Culture Shock: how to navigate unspoken differences between academia and ‘industry’

‘Like a salmon leaping up rapids and waterfalls, I discovered I needed to be intentional about my career and know where I was headed, even though I didn’t know exactly what was waiting for me upstream.’

– Matteo Tardelli,The Salmon Leap for PhDs

Rather like bowling, or trying to iron creases out of clothes without ironing new creases into them, diplomacy is definitely a skill I’ve worked on over the years. Take one of my early team meetings in my first job post-PhD, when our manager asked for feedback on some proofs for a new advertising campaign.

My response?

Well, whoever put them together got ‘its’ and ‘it’s’ mixed up? Why, these people were practically illiterate!

Then came the gentle nudge from one of my colleagues… ‘how about we start with what is working well…?’

Now I’d never thought of myself as a particularly ‘negative Nancy,’ but reflecting on my transition from academia to an ‘alt ac’ position, I hit upon why it might have been that for the first few months, I was always coming in with the criticism before the kudos.

The thing was, I was so used to academic cultures of feedback based on critique. Supervisors’ critique of my chapter draft. Delegates’ critique of a conference talk. Reviewers’ critique of an article manuscript. Critique, critique, critique. Hence, I’d come to understand giving feedback as picking your way through someone’s work and telling them everything that was wrong with it.

Crucially, learning skills like diplomacy and giving productive feedback were all part of my transition from academia to not only a different type of work, but a different type of working culture. Laying straight into the designers’ concepts with their first drafts? Not ok. We weren’t in peer review now, Toto. It turns out, however, that I was far from alone.

In 2021, Skakni, Inouye & McAlpine published a paper in the journal Studies in Higher Education called ‘PhD holders entering non-academic workplaces: organisational culture shock’ (13:2, pp. 151-170). They did 32 semi-structured interviews with PhD graduates who had moved the public and private sectors and found that half reported dedicating significant time and energy to understanding the working culture within their organisation. They particularly noted working out how their workplace functioned, their organisation’s values, and how hierarchy and status worked in their new environments. So jarring were some of their participants’ experiences that Skakni, Inouye & McAlpine describe these challenges faced by PhDs transitioning into different industries as ‘organisational culture shocks.’

Seems I wasn’t the only one who felt like a bit of an academic square peg in an alt-ac round hole when I first moved into my post-PhD job. But, I was still working within a university. How would this culture shock feel making the transition from PhD to a totally different sector? Well, someone I knew would have plenty of interesting insights on this was none other than Matteo Tardelli.

Matteo had been on my radar since I bought his book ‘The Salmon Leap for PhDs’ last year. After working in academia as a PhD and Postdoc for 9 years, Matteo transitioned into biotech and consulting; his book takes everything he learned (sometimes the hard way!) from that transition and puts it into a neat ‘how to’ guide for PhD and postdoc scientists looking to follow suit. I was lucky enough to catch up with Matteo last month now that he’s based in London and exploring his next career move.

In a truly international career so far, Matteo moved to Vienna for his PhD, then to the US for a postdoc in New York. But in 2021 he quit his second postdoc and moved from academia into project management and consulting. In a career that had already spanned several roles and continents, I was itching to know what Matteo had to say about the ‘culture shocks’ he’d experienced along the way.

Ah yes, I remember, said Matteo early on in our conversation. It was the first week of my new consulting job, working completely remotely from different places around Mexico. I was in a video call with my manager who was in his home office in North Carolina when for the first time I heard ‘Sorry, I can’t hear you. I think you’re on mute!’

We’ve all been there.

Yes, but this was the first experience of such a kind for me, Matteo explained. Although I’d moved around Europe and the US during my academic career, I definitely wasn’t used to showing up at work through laptop screen every morning…! I mean, I just used to go to the lab every day and run experiments, in real life!

As it turns out, being caught with his mic down was just the start of a journey that made Matteo ponder the ‘cultural’ differences between academia and his new world of work.

