(S4E4) From Academia to Industry and across 3 Countries - Dr Niclas West in Conversation with Ruth Winden

Introduction [: 00:00:04

Welcome to the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, where in every episode we explore what is research culture and what should it be. You'll hear thoughts and opinions from a range of contributors to help you change research culture into what you want it to be.

Ruth Winden [: 00:00:27

Welcome to our podcast Research Culture Uncovered. It's season four, focusing on researcher careers, and we're already in episode four. I'm your host, Ruth Winden, and I'm the Careers with Research Consultant at the University of Leeds. Today I'm talking to a fantastic postdoctoral researcher who has managed his transition into industry in a textbook manner. He did his PhD in Texas at Texas A&M University in Physical Chemistry and his postdoc at Leeds in Space Physics, building bespoke optical instruments. On our Career Architect programme, he realised he loves working with complex instruments, programming computer scripts, and teaching people complicated concepts with 3D animations. And that clarity about his career aspirations helped him secure a position with an industry leader, Andor. Welcome Dr. Niclas W est. It's such a pleasure to have you.

Dr Niclas West [: 00:01:29

Hello. Yeah, thank you for having me.

Ruth Winden [: 00:01:31

Yes. Where are you today? Are you in Milan, is that right?

Dr Niclas West [: 00:01:34

Yes, I am.

Ruth Winden [: 00:01:35

Fantastic. And we'll come back to Milan because it is absolutely why you are in Milan. And let's get back to you, but before we dive into your career and how you've managed it so well, Nick, I just wanted to talk to you about something that struck me immediately when I met you. And I know you have a bit of a passion for dancing, and not just dancing in general, but a special genre. D o you want to tell us a bit more about that?

Dr Niclas West [: 00:01:59

Yes, so just basically since high school, I've been doing swing dancing, and so I joined the local swing dancing groups in Leeds right away. And actually, that's where I met my then girlfriend, but now wife. And it's been my outlet to destress a bit, but also has led to some of these things that are affecting my career paths that we'll probably get into in the next part of the discussion.

Ruth Winden [: 00:02:27

So now you're a dual national career couple as well, with an Italian wife, coming over from the US. So you're truly globally-orientated, Nick. Okay, so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your background, because I've always wondered, you were in the US. What attracted you to the UK? Now you're off to Italy. Where does the curiosity about different countries come from?

Dr Niclas West [: 00:02:52

Overall, I do enjoy meeting different types of people and learning about different types of cultures. Even before coming to the UK, and then next to Italy, I moved around in different areas within the US. Since there's somewhat different cultures there. But now I'm really exploring some places in Europe as well.

Ruth Winden [: 00:03:11

Yeah, and it's interesting to see, when you talked to me, you said, I just like playing with instruments, and I thought that was such a great thing to say. It's so clear, it's a real passion of yours. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what that playing with instruments is?

Dr Niclas West [: 00:03:26

Yeah, so I think that really brought me to the postdoctoral position, because through the university, you start playing through chemistry and physics. If you want to do experimental things, you can start playing with these instruments. I fell in love with physically attaching, working, doing the plumbing of the gases, the electrical bits of it, the programming, every aspect of it, to make one big instrument, to make some new chemical insight in the world. And I realised the postdoc position is kind of the ultimate position you can reach within academia, unless maybe you go to a national lab and have a career in that. But otherwise, as soon as you become a professor, you don't get to touch and play with all this equipment anymore.

Ruth Winden [: 00:04:08

So the hands on role, that was really what you wanted to keep. Okay. And that's when you started looking outside of academia, and I was part of your journey. And I was so impressed with, when you were on Career Architect, how methodical you were and how much effort you put into really going deep so that you felt assured, I'm making a good choice here. Because you also, let's be open about this, you also had a real challenge. You were A merican. You wanted to stay in the UK. You needed to find someone who was willing to take you on with the whole visa situation. Tell us how you did that, because I thought that was a really clever approach you took.

