand for research professionals. However, competition for these positions can also be fierce.

4. How important is networking in getting a research job in industry?

Networking can play a crucial role in securing a research job in industry. Many companies prefer to hire candidates through employee referrals or professional connections. Attending industry conferences, networking events, and connecting with professionals on LinkedIn can help expand your network and increase your chances of getting hired.

5. Is it necessary to have industry experience to get a research job in industry?

While having industry experience can be beneficial, it is not always necessary to secure a research job in industry. Many companies value academic research experience and technical skills just as much as industry experience. Focus on highlighting your relevant skills and research experience, and be open to entry-level positions to gain industry experience.

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'Black jobs'? Trump draws pushback after anti-immigration rant

What exactly are "Black jobs" — and are they really at risk from the recent surge of immigrants?

"They're taking Black jobs now and it could be 18, it could be 19 and even 20 million people," former President Donald Trump said in the debate Thursday about the role immigrants play in the U.S. economy. "They're taking Black jobs, and they're taking Hispanic jobs, and you haven't seen it yet, but you're going to see something that's going to be the worst in our history."

The available data, however, doesn't indicate that immigrants are filling roles en masse that would otherwise go to American citizens.

And as Derrick Johnson, CEO of the NAACP, pointed out, "There's no such thing as a Black job or a white job."

"They're hardworking Americans who are seeking to have quality jobs, and that should be the goal of this conversation," he told NBC News. This election cycle — when researchers have found Black voters are being heavily targeted by political disinformation —  it is crucial to not turn “communities against one another,” Johnson said.

It's true that Black workers have historically been overrepresented in certain sectors like government and home health care . But Black Americans occupy all rungs of employment, including leadership positions: Eight Fortune 500 companies, an all-time high , are currently run by Black executives, though that rate is far below Black Americans' 14.4% share of the population.

Data shows that Black workers have seen gains during both the Biden and Trump administrations. Under Trump, the unemployment rate for the group fell to 5.3% in September 2019 — a record low at the time. It dropped even further under President Joe Biden, to a new low of 4.8% in April 2023.

Today, as the broader U.S. labor market has slowed, Black unemployment has crept up to 6.1% along with the national rate, which has climbed from a low of 3.4% in January 2023 to 4%. But the employment situation for Black workers remains generally favorable.

Another measure of job-market health, the labor - force participation rate, h a s a lso improved among Black workers under Biden, with 64% of the U.S. Black population in the workforce (employed and unemployed but seeking work), compared with a peak of 63.2% under Trump.

As the overall economy has slowed, the rate has slipped back to 62.9% — about where it stood for the better part of the Trump administration.

The all-time labor-force participation record for Black workers — as well as all U.S. workers — came during the Clinton years and has declined since then, largely thanks to baby boomer retirements.

In May, the White House released a report showing the gains Black workers have made in the past three years, concluding that the robust overall labor market "has benefited the middle and working classes, especially Black Americans."

As debate-watchers digested Trump's remarks, some voiced confusion and criticized the moderators for not pushing back. Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms joked in a post on X : "I have a law degree. Does that get me a #blackjob?"

Cherron Perry-Thomas, a Pennsylvania voter watching the debate in a focus group with NBC News, said Trump has a "very limited vocabulary" when discussing Black workers. "We’re very diverse people."

Another Black Pennsylvanian, who spoke to NBC News anonymously to share his thoughts freely, said he would likely back Biden but found himself "disgusted by the way both of them speak about the Black community."

"In fairness, Trump did positive things for the Black community and he's strategic enough to appeal to Black voters now," he said, but added that he felt Biden's record is stronger.

Recent improvements in Black workers' fortunes haven't been uniform. For instance, they are more likely to be union members than any other racial or ethnic group. Yet despite Biden's longtime support for organized labor, union membership rates have fallen during his administration to a record low of 10%, down from 10.8% in 2020.

When it comes to pay, inflation-adjusted weekly earnings for Black workers reached a two-decade high of $314 under Trump. That was narrowly surpassed in the fourth quarter of 2023 under Biden, hitting $315. But amid persistent inflation and a cooling job market, Black workers' average weekly earnings declined in the most recent quarter to $293.

As for whether immigrants are "taking" native-born workers' jobs in general, the data suggest they aren't. The Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that the unemployment rate for U.S.-born citizens remains near all-time lows: 3.8% in May, lower than the nation's 4% unemployment rate overall. It's unlikely that native workers' unemployment would be so low if they were being crowded out by immigrants.

