Mark Bayer
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Wonderful. Great question. And I think a lot about this. And I think, first of all, that AI certainly has its place. It could be a great first cut at something. However, I would say, reflecting what you were talking about with the Chinese translation.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
So if you think about AI, you think about, OK, what's going to happen is the language or the response that you get back to your query is going to be stitched together from pre-existing content that could have been around for a long time.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
so one of my main messages is to get attention you need to present things in ways that are fresh and new and inventive and maybe counterintuitive that are surprising right so you don't want to try to how are you going to get a content that really hits that when the building blocks that you're asking ai that ai is going to pull from are really stale they're old they've been around for a while
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Right. And so that's one thing to think about, right, is, OK, I can get some sort of orientation perhaps through AI. But the finished product using retread content to try to get someone's attention doesn't really seem to me to work very well at the final stage when you really during the job interview and so forth. And teachers will say, I can tell exactly when someone used it at this point.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
And I know AI will be getting faster and better as you move forward. The other thing is something that you mentioned about voice, right? Which I talk about a lot for presentation. So it just doesn't sound like you. It doesn't read like you. And so it feels more artificial. Yes, it is getting better.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Nonetheless, I think that injecting that kind of surprise and that kind of creativity, I generally call it artistry, to your communications is not something, at least right now, and maybe perhaps for the near term, you're going to get from AI. The other thing that you touched upon that I talk a lot about is the need to connect before you communicate.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
And by that, connect on a human level before you get down to the substance. And this is something that many people don't actually think about. But the way I talk about it, and this really relates to AI because obviously AI is not human and probably, I don't know, who knows what's going to happen as we move forward. But I will just say that
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Humans want to relate and interact with other humans that they feel understand them and get them and have similarities with them, understand their experience, maybe have some shared experiences. And I also think that goes way back to our wiring. when we were needed to make sure that we were among people who are going to be friendly to us.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
And one of the ways we determined that was, did they have similarities with us? And so I think in the modern day, there's this free stage that I talk about before communication. Most people actually think about, I'm going to go right to the message and how do I sequence it? What do I say? Get my 90 seconds and like all that. And I say, actually, there's something really important.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
You need to open the channel of communication before you actually develop the content that communicates it. So what does that mean? It means just trying to interact in a human to human way with your audience or with your interviewer.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Someone telling me saw a story about a woman who was interviewing for an engineering job, and they spent like all the big part of the interview talking about how they both love to play classical guitar. And you might say, oh, that has nothing to do. It's just small talk. But see, I would say that's a misconception and a mindset that's not helpful to you because...
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
I want to be different and differentiate myself from all the other people who are looking for that job, for example. And sometimes that comes by understanding just the human aspects of the person you're talking about and where there are overlaps, you have a similar someone in common.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
You think about how you get, whether you open an email or whether you connect with somebody you don't know personally on LinkedIn. If the subject line of an email says referred by and inserted a person that you're probably going to open that email, right? Even if you don't know the sender coming from somebody whose name you don't recognize. And why do you do that?
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
It's because some of that familiarity with the mutual contact is leading you to do that. And I sometimes call it the transitive property of relationship building. It's I don't know you, but we both know the same person. So therefore, I know you in enough of a way for you to give me a chance to communicate something important to you.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
It absolutely does. It absolutely does. And I think it's overlooked. And part of it is this focus on technical skills. And you could argue that in many ways, and you're suggesting this, I think, in your example too, Vince, that those technical skills are a commodity. This person either knows how to do it well or they don't know how to do it well.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
And if you're recruiting from these best business schools, they're all going to know how to do it well. So what differentiates one from the other? And it's the types of things you're talking about, 100%.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Absolutely. And it's funny because this idea of soft skills versus hard skills. And I think oftentimes people denigrate soft skills. They're fluffy. The first thing I would just say on that is I was curious as to how this whole terminology came about.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
and it turns out and i've got research that was cited by someone that i was actually talking to through a podcast and they basically the reason why things are called hard skills and soft skills is because the united states military at one point needed to classify the jobs that people had and they decided that anyone who worked on a machine which was made of metal most likely
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
That was a hard skill because it was a hard metal. And so that person had a hard skill, meaning they could work on a machine. Now, if you didn't work on a machine, you just didn't have a hard skill. So therefore you had a soft skill. I think over time, so there was no judgment. There was... Soft skill was not a pejorative. It was not something that was a nice to have.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
It just was a way of classifying the job somebody had. Over time, I think it's become more of a kind of viewed less seriously. But as you're pointing out, I think we're in total agreement here is that those kind of skills, while they are vital, I'm talking about skills. the spreadsheet or the modeling or whatever. In certain ways, they are commodities, right?
