How to Transition from Academia to Industry
From Choosing the Right Role to Landing the Job
Why make the jump to industry?
Academia doesn’t promise what it used to. Gone are the days when your PhD would have guaranteed you a post-doc position and a decent salary. Today, with the number of PhD and MSc students increasing, and funding for academia at an all-time low, it’s no mystery why academics are getting curious and leaving their not-so ivory towers.
The reality is that industry can often offer:
💰Higher Pay—My current entry/mid-level role at a health tech startup pays roughly what an Associate Professor at a leading UK university would earn. That’s insane! Industry needs top talent in a competitive market, and is willing to pay for it. If your paycheck is important to you, industry wins hands down.
🌎 Focus on Real-World Impact—While academia is focused on the bigger problems that industry often overlooks (international development, improving health in lower and middle-income countries, etc.), academia is ultimately focused on publishing papers, not actually changing the world. Industry, on the other hand, must deliver great products and services to retain customers. Yes, they are fundamentally profit driven, but a lot of health tech companies actually do incredible work and are full of people who care deeply about making an impact.
📈 Better Career Opportunities—I’ve only been in industry for 7 months, and I’ve already had so many opportunities to work with different teams—from strategy to product to HR. Great companies want to retain great employees, so conversations around career progression are much more frequent and transparent.
⚕️More Competitive Benefits—When I moved to industry I got private healthcare, free mental health counseling and career coaching services—I go to the dentist and doctor almost too often now! Academia doesn’t offer anything equivalent to this.
😴 Lower Burnout—This one is dependent on where in industry you work. In academia, burnout can be due to the amount of workload you put on yourself as no one can do your work for you. In industry, workload is often shared and delegated across others if needed, but the deadlines and consequences if not met can be more severe. Overall, though, if you want the ability to leave at 5pm and fully switch off from work, industry is your best bet.
🥳 More Fun Workplace Culture—I’ve loved industry so far due to the social life. Work drinks, summer socials, company hackathons, etc. these have all been a lot of fun and it’s great to have a new group of friends who make the work day much more enjoyable. In academia, while I loved my colleagues, there wasn’t a culture of socials, mainly because everyone in my team was at least 20 years older than me and they just wanted to get home to their kids at 5pm.
😊 Greater Job Satisfaction—64% of people in industry report feeling positively about their careers compared to those in academia (42%) according to this Nature article. I’m clearly not the only one!
So, if that all sounds appealing to you, let’s dive into how you make the jump.
How to make the jump into industry
I found the transition from academia to industry quite challenging. I felt that none of my skill sets in academia had prepared me for a role in industry. The research I had done wasn’t directly applicable to business analyst work, the projects I’d managed were all based on research timelines, rather than product and engineering roadmaps, and all the years I’d spent working on research papers and grant applications suddenly felt irrelevant on my CV.
That said, after months of rejection from tech companies, I finally got into the rhythm of job applications and cold emailing which led me to a role as a Founder’s Associate at a health tech startup. And I’m very glad I made the transition.
So, here are a few things I learnt along the way that will hopefully be of use to others wanting to make the same career move.
1. Define where you want to land
Job titles in industry are confusing. Some of them are so abstract they don’t mean anything, and that makes it tricky to know what job title you want to apply for.
When I first started applying for industry jobs, I applied to a whole bunch of User Researcher and Product Manager roles, because I had no idea what they really meant. I assumed “well I’ve done 4 years of academic research and programme management—surely that’s the same skill set”. Now, having worked with user researchers and product managers, I can confirm that academia had not sufficiently trained me for those roles…
To get a feel for what kinds of jobs are out there, where they sit within a company, and what level of seniority they are, Ongig is a useful website that lists all the jobs you can think of and their hierarchy within a company.
One thing to note, though, is some companies just don’t define job titles very well. So don’t take titles too seriously when searching for your next role (more on this later).
3 Things to consider when choosing an industry role
When figuring out what area in industry you want to move into, think about:
🌿 The Nature of the Work
Do you want to continue research or technical work similar to academia? Or are you interested in exploring different areas of work? If the former, consider an industry research lab or think tank. If the latter, aim for a generalist role in a company or consider management consultancy to gain broad exposure to how companies operate.
🏢 Company Size and Structure
Do you prefer working in a smaller team, similar to academia? Or do you want a change of team structure and work with multiple different teams?
Smaller companies often offer:
Greater flexibility to explore different roles.
Faster progression to senior positions due to less competition.
Less structured training—you’ll have to figure things out on your own.
Larger companies provide:
More structure and established processes.
Defined career paths and mentorship.
Less variety in tasks but stronger support for learning.