While Trump may have been pointing to Black workers' overrepresentation in lower-wage roles, newly arrived immigrants tend to be employed in fields — like construction, food service and agriculture — that would likely go unfilled by native-born workers, whatever their race, experts say.

"It is clear the labor market is both absorbing immigrants and generating strong job opportunities for U.S.-born workers, including those in demographic groups potentially most impacted by immigration," the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, said ea r lier this year .

Seth Anderson-Oberman, another Pennsylvania voter who watched the debate, found the jobs discussion off-putting.

He decried "the constant use of division to try to pit people against each other — Black and brown folk, immigrants, people who are struggling to be able to take care of themselves and their families — pitting us against each other."

For more from NBC BLK, sign up for our weekly newsletter .

Rob Wile is a breaking business news reporter for NBC News Digital.

Char Adams is a reporter for NBC BLK who writes about race.

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Who Won the Debate? Biden Stumbles Left Trump on Top

A halting debate performance by President Biden left Democratic strategists reeling, raising questions about his fitness to stay in the race.

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By Alan Rappeport

Reporting from Washington

In the first presidential debate of the year between the leading Democratic and Republican candidates, President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump clashed on inflation, taxes, Ukraine and the future of democracy.

A halting performance from Mr. Biden and a relatively steady and measured delivery by Mr. Trump left Democrats deeply concerned about Mr. Biden’s prospects. Personal attacks overshadowed discussions of policy during the debate, with the candidates sparring over who had a better golf game, their respective cognitive abilities and their legal problems.

On cable news and social media, strategists from both parties wondered if Mr. Biden could continue in the race against Mr. Trump. Few Democrats could muster an upbeat assessment of the president’s performance.

Here is a sampling of the reaction.

“It was a really disappointing debate performance from Joe Biden. I don’t think there’s any other way to slice it. His biggest issue was to prove to the American people that he had the energy, the stamina — and he didn’t do that,” Kate Bedingfield, Mr. Biden’s former White House communications director, said on CNN.

“Biden is even whiffing on his easy pitches — abortion and Jan. 6. I mean, my God,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist and former senior adviser to the presidential campaign for Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.

“Look, I debated Joe 7 times in 2020. He’s a different guy in 2024,” Andrew Yang, a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, said on the social media platform X, adding the hashtag #swapJoeout.

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How to Improve the Hiring Process for Disabled Candidates

• Mason Ameri
• Terri R. Kurtzberg

It takes more than lip service to convince disabled job applicants to apply to your company. These research-backed practices can demonstrate that you’re a truly equitable employer.

How can companies do a better job of attracting disabled people to apply for jobs and convincing them that they truly are an equitable employer? And how can job candidates feel more comfortable disclosing a need for accommodation? The authors’ research over the last five years offers a number of paths forward for both sides. First, employers can move away from legalistic boilerplates and use more heartfelt language about their commitment to DEI. But they also need to back up their words with concrete evidence, such as a personal message from the CEO; testimonials from disabled employees; statistics on the hiring, promotion, accommodation fulfillment, and retention of disabled employees; or awards recognizing the company’s accomplishments in the DEI space. Their research also suggests job candidates emphasize their hard skills during interviews and delay the conversation about accommodations until they’ve built up more of a rapport with the hiring team.

Despite recent record employment gains for disabled employees in the U.S., the hiring of disabled people continues to be a pain point for both candidates and companies.

• Mason Ameri , PhD is an associate professor of professional practice at Rutgers Business School. He is an expert in disability employment and is a consultant and speaker on policy reform in this area to government and industry.
• Terri R. Kurtzberg , PhD, is a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School. She is the author of five books and her research is frequently quoted in the media. Dr. Kurtzberg is the recipient of multiple teaching and research awards.

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Tips on how to get a research job/experience.

I recently graduated with a bio degree and would like to start off my career working in a lab. I wasn't really sure where I was going with this degree but my senior year I took two labs I enjoyed which made me think I might like working in a lab for a few years and then maybe applying to grad school. I live in a big city and I've applied to many entry level research assistants/ technicians/aide positions in the hospitals and research institutions here but so far I've only had 2 interviews that didn't go anywhere. I know my lack of research experience is most likely getting in the way so I was wondering if you guys have any suggestions for gaining experience? I was thinking about emailing PIs directly instead of through the institution's application process but I wan't sure if that would be annoying or unexpected to them. I am also open to volunteering in a lab to gain experience for a few months but I dont know how that works out or if they would want to train someone who is only there for a short time. Thanks for any advice!