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
sure glad to and i have different ways of explaining and different elements but one thing that i do is and this is difficult for people to do regardless of their background which is really distilling complexity and complicated things you have so many details that you know and you have to figure out how do i convey the thing that is going to be most important to the person receiving the information
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
But what is really that magical factor is what we're talking about that really differentiates yourself, which is the human to human connection.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
And so I created this free infographic. It's called 11 Keys to Translating Complexity. And anyone, any listener can pick it up. It's at complexitymadeclear.com. You can download it and you'll see it's a free resource. You'll see these 11 things that over my 20 years of work in the U.S.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Congress, I've really found to be helpful in conveying your points in ways that are first accurate, and then also that are interesting, that are understandable, and that are short. Spears said, brevity is the heart of wit. And it can be really hard to get a brief piece or soundbite, for example, in our world that really reflects it.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
I also would just say that's the kind of beginning of a conversation. People, sometimes my students will say, yeah, that metaphor, that simile that you want me to use, it isn't exactly the thing that I'm talking about. It's similar, right? And I say... Exactly. It is not the thing. It's to get the person oriented to your idea, like on the same page.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Or maybe if you want to think of it, you want to bring these people into the ballpark, right? And so they're outside, they don't know what it's like inside. So you don't just sit them in the front row right behind home plate in a baseball analogy. You have to get them oriented first, right? This is what the game is about.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Before you obviously say, okay, you're on the field and you're playing now because it's too big a gap to try to bridge.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Absolutely, Vince. And that is so important, particularly since I've heard of PhDs when they apply for a job beyond academia, they will leave off the fact they have a PhD, which to me is heartbreaking because not only for the skills I'm going to talk about in a second, to signal that you have those.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
But also, as you referenced, the blood, sweat, and tears that went into years and years of training, and then you're just going to leave off the PhD and your resume because somebody told you that an employer, say, at a big company, at an investment house, whatever it is, will see that and think, oh, this person's too theoretical or Somehow that training isn't relevant.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
That training is so relevant. And some of the things that make it particularly useful, one of them is curiosity, figuring out like, why does this happen? Why does it work like this? Maybe it could work in a different way. Because when you're, for example, in the policy world, You're doing that all the time.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
You're looking around the landscape and you're saying, oh, I see that the United States doesn't require the screening, the physical screening of all the air cargo that goes on a passenger plane. So this is a real example that I worked on really intensely over years with my boss. And you say, why is that? What do they do instead? Is that a good idea? What are the risks of doing that?
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
No, actually, it's a terrible idea. It's a huge loophole. What should we do instead? These are questions that scientists ask themselves all the time. So much of the scientific method is applicable beyond academia, and curiosity is just one little thing. Then the analyticals, you can also talk about, okay, I have all this data. One thing scientists are very careful about, is this data sound?
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Is it credible? People like to make arguments with facts all the time. And one question from a scientist in a meeting on Capitol Hill asking, oh, it's interesting you're presenting that. What was the sample size? Now, that's a question that scientists ask all the time and are aware of. But if you were to ask that in a briefing on Capitol Hill with all these policymakers, there might be a silence.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Because they wouldn't want to ask that question. And then if it was a small sample size, the data that this expert just presented or somebody just cited is garbage. And so that is a huge thing. For example, just one, it could have a huge impact. And somebody coming from a PhD program might say, oh, that's probably already thought of that. But the answer is they didn't think of that. Most likely.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
And so that kind of analysis, the ability to really, this gets into an attribute, as you suggested, the tenacity. Like I worked on this air cargo project to change the law with my boss. Now we ultimately succeeded. It took five years. And that's a long timeline in many ways. An academic might look at that and say, yeah, we're in it for a little bit of a long haul here. Right.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
And the ability not to get frustrated when there are setbacks. And there were a lot of setbacks to figure out new ways of doing things. Something that, oh, that hypothesis that we had, actually, it's not accurate. Let's find a different way. These are all things that within a scientific environment that PhDs and researchers are doing all the time. And they're so applicable.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
In so many ways, even in industry, you could say we're going to try this. We got to make sure if it doesn't work, you know, we don't we want to abandon it and try something new pretty quickly. So just a lot of skills and attributes that scientists have, everything from the analytical to the mindset are so valuable in careers beyond academia.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
I'm so glad you mentioned that because there are a couple of different levels as to how that's a strength from my perspective. And so I, as I've had a podcast when science speaks for quite a while, and one of the things I do, we talk all about these issues. And one of the things I do is I look for scientists who are phenomenal scientists and phenomenal communicators, right?
