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The World of Cybersecurity

We can guess what many of you are thinking.  Cybersecurity? With my background?

Yet cybersecurity careers permeate nearly every industry and government agency today, and the people they are recruiting–and skills demanded–are expanding across the range of security, privacy, law and policy domains.

It’s also a fast growing industry: the Broadband Institute projects below the size of the Cybersecurity Industry to reach $248 billion in annual spending by 2023, much of this on infrastructure and people, including PhDs.

During our search this week it was evident that demand for highly-skilled people in this industry is significant and growing.  And it’s not just computer or data scientists in demand; there are jobs in privacy advocacy, policy work, technical writing and general market and business development.

As we often note here, there is also significant activity amongst start-up and emerging companies which can offer great hiring packages and exciting career opportunities.  The market map below provides a few examples of companies on the move (source: CB Insights).

106 Cybersecurity Startups In A Market Map

You can check out a few examples on our list below, and many more on our SmartJobs page:

HSS

FOIA Analyst/Lawyer, IBSS Inc

Senior Manager, IR Business Development, SentinelOne

Special Projects, Coalition

Snr Business Development Manager, f5

Open Source Researcher, TS/ w CI-POLY, Excivity

STEM

Cybersecurity Subject Matter Expert, TUVA (Akima)

Information System Security Engineer, ManTech

Principal, IT Risk Analyst, BNY Mellon Bank

Android Vulnerability Researcher, Lockheed Martin

Digital Forensics and/or Reverse Engineer, Mitre Corporation 

If there are areas of work you would like us to explore in more depth, please contact at social@versatilephd.com. 

We want to hear from you.

For access to more jobs as well as archived and searchable opportunities, visit our SmartJobs page. Note: SmartJobs access requires a university affiliation. User-generated jobs are open to all members and can be accessed here.

Food Science, Climate and Plant-Based Chicken?

 

Career opportunities in the future of food, agriculture and climate, focused narrowly on the US or more significantly around the world, are multiplying. In the investment and start-up world not a day goes by when there’s not some mention of a new plant-based chicken, the impact of agriculture on climate change, policies that allow more healthy lunches to school children, or how Uber is acquiring another company to deliver alcohol straight to your home.

These sectors are broad and offer a range of business, research, lab science and public advocacy opportunities.  In the US alone the food and agriculture sector accounts for over $1.1. trillion in GDP and is a critical part of the workforce.  The extension to climate, as well as the science that drives the sector’s future development, is a separate and equally important source of present and future jobs.

We have pulled in a range of possibilities, from government to private sector food development to scientific work into the how future generations will eat.  Notably, the emergence of new companies in these sectors need to draw from a wide range of domain expertise, with PhDs front and center.

Check out a few examples here, and more on our site:

HSS

Foreign Service Agricultural Officer, USAID

Senior Research Consultant, Agribusiness, IHS Markit

Director, Product Dev Commercialization, Impossible Foods

Research Analyst, IFPRI (Intl. Food Policy Research Institute)

Program Manager, Food & Agriculture, Climate Works

STEM

Field Applications Scientist (Sequencing), Thermo- Fischer

Food Science Product Development, Compound Foods

Principal Development Scientist, Meat Snacks, Conagra

Bioprocess Engineer, Invaio Sciences

Flavor Scientist, Mars Corporation

 

If there are areas of work you would like us to explore in more depth, please contact at social@versatilephd.com. 

We want to hear from you.

For access to more jobs as well as archived and searchable opportunities, visit our SmartJobs page. Note: SmartJobs access requires a university affiliation. User-generated jobs are open to all members and can be accessed here.

Shaping the Future of Finance – and Society

Fintech, or financial technology, applies technological innovation to the finance industry and impacts a wide range of everyday life. Fintech also includes companies and organizations that use technology to enhance social change, income equity and access, workforce development, currencies and financial literacy.  The field has also proved remarkably resilient through the pandemic and, according to recent activity, continues to thrive as attractive workplaces.