To gauge company size, search the company on LinkedIn or PitchBook.
⬆️ Career Progression
What long-term role are you aiming for?
Some companies allow lateral movement (e.g., switching departments from implementation to product), but promotion to leadership roles may be harder.
If you’re applying for a junior/mid-level role (e.g., Research Scientist) with plans to advance:
Check if the company has Senior Research Scientists—and how many.
Ask in interviews for examples of employees who have been promoted.
You may have to accept that your first role in industry is a stepping stone to the role you really want. So make sure there actually is clear career progression at the company. Or be prepared to switch companies if internal advancement is slow.
Taking a generalist role
If you aren’t sure what department or type of work you want to commit to, you can take a more generalist role.
These are roles that largely support C-Suite level positions with ad hoc projects, meaning they get to work across multiple different teams and largely have the flexibility to make the role their own.
These can be job titles like:
Founder’s Associate
Chief of Staff
Corporate Manager
Business Analyst
Strategy Consultant
I moved to a Founder’s Associate role straight after my time in academia because I didn’t know which area of a company I wanted to work in. The FA role exposed me to how the C-Suite operated and got me in the right rooms. I could work with any team I wanted to which gave me a lot more freedom and visibility than if I’d gone straight into a more defined role.
For a great overview on the Founder’s Associate role, check out Friso Van De Stadt’s article Rising Superstars: The Founder’s Associates.
Knowing what roles are out there can save you a lot of time by narrowing your focus when applying for your first industry job. So get that a little clearer before you start searching for jobs.
2. Prepare for take off—how to search for a job
Once you’ve thought about the type of role that you’re interested in, it’s time to start searching for what’s out there.
Start with your network
The most likely way you’ll get a job is through referrals.
Applying for jobs via an online job board like Indeed.com is actually one of the least likely ways to get a job, because that’s what everyone else does.
Richard Bolles explains this in his bestselling career guidance book What Color is Your Parachute? and the 80,000 Hours website has a great summary on their website:
The tricky part of moving from academia to industry is you won’t have many colleagues who can vouch for you in industry. However, what you need is leads—people you can talk to in order to start building your network.
If you’re working in academia, you probably have friends from undergrad or post grad who you can stalk on LinkedIn. Are any of them in industries you’re interested in? Or have connections to relevant people/companies? Also, speak to family friends—I know two people who got their first industry jobs through their parents’ friends. Yes, this is nepotism, but it’s also the most obvious way to increase your chances of success in industry.
Apply for jobs that don’t exist yet
One of the wonders of industry that academia doesn’t provide, is the flexibility of creating job roles.
Most small companies will have an "Interested in joining our team but don’t see a role that fits?" option on their career vacancies page. Use these for companies that you’re particularly interested in because be prepared to send them your CV at least three times before they properly notice you, but it does work! I have a friend who really wanted to work at a small global health consultancy and used this technique, they were so impressed by her persistence they eventually invited her to join their team.
For this technique, the tricky part is finding the companies in the first place. You can:
Search Google for lists of emerging companies in fields you’re interested in—there are always pages on, for example, ‘the top 50 startups in health tech’ that give lists of companies that you can then search individually.
Look on business database websites like Crunchbase, PitchBook or Seedtable for lists of companies—if you’re currently in academia, your institution should have free access to these already!
On LinkedIn, if you find a company you’re interested in, look to the right hand side for ‘Pages people also viewed’ or ‘People also follow’ for a list of related companies.
Do industry research and read up on key trends as there will always be lots of new companies that get mentioned in random industry magazines.
Search on job boards
Alongside networking and cold emailing companies, also do the obvious of applying via job boards.
Here are some job boards to try:
80,000 Hours - best for having an impact and working in research
Escape the City - best for having an impact and career changes
LinkedIn - the all rounder
Welcome to the Jungle (formerly Otta) - best for tech and company culture in Europe
Work in Startups - best for wanting to work in very early stage companies based in the UK
YCombinator - best for tech startups, mostly in the US
Don’t search based on job title—so many companies use titles ambiguously. Instead, search based on your non-negotiables like industry, location or salary. Then, when you find a company you like, go to their website and see if they have other roles open you’re interested in. Or cold email as discussed above!
Create a job application database
Ever since I left undergrad, I’ve had a Google spreadsheet of all the jobs I’ve ever applied for.
I write the job title, job description link, company, salary, location, WFH days per week, my personal rating of the job out of 10 (I call it ‘yay-ness’), how many days left until the job will close, the date I applied, and the response I received:
I could not recommend this enough. It makes the job application process so much easier!