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
We talked about some of the gaps and some of the benefits, and then Those people are out there. And one of the early interviewees that I had, the scientist and a professor named Elizabeth Wayne. And Liz Wayne is phenomenal in a variety of ways. She's a cancer researcher. And the innovation and creativity that she's bringing to that to try to cure various types of cancer is phenomenal.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
And she's a great communicator. So I became fascinated in this question of how does this happen? Because I focus on verbal. I'm a communications guy. I don't do experiments in the lab. I never did. After high school, I stopped really taking science. And so here you have someone in Dr. Wayne who has both. So I always ask people who have both these questions.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
parts of their brain kind of firing at full power. How did this happen? And there, over the years, I have found that there are really two variables that often keep popping up. One of them is that they're the first in their family to go to college. And I can talk a little bit about that.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
I think, I guess the reason why I think that is, if we accept that hypothesis could actually be accurate or true, is that someone who has their PhD now who went through school and their family really has no one else who say graduated college, sometimes even was in college or enrolled in college.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
That person probably took a lot of challenging and difficult subjects as they were going through, even starting in middle school. Maybe they're taking biology, they're taking these subjects and their parents, their loved ones, their families, they wanna know, so what did you do in school today? And the person needs to explain what they did maybe in a calculus class or a physics class.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
And their audience, their family doesn't have a good frame of reference to a lot of what they're talking about. And so that young person, maybe 13, 14, 15, starts to figure out how to explain complexity in ways that are number one, not condescending because they're talking to authority figures.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
and also that are accurate give a reference point and really help illuminate what they're doing so you can imagine that somebody starts doing that as they're 13 14 goes into high school continues to do that goes into college and then a phd program that person gets really good
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
at doing this kind of distillation, figuring out what's important, how to make it interesting, memorable, accessible, all of those things. They had a lot of practice. So that's one of the reasons why I think that is a common trait for scientists who are fantastic communicators. Sometimes they're first in their family to go to college.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
The other is something that you referenced, which is being bilingual. Because as so many words, expressions that exist in one language just don't have that in another language. I lived in Paris for a while. I was speaking French gradually, fluently. In the beginning, however, you try to translate word for word some idea in English right into French or back.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
And you find out very quickly, sometimes in embarrassing ways, as I did, that that doesn't work. We don't say it like that. The word, for example, this is a friend of mine told me this, who was in a similar situation.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
If you're at the dinner table and someone asks you if you are finished, like you're done eating, and you say you're full and you try to use a word, which is something you might say in English, and you try to use a word in French that is full, that actually means pregnant. So you don't want to say that.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
So what you learn these idioms, you learn these devices that express an idea, but they're not a word for word translation. And that really, when you get to that level in science, when you get to that level in any language.
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
you know that you're on the way to fluency so it's really exciting then of course you mentioned cultural practices and values and that is a third layer so it's it's something that is a big challenge and the good news i would say in my experience is it's something that can be learned it sounds like your friend's wife really has excelled and so i'm very optimistic about this and i would also just say how important it is for society to have people like that
Chief Change Officer
#312 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part Two
Because particularly in the U.S., we're going to be heading into another phase, it looks like, where science and scientists are denigrated. So the question is, how do they still have a voice in the public square, so to speak? And really, that's what got me into this whole thing in the first place.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
Why is this life sciences firm going to care about machine learning for early detection of skin cancer? And the answer might be they don't really care about that very much. But just think about how you approach solving that problem and how you deal with different setbacks and creating hypotheses and then really testing them. There was a recent article in Inc. Magazine.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
I think it was basically Adam Grant was saying scientists like you have this analytical framework. You've been trained in how to think. And that is so valuable regardless of what career you decide to take on.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
yeah for sure i want to just underline something you said there vince because i think a lot of people forget like you were talking about resilience if you think about knowledge skills and attributes like the knowledge might be this skin cancer you can drill down and the machine learning but the attributes like resilience this person i gave the example of who came from china that went to hopkins in new chicago like the ability to handle ambiguity
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
all these different things that are part of your makeup. I try to also have PhDs think about that too, because as you suggest, you're saying those are really important in the working world as well.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
I think some of the gaps that people have are ones that you would probably expect because the writing, for example, that you're doing in a scientific environment, you're writing if you want to try to get published in a journal, for example. It can be very technical, very jargon heavy. I'm sure your listeners are familiar with the perils of using jargon.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
I also will say that even the structure and the sequence that you're taught to write, you lead with your methodology, how you got it done. When you're in a general environment, The board member, the executive, they don't really care so much about how you got something done. They just want you to answer a specific question. Should we license this technology from another company?