Dr Niclas West [: 00:04:48

Yeah, I think my partner at that time maybe was still kind of in the beginning of her role, and so we wanted to stay, but it was based in Manchester, and so we wanted to make sure that I could travel to be where she needed to be, and I needed a work visa still. So partially I was flailing about putting whatever I thought would be important on LinkedIn, reading how to do that, looking up the list of companies that are already registered to sponsor Visa, so I could know if I did get responses from recruiters or so could the company already know how to keep people. And it really helped when I went into the Career Architect programme to really systematically analyse myself. There were little aspects of it that I think I had touched on before, but it really clarified what I needed to do to systematically analyse the different jobs that were out there. Because I kind of never having been in the industry before, there's so many job titles that I just had no clue what they were. And so I think Ruth really helped me to figure out what things I would like to do in jobs and what things I could be okay if it wasn't quite there, and really pick the top ones and only focus on those ones.

Ruth Winden [: 00:06:00

Yeah. And I learned so much from you doing that process when we looked at transferable skills, because as part of the programme, what we always do is we'll look at your top ten motivated skills, the skills that you love doing and that you're also very good at. And you came up with your list of ten, and I still teach your approach, and I always refer to you because it was your idea how to do it, your method, and it's really effective. Do you want to tell a little bit more about what you did with comparing your top ten motivated skills against opportunities? Because that seemed to really help you narrow down, because with your background, you could have gone into lots of different directions.

Dr Niclas West [: 00:06:35

Yeah. So I think some of the top ones that I had on there were programming, working with instruments, doing presentations on these complex topics. And so a couple of them that I had recruiters coming to me for were first of all, this application specialist role for Andor where I am currently traveling around to conferences, going to universities to train people how to use the instruments, doing all these things. I don't get to do as long of heavy calculations as you might in, like, an R&D situation. So when I was sat down talking with Ruth, I said, I think this just means on the weekends I can have that as a hobby, but it's not my core role, day in and day out. And I was comparing that to I think the other major late round interview that I had was for just a LabView programming job in Paris, where I was like, well, the location wasn't quite right, and it's just programming the A ndor really ticked all the boxes at that point in time.

Ruth Winden [: 00:07:38

Yeah, you are very systematic, weren't you, in looking, these are my top ten. It's unrealistic to get a role where all my top ten are fulfilled. And you said, okay, this one, the programming side is not as strong, but I can use the programming in my spare time. And that's what you're doing because I know you're also studying Python on the side. And I thought, breaking it down, and really thinking, what would it be like to do this role day in, day out, and what are my transferable skills, which are the ones I love doing, I'm really good at. So the motivated skills, as we call them, and then being systematic and comparing, but also not being, okay unless it's 100%, I'm not going there, because that's totally unrealistic. So you did that really well, and then you seemed to move into a really fantastic company, because what I noticed then on LinkedIn, as soon as you joined, all your colleagues came onto LinkedIn and they were so welcoming, said lovely things about you. Your boss came in and I thought, wow, that seems to be an organisation that really appreciates its staff.

Dr Niclas West [: 00:08:36

Yeah, absolutely. Some of the colleagues there as well were pretty good with LinkedIn. There was a lot of onboarding. It was still kind of in COVID time, so it was a little bit more remote than you would normally do. But as soon as we could, they had me come there for training. It's a very close knit team that when they do go out to conferences and things, you go out to dinner afterwards and hang out with each other.

Ruth Winden [: 00:09:00

So the social aspects as well as the challenging role and what are you enjoying most about your new role? Or actually, it's not that new anymore because you've been there two years, is that right?

Dr Niclas West [: 00:09:10

Yeah, it's hard to say any one thing that I enjoy the most. I mean, it ticks all the boxes with all the technical skills that I wanted to be able to do there. So that was definitely good. It allowed me to have the freedom and the security to know I could move around with my wife when I needed to. A lot of things there.

Ruth Winden [: 00:09:32

A lot of researchers are worried about, oh, could I actually be adaptable and after some time in academia, be effective in different cultures or even enjoy different cultures? What have you learned about the cultural differences working in academia and in industry? Is it really the difference as big as people worry about, or what did you notice?