For PhDs and graduate students, the field of fintech is being driven by well-funded start-ups and more established banks and companies with exciting career growth opportunities and ample capital to hire.  And demand for skilled talent is sky high.  For background, you can read this quick explainer which also includes some examples of start-ups across the US. In the last two weeks alone, nearly $1.7 billion was raised by fintech companies in the US alone.

Here are some of the top fintech companies (source: CB Insights), and areas of focus, for reference.

Notably, fintech jobs are not just for “finance” people.

As a rapidly moving career area with significant demand for highly-skilled talent, we would recommend that you take a pro-active approach to search for specific companies as they do not all appear on the pages of Indeed or other job aggregators.  There are also global networking events that can enhance your understanding and put you in touch with these decision-makers.

  • VPhD’s own search on SmartJobs has yielded a large number of available jobs as well, including companies working to improve homeownership, student loan repayment, catching financial crimes through analytics (!) and scores of other areas.   These are only examples. You can many more live jobs on our SmartJobs site.

HSS

Senior Associate, Credit Ninja

Analytics Manager, Chime Remote

User Research, Better

Compliance Officer and Government Affairs, Sofi

Summer Internship, Research, Financial Technology Partners

STEM

UX Researcher, Prosper

Head of Data Architecture and Analytics, ThinkMarkets

Senior Quantitative Developer, Financial Crimes Analytics, Interactive Brokers

Staff Data Engineer, Venmo

Financial Modeling Associate, BlackRock

If there are areas of work you would like us to explore in more depth, please contact at social@versatilephd.com. 

We want to hear from you.

For access to more jobs as well as archived and searchable opportunities, visit our SmartJobs page. Note: SmartJobs access requires a university affiliation. User-generated jobs are open to all members and can be accessed here.

Market Research in a Post-Corona Economy

  • As vaccinations begin and a sense of normalcy begins to return, we expect a broad range of industries to recover.  For many enterprises, both private and public, this not only means more hiring but also a renewed focus on strategies for reigniting growth in a post-corona world.
  • How will many of these new ideas be formed? By conducting innovative market research.
  • Market research is a catch-all term that includes a wide range of research methods, applications, and processes from designing studies to collecting and interpreting data to communicating it clearly to intended audiences.  As such, PhDs form an active and often essential component of these efforts.
  • We have already discussed the vast application of “market research” to PhDs in previous posts (see here and elsewhere on this blog).  This employment cache is so vast that it’s probably best for you to search on your own, starting with few representative jobs below that include ethnographers working for Netflix or Zoom, machine learning specialists at Twitter, and many other career profiles to think about.

HSS

Senior Associate, Research & Insights, Fuel Cycle

Senior Research Analyst, Data and Insights Team, The Economist

Senior Product Researcher, Netflix

Researcher for Consumer Insights, Zoom

Research Director, Ipsos

STEM

Global Markets Lead, Hematology, Takeda Pharmaceutical

Growth Strategist, Ginko Biotech

Lead Data Scientist, Nielsen

Experience Researcher (META), Twitter

Strategy Manager, Thermo Fisher Scientific

If there are areas of work you would like us to explore in more depth, please contact at smartjobs@versatilephd.com. 

We want to hear from you.

For access to more jobs as well as archived and searchable opportunities, visit our SmartJobs page. Note: SmartJobs access requires a university affiliation. User-generated jobs are open to all members and can be accessed here.