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
Had another student in class who was an organic chemist at a big company. And he was just going so deep into the science when he was in the boardroom. This was a story that he told me. And really that question, should we license this other chemical process? Until finally he realized that wasn't the way they wanted this question approached. And he gave a very crisp answer to that.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And ultimately he gave the answer that they wanted. But I think that when you're in a technical environment and you're asked a specific question, scientists often want to dump all that they know about the topic.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
to answer the question but i sometimes say it's not what you know it's what they need to know you have to do that distillation and that filtering and then you have to focus on answering a specific question it's not just demonstrating all you know about a topic So that's a blind spot.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
I think the sequencing when writing this tendency to want to lead with a lot of background, because that's what you did when you were writing for your academic audience. But you need to lead with the punchline. You really need to lead with the result or the real world relevance, the impact, the answer to the question first.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And it can seem backwards, but the challenge is your listener, your reader is not going to stick around for more than about 10 seconds. Then their attention is going to drift if you don't really address what they care about most.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
So another sort of blind spot is thinking about in the writing, in the presentation, really leading with what your audience, what your stakeholder, what your exec wants to know first. And then you can always backfill later if they have a couple of questions. How did you get that? Or what else did you look at?
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
that's fine but if you lead with that it's not relevant and this window of attentional opportunity is going to slam shut and there's going to be a lot of frustration all around but you can learn that right and that's one of the things one of the things i teach often just one other thing on the speaking side i find scientists can be really excited about the work they do and the discoveries that they're going to that they're focused on making that can make such a huge difference
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
The challenge can become in the presentation part where that excitement just doesn't come through. They tend to just want to present in a very monotone, matter-of-fact way, not apply any real artistry, I would say, to their delivery. And you have to really give energy to get engagement. So that you're enthusiastic and you're upbeat, you're going to get your audience excited about it as well.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And so being emotionless, you know, is something that scientists often are taught in presenting their results, but that's not something that works when you're beyond academia.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
Thanks very much, Vince. It's so wonderful to be here with you.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
Yeah, so true. And I've learned some of the science behind this. Of course, I'm in no way a scientist. However, things like our brains are really wired to tune into new things and opportunities to learn new information, things that are counterintuitive. Things that just are stimulating because we think we might be able to put them to use in some way.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And I really think that goes back way back into our history when learning to do something could actually mean the difference between life and death potentially, or out there on the Savannah. in our tribe or trying to put things together, just the ability to learn something new. So we, in many ways, I believe are still drawn to finding that information or paying attention to things.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
So when you lead with something that's surprising, did you know, or imagine these are what I call wake words. And it's really, if you're on the receiving end of something like that kind of phraseology, that phrasing, it's hard not to pay attention. Because you do want to know what is it that they're going to say.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
When I start out my keynotes, sometimes I'll say, you're going to, the first words I'll say, I don't come out and introduce myself as the person who's, someone else has done that. I don't want to lead with background. Oh, it's so great to be here again with you. People don't care. They weren't there the first time. Even if they were, they're really not that interested.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
They want to know how can this person help me do something specific, find a job that I love or build relationships professionally that don't make me feel dreadful and transactional and icky.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And so I sometimes will start out by something that's totally counterintuitive because I'm also playing in to this notion that people will tune in to things that they're not used to hearing together in two weeks. So I'll say immediately, you are going to forget 90% of what I'm about to tell you in the next 48 hours. And that's not because you're not, it's not because you won't be paying attention.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
It's just because that's the way our brains are wired. So you have, I have about 10%. of mindshare that is going to be available to me for you to remember as you move forward well beyond this course.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
So I need to think strategically, and this really applies to scientists or really people in any kind of meaningful high stakes conversation is what do I want my listener to walk away with and remember? And it's going to be something very short.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