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June 24, 2024

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New research shows why you don't need to be perfect to get the job done

by Howard Hughes Medical Institute

When neuroscientists think about the strategy an animal might use to carry out a task—like finding food, hunting prey, or navigating a maze—they often propose a single model that lays out the best way for the animal to accomplish the job.

But in the real world, animals—and humans—may not use the optimal way, which can be resource-intensive. Instead, they use a strategy that's good enough to do the job but takes a lot less brain power.

In new research appearing in Science Advances , Janelia scientists set out to better understand the possible ways an animal could successfully solve a problem, beyond just the best strategy.

The work shows there is a huge number of ways an animal can accomplish a simple foraging task . It also lays out a theoretical framework for understanding these different strategies, how they relate to each other, and how they solve the same problem differently.

Some of these less-than-perfect options for accomplishing a task work nearly as well as the optimal strategy but with a lot less effort, the researchers found, freeing up animals to use precious resources to handle multiple tasks.

"As soon as you release yourself from being perfect, you would be surprised just how many ways there are to solve a problem," says Tzuhsuan Ma, a postdoc in the Hermundstad Lab, who led the research.

The new framework could help researchers start examining these "good enough" strategies, including why different individuals might adapt different strategies, how these strategies might work together, and how generalizable the strategies are to other tasks. That could help explain how the brain enables behavior in the real world.

"Many of these strategies are ones we would have never dreamed up as possible ways of solving this task, but they do work well, so it's entirely possible that animals could also be using them," says Janelia Group Leader Ann Hermundstad. "They give us a new vocabulary for understanding behavior."

Looking beyond perfection

The research began three years ago when Ma started wondering about the different strategies an animal could possibly use to accomplish a simple but common task: choosing between two options where the chance of being rewarded changes over time.

The researchers were interested in examining a group of strategies that fall between optimal and completely random solutions: "small programs" that are resource-limited but still get the job done. Each program specifies a different algorithm for guiding an animal's actions based on past observations, allowing it to serve as a model of animal behavior.

As it turns out, there are many such programs—about a quarter of a million. To make sense of these strategies, the researchers first looked at a handful of the top-performing ones. Surprisingly, they found they were essentially doing the same thing as the optimal strategy, despite using fewer resources.

"We were a little disappointed," Ma says. "We spent all this time searching for these small programs, and they all follow the same computation that the field already knew how to mathematically derive without all this effort."

But the researchers were motivated to keep looking—they had a strong intuition that there had to be programs out there that were good but different from the optimal strategy. Once they looked beyond the very best programs, they found what they were looking for: about 4,000 programs that fall into this "good enough" category. And more importantly, more than 90% of them did something new.

They could have stopped there, but a question from a fellow Janelian spurred them on: How could they figure out which strategy an animal was using?

The question prompted the team to dive deep into the behavior of individual programs and develop a systematic approach to thinking about the entire collection of strategies. They first developed a mathematical way to describe the programs' relationships to each other through a network that connected the different programs. Next, they looked at the behavior described by the strategies, devising an algorithm to reveal how one of these "good enough" programs could evolve from another.

They found that small changes to the optimal program can lead to big changes in behavior while still preserving performance. If some of these new behaviors are also useful in other tasks, it suggests that the same program could be good enough for solving a range of different problems.

"If you are thinking about an animal not being a specialist who is optimized to solve just one problem, but rather a generalist who solves many problems, this really is a new way to study that," Ma says.

The new work provides a framework for researchers to start thinking beyond single, optimal programs for animal behavior. Now, the team is focused on examining how generalizable the small programs are to other tasks, and designing new experiments to determine which program an animal might be using to carry out a task in real time. They are also working with other researchers at Janelia to test their theoretical framework .

"Ultimately, getting a strong grasp on an animal's behavior is an essential prerequisite to understanding how the brain solves different types of problems, including some that our best artificial systems only solve inefficiently, if at all," Hermundstad says. "The key challenge is that animals might be using very different strategies than we might initially assume, and this work is helping us uncover that space of possibilities."

Journal information: Science Advances

Provided by Howard Hughes Medical Institute

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