It helps you prioritise which jobs you need to apply for first based on when the job application is closing, or how badly you want it.
It can help you quickly see how each job compares to each other.
If you get a call from a recruiter about a job you applied for, instead of panicking and not remembering because you applied to 10 in the past day, you can instead pull up your spreadsheet and immediately find the link to their job description.
Hopefully you’ll start to see progress. The first month I applied, I only got rejections, but slowly I started getting more and more interviews and it was nice to see the number of red rejections in the database going down.
If you’re cold-emailing companies for job opportunities, keeping track of when you last contacted them can be helpful. You can add a reminder in a new column that you should chase them in a week.
Also, always having this data is useful for future job searches. You can go back to the companies you were previously interested in and see if they have any new positions now.
Finding jobs to apply for can be almost as time-consuming as actually applying for them. But if you widen your search strategy, and organise your applications well in a database, you may end up interviewing for roles that other people missed or didn’t think to ask for, increasing your chances of actually getting the job.
3. Prepare for landing—how to get a job
OK so you’ve got a pretty database of all the jobs you want to apply for, and now all you need to do is actually apply.
Here are some tips I’d give to people applying for jobs in industry:
Industry vs academic CVs
Industry CVs are shorter. The general rule is have one page for each decade of your career.
Don’t list all your publications, grants or conferences. Either list them under the specific position you held (e.g. included in your accomplishments in your postdoc) or in your ‘Additional Achievements’ section at the end.
Use AI keyword finders like Huntr to make sure your application matches the job description as closely as possible as most companies in industry are using AI for their hiring now.
Add as many quantifiable results to your CV as you can—industry really cares about this. For guidance on this look here and here.
Have different versions of your CV
When you’re starting out applying for jobs in industry, you might be applying for a bunch of different options, like operations and research roles.
To make this easier, have one ‘master CV’ with literally all of your accomplishments listed. Then create one specifically for operations roles, outlining how you’ve managed teams, improved efficiency, etc. and one for research roles, outlining the number of papers you’ve published and conferences you spoke at, etc.
For the different roles you apply for, you will then at least have a baseline CV version to work with. You can then edit it to make it match the job description as clearly as possible using tools like Huntr as mentioned above.
Always send a cover letter
What you want to demonstrate to every potential employer is that you want the job more than anyone else. A cover letter is the most obvious way to do this.
For the job I currently have now, they said they received over 300 applications for the role and for all the applicants that didn’t write a cover letter, they were immediately rejected.
Yes, realistically the interviewers won’t read your cover letter, but you need to think of it as a tick box exercise. You either care enough about the job to write one, or you don’t get an interview.
Go the extra mile—in your application AND your interviews
Doing an extra task to stand out is the best way to get noticed when hundreds of other people are likely applying for the same job.
Even if you’re cold emailing or just networking, don’t just send your CV! You have one chance to impress, so do some extra work to show how much you’ve thought about the role and how badly you want it.
For my first role in industry (Founder’s Associate), I applied through a job board and sent them an additional piece of work that was not expected at all. I wrote two pages on how I would improve the CEO and Senior Leadership Team’s efficiency, noting key project management frameworks and additional ideas I had that were in line with the job requirements.
This got me a first interview! Which then turned into a seven-stage interview process with a mixture of interviews and tasks. When I got to the final stage interview with the CEO, I went the extra mile again. It was meant to be a relaxed culture-fit interview, but I went in with a whole presentation prepared (again, not expected from me!) about three ways I’d support his workload.
I got a call a few hours later saying I got the job.
Conclusions
So there you have it! My main tips on how to transition into industry.
The main thing I’d say is don’t get discouraged and don’t beat yourself up for wanting to make a career move.
I struggled with my career jump into industry as I felt guilty leaving academia. And I think people in academia judged me a bit too. There’s a sense in academia that if you leave for industry you’re driven by money. This was true for me to an extent, but my main motivation for leaving academia was it felt like a dead end. Everything had started to just be about applying for grants rather than actually doing the work, and that was tedious.
Moving to industry was definitely the right choice for me. I am so much more motivated than I was in academia, and I have high hopes that I’ll make it to a C-Suite level role in a health tech company one day.
I hope that other people also find the move to industry as fulfilling as I did.
If you ever have any questions or want guidance on your transition out of academia, or just into industry generally, feel free to reach out to me on Substack or email me (sonias.substack@gmail.com) and I’ll be happy to chat! :)
Have a fab Sunday :)
Hey! You made it to the end of the post—well done, this was a long one!
If you’re interested in weekly articles on the health tech industry, how startups run, or early-mid stage career guidance, go ahead and subscribe :)