So, that's something you learn, you reference journalists, you learn from talking to press is that when you have a line, this is something that my old boss used to talk about, when you have a memorable line like that, that is something that reporters love because, first of all, they don't have a lot of space in their article. or airtime on TV.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And so if you can really present something memorable and compact for them, that is a gift. And you start to do that more and more. And then you start getting incoming requests. People really are, press is interested in hearing from you because they know that you're always good or a quote like that.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And that requires some creativity, requires thinking along the lines of rhetorical devices and all these things that I teach in my courses and workshops.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
Oh, you're welcome. And the privilege is mine. You've done so many things in your career and your life, had so many different experiences. So I'm just really interested in having this dialogue with you.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
Sure. Glad to. And I have different ways of explaining and different elements, but one thing that I do is, and this is difficult for people to do regardless of their background, which is really distilling complexity and complicated things.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
You have so many details that you know, and you have to figure out how do I convey the thing that is going to be most important to the person receiving the information.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
So great. And maybe I'll start by talking about the transition a little bit, since that's really going to be our focus. As you said, 20 years working in the United States Congress, I was a chief of staff in the Senate and also in the House of Representatives. And I had the privilege of being in the middle of a lot of big issues, Obamacare, healthcare reform.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
After the 9-11 terrorist attacks in the United States, I was focused on the Hill, on aviation security and trying to close loopholes that had been exposed as a result of those attacks, working with my boss who at the time was Congressman Ed Markey. He then subsequently ran for Senate. And so that's when I moved over with him.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
I think the big kind of takeaway for people thinking about careers and career transitions and how it relates to my own transition is really thinking about the skills that you develop along the way and what you like to do and what
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
but also really what skills, so public speaking, being able to really distill complicated information into shorter, accessible, memorable pieces of information for various audiences. I worked a lot with the press. I worked a lot with trying to persuade other offices that the initiatives that we were developing were ones that were worth support.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And so you have to figure out how to persuade in authentic and honest ways, how to write under tight deadlines, and then really how to distill and present to someone at the New York Times who's got a deadline coming up in a couple hours. Those are really skills that have served me well, both in my career in the US Congress and then what I'm doing now.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
Yeah, it's a great question. And so a little bit more about my time on Capitol Hill. We in our office always had PhD scientists who would spend a year taking a break from their academic journey, and they would really learn what the legislative process was all about. And it was through a fellowship that was administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
I'm sure some of your listeners are familiar with it, the AAAS fellowship program. And so they would, we took this very seriously as far as finding well-qualified people for our office. And the thing is when they would arrive, it would be like being dropped into a foreign land without any GPS. It was different language, different deadlines.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
different things and considerations to take into account they'd never thought about. And I did a lot of mentoring of PhDs as a result of that. A senior staff member and I, we had really sharp, motivated people, but they were learning all of these different things at the same time. The subject matter they were working on was different from their expertise in almost every case.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
The language I heard, it was a funny story. I was talking to someone and she came from academia. And one of the first days in the office, she heard someone in the office, one of the staffers say, oh, we need to really focus on R&D. And she thought to herself, oh, this is great. I'm already understanding they're talking about research and development.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
But then she realized long after that, not long after, that they were talking about Rs and Ds, meaning Republicans and Democrats. And so she got a quick preview of the different lingo that is used on the Hill. And it just explains the learning curve that anyone would have being dropped into a new place. What happened with me is that I love doing the mentoring. I was very familiar with AAAS.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And then after Donald Trump got elected in 2016, And I had left the hill at that point. I became concerned that policymaking in the United States was not being driven by data science and evidence and really the best facts available because that's how we did policy. That was always our beginning, like what makes sense based on the evidence, based on the science.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And so I started digging into this question of helping scientists get more involved in the policymaking process, because at that point, 2016, 2017, they were really feeling marginalized. We didn't even have a head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the United States. Advisory boards were being disbanded. Scientists were feeling pushed to the side.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And they started to realize they didn't have the skills, the knowledge to really survive in that environment. And it was around. And I was thinking, I want these people to be involved in the policymaking environment. I don't want me decisions being made by strict ideology. Of course, that political interests do have a place in this.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
