WELCOME TO IMPERIAL SEARCH

CONSIDER WHAT WORK ENVIRONMENT YOU NEED

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Are people in the workplace you’re considering competitive with one another or collaborative? Are they friends outside of the office? Do they work as a team or on their own? Can people work remotely or are they expected to work in the office? What is the work-life balance like? What are the salary expectations?

These are all important questions for potential workplaces and employers when you’re searching for that dream job to jump start a new career path. It’s also good (and easy) to do some initial

research on your own—both about

industries in general and employers in particular.

If you know you work best as part of a team, then it’s important to find a company that prioritizes a collaborative approach. If you’re more productive working alone, then you might be better served by freelance or contract work that allows you to manage yourself and set your own terms. The same thing goes for scheduling and flexibility concerns. If you thrive in a structured environment and prefer reporting directly to a manager for guidance, then you might look for a traditional, 9-5 job in an office environment. But if you prefer the freedom of working from home or on the road as a digital nomad, and you’re more comfortable being your own boss or supervisor, then looking at remote careers will be key to your career happiness.

If you aren’t sure where you stand with these things, you can always try taking up work on the side to help you figure it out. For example, if you work in a hierarchical environment now, try doing some solo freelancing gigs and see if you notice a difference in how you feel. And the same thing goes if you normally spend your workdays by yourself—try making some peer connections instead or work on a collaborative side project to test if teamwork might be more your thing.

• Take Care of Yourself, As a first step, don’t neglect your physical and mental health. Meditate. Do jumping jacks in your living room. Practice yoga. Whatever it is that works for you, do what it takes to care for your body and mind.

• Learn a new skill, Let’s face it. If you’re stuck at home, you’re probably not going to become an expert on how to run a mass spectrometer. But you could beef up your computer programming skills—for instance, by learning how to create a fancy new graph in R or how to produce documents in LaTeX. You could also read a book about a new topic or circle back to that online course that you never finished.

• Think About your CAREER PLANS, When you’re in the lab, it’s easy to focus on your next experiment and neglect long-term career planning. So, consider using some of your homebound time to learn more about yourself and your career options. 

• Conduct informational interviews, If you have a few ideas about jobs that might interest you, then take this time to reach out to professionals who currently hold those jobs. In the midst of a pandemic, it’s not appropriate to ask them to meet up for coffee. But you can ask them for a quick phone call or Skype chat. The reality is that the people whom you’d like to speak with may be working from home too. What’s more, they might be itching for more social contact. So, informational interviews could be a good way to break isolation, learn about someone’s career, and build a network, while still keeping a distance.

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