Building a Career in Public Health

Public Health reaches across a wide range of disciplines, enterprises, research areas, philanthropies, technologies and communication modes–in other words, perfect for a broad range of PhDs with deep specialization to consider as a stable and meaningful career choice. Moreover, it should come as no surprise to anyone reading this that demand for public health professionals is skyrocketing in the US, and in many countries around the world, as Covid-19 has exposed vast weaknesses in our health care systems, economies and societies.  
Public health imperatives reach far beyond the current crisis, as indeed they preceded it.  The current state is summed up in a New England Journal of Medicine article in 2015 on the The Future of Public Health“noting that “the involvement of many parts of society, including government agencies, health organizations, nongovernmental organizations, clinicians, the private sector, and communities, is increasingly important for success.”
The use of public health assessment, policy development, and assurance activities provides some further insights on the public health field (see figure below).
Our SmartJobs selection this week includes a wide range of possibilities, including communications, data science, clinical research, technical writing, policy advocacy, field work and other roles across the private and public sectors. 
Below are a few examples; there are hundreds more on our SmartJobs page.
HSS
Health Consultants, CAMRIS International

Health Policy Research, RAND Corporation

Senior Manager, Social Media Research, Sabin Vaccine Institute

Senior Researcher, Community Development, Federal Reserve Bank of SF

Director, Research and Investigations, Physicians for Human Rights

STEM

Public Health Informatician, MITRE

Director, Research Compliance, Children’s Hospital of Chicago

Covid-19 Surveys, Fund for Public Health NYC

Technical Writer, Public Health Research, PSI

Research Clinician, Heluna Health

Medical Director, Health Technology Assessment, ICER

If there are areas of work you would like us to explore in more depth, please contact at smartjobs@versatilephd.com. 

We want to hear from you.

For access to more jobs as well as archived and searchable opportunities, visit our SmartJobs page. Note: SmartJobs access requires a university affiliation. User-generated jobs are open to all members and can be accessed here.

What can Economists do?

We recently participated in a forum at Columbia University that discussed the versatility of economics PhD’s in the job market.  The topic we introduced was “Unbundling Your PhD” as a way to visualize and understand the vast applications of an economics PhD (or any social science, for that matter) to the job market.

You can listen to the event recording, including a Q&A session, here:

Note: This event was hosted by the Graduate School at Columbia University as part of its PER Series and included the participation of Versatile PhD.

 

Social Scientists in the Boardroom

Will the future CEO of Coca Cola be a trained anthropologist?

Consider a story a few years ago by Gillian Tett (herself an anthropologist turned journalist at the Financial Times) on how anthropological and ethnographic research was used at Coca Cola to expand its products into China and other new markets.  Now apply this story across every company in the world that focuses on consumer data, behavior and psychology–which is to say, every modern company.

Then take a glance at any job board and search under “anthropology” or related social science fields.  What this quick exercise may tell you is that public and private sector enterprises, from start-ups to not-for-profits to multinational enterprises, are demanding behavioral and social scientists in significant numbers.  And with a PhD, you will likely have a greater chance of getting in the door.

One subset of this, User Research, is a discipline which exists in virtually every enterprise that works with data and consumers.  If you’re unfamiliar with this career area–which draws heavily on qualitative and quantitative research methods, as a well as domains such as psychology, anthropology and sociology–you can learn more here.

Or check our SmartJobs feed this week.

Of course, there are many other examples and applications within social media companies such as Facebook and Tik Tok, music platforms, “behavioral labs” and practically every start-up emerging today.

Behold the variety of jobs available–and take a deeper look.  You might be surprised at the scope of career diversity available.

HSS

User Experience Researcher, Blend Labs

Usability Analyst, Clovity

UX Researcher, Facebook Reality Labs

Senior User Researcher, Tik Tok

Researcher, Nextdoor

STEM

Senior Data Scientist

Neurology Physician, Cognitive Health and the NFL, Mount Sinai Medical 

Data Scientist, Directorate of Digital Innovation, CIA

Academic Partnership Manager, Noom

Behavioral Scientist, Symend

If there are areas of work you would like us to explore in more depth, please contact at smartjobs@versatilephd.com. 

We want to hear from you.

For access to more jobs as well as archived and searchable opportunities, visit our SmartJobs page. Note: SmartJobs access requires a university affiliation. User-generated jobs are open to all members and can be accessed here.