But I didn't I wanted science to have a really big seat at the table. And that's when I started really working with AAAS. I did a workshop for all of their incoming fellows. I did a talk at a big conference, the annual conference for AAAS on how to actually respond and debunk misinformation. That became a big hit.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
There was an article in Science Magazine written about the interactive discussion that I did on that. People were hungry, people meaning scientists, were really hungry to learn about how they could get involved, influence, make an impact. It was March for Science. All of these things were happening in 2017, 2018.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And that's when I really started to focus on helping scientists get more involved and embedded and comfortable making their case in a policymaking world.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
Absolutely, Vince. And really COVID is the historic use case of the importance of scientists being able to operate, communicate with the public. Sorry. Sorry about that. If COVID was really that historic use case where we saw scientists, Anthony Fauci all the way down. Anthony Fauci does an excellent job. He also had been in D.C. for over 40 years.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
So he was very used to that kind of shift in ecosystem where he has to really talk to the public and how do they craft messages. When COVID happened in the US, we're talking about spring of 2020, it started happening everywhere. I had already been focused on helping scientists translate and communicate going back to 2018.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
So it was just this historic example of the importance of scientists being able to translate their work in ways that preserve accuracy, that are true to the facts. and also resonate are relatable to, accessible to, memorable by the general public. And that was my real focus starting back in 2018.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And then by 2020, I think scientists started to realize that if they didn't have this skill set, that they were really in jeopardy of becoming much less relevant in society.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
Sure. For the last two years, I've actually done the keynote for Harvard Medical School's orientation. So I also do talk to MDs, and they're the same challenges in many cases. So it could be a researcher at the University of Chicago, which I've worked with for a long time.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
that decides they want to learn these skills because they're thinking after earning a PhD, say, in biology or neuroscience, that they're not going to stay in academia, that they're actually going to look for a job, could be at a startup, could be at a place like Pfizer, It could be for a biotech company. It might say, I want to go to Amgen. I want to get involved in public policy.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
In the US, only about 8% PhDs across the board are actually staying in academia for their career. However, almost all of them are trained as if they're going to be tenure track professors. So they don't have this other dimension, generally speaking, to their skill set. And I led off with gathering these types of skills.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
Whether you do stay in academia or you decide you want to do something different, the skills that we're talking about are really essential skills.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
It's really interesting. Over the years, this dynamic, I think, has been changing. One question is, why is that? Why only 8%, 10%, 12% stay in academia? It can be a variety of reasons. First of all, actually, the number of tenure track positions has been shrinking. So there aren't really that many jobs. The other is the lifestyle. People are drawn to want to discover and create and do new things.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And that's really what we need. I think part of it is that sometimes they find I have to move around a lot. get to look at these different positions. Or the salaries as you're coming up through to try to get to that tenure track role can be really small. And it's very challenging to be able to operate in these different places with such a small salary. Then you say, I want to have a family.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
It becomes even more difficult. And then people do realize that this just isn't the type of maybe work I want to do. I want to do something that is maybe more tied to maybe instead of basic research, which of course is fundamental, really, we're trying to figure out fundamental questions. It's not basic, like easy. It's so critical.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
They say, I want to do something where I'm applying the research in ways that are different So there are a variety of reasons why people don't stay in academia. I think the whole academic model in the U.S. has been going through a lot of change as well. Then people, sometimes they get to the end of their program. I had a student in my online course who decided she was really sharp.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
She had come over from China. She had gone to Johns Hopkins. She had excelled. She had then gone to University of Chicago. She worked in the lab there, really a superstar. And she decided she wanted to go work for a life sciences company in the Chicago area.
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And her challenge really was how to translate the skills that she had developed in the lab in a way that was relevant and that resonated with, say, the managing partner that she was talking to during the interview. And so that can be a challenge too, because people think, what am I trained to do?
Chief Change Officer
#311 Mark Bayer: From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One
And the answer is you are trained to do so much by just your analytical framework, your thought process, how you approach problems and challenges that are really difficult. And I think sometimes PhDs lose track, lose sight of that for a little bit. They think it's the subject matter people care about.