Dr Niclas West [: 00:09:56

So I think in academia, I always got the sense of, I always felt like if there's a problem, I'm the one that needs to solve it because there's no one else that's going to take over and get you to the point where this paper is going to be published. And in some cases, it's almost the opposite. In a company, if it's not in your role that you're meant to be doing, that your manager wants you to do, you're really not supposed to do these other outside activities to push the team forward. You're almost supposed to leave something sometimes just so that the company at a higher level feels, oh, there's a gap there. We need to hire a new person to fill that role. If you're doing that other task that you're not meant to be doing, it means you're not doing your role. There's a little bit of this as well as what I mean by working as a team to kind of describe what that actually means, though, in terms of a company then, is that I'm kind of in the sales wing, but I work with the product management people that design the instruments. I work with the marketing people and I'm kind of a technical advisor because I have a window into I talk to the customers a lot and understand how they use the equipment and what they want in the next generation of the equipment, what they would respond to in terms of marketing content that the company would put on the LinkedIn page. So these people and these other departments will come to me and ask me for help with these things. But I always, as long as, it's hard to judge exactly, but if it's only going to take a half hour or an hour, fine. Yeah. You work with those teammates. If these people start to ask you for a day or two of your time, your manager wants to know, are you still going to be able to get done what your manager wants you to you, if you're doing too much help in marketing or some other department?

Ruth Winden [: 00:11:44

Yeah. So it's that fine balance between focusing on your role, hitting your targets. I'm sure you have targets, your sales thing, and also working across the organisation, supporting, because you obviously in that role have a really important position because you're the linchpin between the customer and the organisation and the product. And so you obviously have to hear a lot of things on the ground from your customers, what they like, what they need, what they want to improve. So you have a lot of intelligence that you then take back into the organisation, haven't you?

Dr Niclas West [: 00:12:19

Absolutely.

Ruth Winden [: 00:12:20

And when you look at your postdoc, what helped you then be so successful? Because it's so obvious from LinkedIn and your posts and people's comments that you're really good at what you do. What helped you what did you take from the postdoc that helped you be so effective in industry?

Dr Niclas West [: 00:12:37

I mean, I think I had the technical background, so I wasn't as worried that I was going to be out of my depth in that aspect. And I think even from the interviews they identified, oh, well, you don't have a sales background, are you really going to do okay in this? It was kind of, sort of that fresh out of academia doubts that somebody might have when they're trying to hire you. And so one, I think it was just identifying, okay, that's where I'm going to need to improve, and the company identifying that. So they put me through different types of sales trainings, first of all, to understand what value I have to the customers and how we can actually commodify that to sell that, basically. And also, I think I was just a little bit lucky because one of my colleagues on the team, she had been there for at least a year before, I forget exactly how long now, but she was set to mentor me to make sure that I was successfully making that transition, because she had only maybe a year or a couple of years before transitioned into industry herself.

Ruth Winden [: 00:13:41

Yeah. So she was familiar with the organisation and the company, but also fresh enough, new enough to know what it's like when you join. So was she like your informal mentor?

Dr Niclas West [: 00:13:51

Yes, exactly. And over the past year or so, that role has changed person. And so this new person that came in, I've been mentoring her this new person as well, trying to pay it forward a little bit.

Ruth Winden [: 00:14:04

Yeah. Fantastic. And what has surprised you the most about the difference between industry and academia? I think you mentioned to me a while ago, the pace is different, is that correct?

Dr Niclas West [: 00:14:16

Yeah. From academia, you know, there's sort of the grant cycles where you have a certain set of objectives that you're supposed to complete over a couple of year period. Sometimes that research really doesn't go to plan. So you change pathway, but your boss isn't going to change their mind all of a sudden, and you just change direction. And so this can sometimes happen. Sometimes you can stay on a project for much, much longer, probably in industry, and then sometimes the company can decide it's changing the direction it wants to go in and you have to be able to just drop your previous project and go on to the next one.

Ruth Winden [: 00:14:52

Right. So you have to be really flexible and be not too attached but equally committed. So that's quite a challenge, isn't it? Because you don't know what the strategy at the top that might change. So you then have to adapt and yeah, interesting. And the other thought I had was how have you surprised yourself?