When I moved from academia to project management and consulting, I quickly realised how difficult such a move can be, Matteo continued. I figured out that starting a completely new career trajectory as an experienced professional was tough. Due to my lack of industry experience, I got mentored by colleagues who felt quite junior to me and was often micromanaged, making it tough to learn new skills at my own pace. Feedback on my work was often difficult to take and I had to remind myself to stay humble while keeping up my identity as a seasoned professional.

Indeed, this struggle to get a firm sense of where one stands in a new workplace that is one of the ‘culture shocks’ noted by Skakni et al. Their research highlights that many PhD graduates transitioning into industry ‘took time to determine what status they were assigned in their organisation’s hierarchy and what obligations and privileges were associated with this status.’

It’s not surprising; after all, a feeling of having ‘lost’ recognition or status as an expert, coupled with hierarchical structures quite different from those within academia, is enough to make anyone feel like a fish out of water. You’ve spent years becoming a seasoned expert… now here you are being mentored by someone with a Bachelor’s degree. Hmmm.

For Matteo though, this didn’t tip over into arrogance. In fact, things went the other way.

A few weeks in he explains, I ended up developing imposter syndrome. While previously I was used to knowing every single detail of my niche academic topic, as a consultant, I had to present results that I had little or no idea about. And worst of all, I had to do this in front of true experts of that specific field!

I was totally hearing Matteo on this. After a PhD, so many of us feel like we can only ‘earn the right’ to speak with authority on something if we’re a recognised leading expert in it. What’s more, some of the skills that Matteo *believed* he was developing in academia didn’t quite cut the mustard in an industrial setting.

Project management was also a skill I had to learn on the go. We’re told that project management is something we acquire in our PhD… but it’s not the same! Managing one single PhD project over several years can be very different from managing several projects (try SIX) on a biweekly deadline. I had to facilitate other people’s work and make sure that everyone in my team would deliver their jobs on time, which I’d never done in academia.

So, what did he do to overcome these challenges and crack on in his new role?

Ultimately, I had to accept that not knowing everything was OK. In industry, there simply isn’t enough time to dig deep into a topic due to very tight deadlines. Once, while I was running a competitor analysis exercise, I talked in a presentation about a biotech company that I *thought* was a strong competitor for the client I was working with. Shortly after, I found out that that very company was purchased by the client years ago…! It didn’t pose a threat at all, as my client was clearly aware of them, being now part of their company! So, I learned to juggle embarrassing moments and specific questions to which I had no immediate answer, and got back to the client with updates when necessary.

Matteo’s story here was a lot of things… amusing, slightly cringeworthy, but ultimately… reassuring. In a new workplace, people don’t expect us to be infallible. Everyone makes mistakes… what’s important is owning them and learning from them.

I also learned how to take steps in advance to avoid delays, be prepared for unpredictable outcomes, manage expectations, and communicate with clients accordingly. This phase was tough and a real learning curve; I feel like I learned valuable soft skills, grew much more organised as a person, and understood how to prioritise tasks on several levels of work and life.

My conversation with Matteo really highlighted the importance, when stepping from academia to another sector, of keeping up your confidence whilst also staying humble. So, what can we learn from this to smooth the career transition from academia?

• Don’t be afraid to ask questions in your new workplace: how are things done? What are the processes? How do you and your role fit in to the bigger picture, and what are the boundaries around that?
• Don’t let a few mistakes get inside your head. In a year’s time, will those mistakes still matter? Will anyone really remember them? If not, reflect, extract the learning, and move on
• Understand that you, just like everyone around you, are a work in progress. Keep lines of communication open with your manager(s), especially around your training needs
• Don’t feel alone: connect with people like Matteo who have made the transition too and can offer solidarity
• Going through the PhD process means you’ve already shown resilience and can adapt and learn quickly. Thus, as Matteo finished off, looking back I am definitely grateful for the long academic journey that took me here, even if that journey didn’t give me every tool that I needed to manage people, prioritise tasks, and to cope with imposter syndrome.