Dr Niclas West [: 00:15:13

Yeah, a couple of those things. Seeing how quickly I can kind of adjust to these changing situations. It's not a huge thing. I'm just saying because it's just the difference. So that's why I'm emphasizing it only with Ruth on the Careers Architect programme where I myself am a perfectionist. So when the bosses ask you, when you're doing the interview, what are your strengths and your weaknesses? This is kind of the one you could say is a bit of both because I dig really deep into problems and can give very thorough answers to some things sometimes, but also it can be seen as something being too slow when they don't want quite as long of an answer. So really, partially that was about moderating myself in that and partially it's about direct communication with my bosses when needed to make sure I was on the path that she wanted. Yeah, just getting used to the different types of internal politics and things that a lot of these things I just could not have been aware of until I actually was in an industry position, I think.

Ruth Winden [: 00:16:18

And it sounds like you're always so thoughtful and aware and self critical and then see, okay, I need to adapt here or I need to do more in this area. And that makes you so very adaptable. Now, as we now looking to the future, you are now moving on. And what really struck me immediately was how many people in your organisation came onto LinkedIn and were saying, we totally understand family first because you're Italian wife and you decided you're moving to Italy, but also how incredibly positive they were about your time with them. And I thought, this is just such a lovely expression of how much they appreciated you, because I said, we're so sorry to let you see you go, but at the same time, we fully understand you want to be in Milan with your wife and be closer to her family, and that's why you're leaving. So what are your thoughts on moving forward to Italy now?

Dr Niclas West [: 00:17:13

So I think this is one of those things where it just reached the point in my life where it felt like I needed a change because of the timing of my relationship with my partner and where I was at with basically, I had been studying Italian for the last four years, so I'm reaching sort of the top levels of Italian classes. I really need to move to Italy if I ever want to just get better and get, I guess, fluent in Italian, hopefully at some point. And so there was that aspect. There was slightly an artificial thing because I had a two year work visa with Andor, and so I told them, okay, you need to support me one way or the other, and I was hoping they could support me to move to Italy. They were happy to have supported me to stay in the UK. But I had recently been married, gotten married to my partner, so we didn't necessarily need a work visa. We could move to Italy through the family visa. And I'm getting to the point where I could feel comfortable living doing day to day tasks in Italy with the language. Unfortunately, through some tax reasons and politics and some of these things, it was just too difficult to support me and my role in Italy with Andor. So I've recently given them my three month notice, and I'm on the job search again in Italy.

Ruth Winden [: 00:18:35

Yeah, you are on the move. And we've been trying to use our networks in the university, see whether we can make, we can create some good connections. So can you tell us a little bit more? What are you looking for, Nicholas? Maybe some of the listeners or someone who listens in might have an opportunity for you. You never know how these things work.

Dr Niclas West [: 00:18:55

Absolutely. Fingers crossed. Yeah. Well, I again used LinkedIn to make an announcement that that's what we're doing, that, you know, that I do appreciate everything that Andor has done for me. I've I've loved working there because it utilizes my skills. I feel valued, for the longest time, gave me what I needed in my personal life to be with my partner. But going forward, looking for another role, I do want to try to maximise using a lot of the skills that I have. And so there's a certain couple of directions I think I could go in. I think a lot of this journey of finding your right career path, in my opinion, is kind of finding out about the unknowns of the situation of this move. So for example, one of the pathways I've looked at a little bit is for a data scientist role. Well, the very first thing I did was just translate my CV and convert it into Italian so I could look for an application specialist role, because this would also be very good, but just to kind of see what else is out there. When I was looking at data scientist roles, I actually had another colleague that left the same group basically in the chemistry department as me, where she went into data science. So I asked her for an informational interview over a coffee and we discussed what she had to do. So she had to pick up a few skills to learn. She had done a lot of Python work. So kind of maybe in a similar situation as I am now, where I've used Python for some stuff, but she had to learn some SQL and maybe start to learn some machine learning, I think. But I was trying to figure out how could I be competitive in that marketplace? And it was similar to maybe I should also mention a blind spot I had very early in my other career search, back when I was leaving Leeds University, leaving the postdoc, because I had worked with some aerospace engineers and because other people in the US and my group from Texas had gone to aerospace companies, I was like, oh, cool, maybe I'll see if I can do this in the UK. And I think I didn't realise just quite how important being a citizen of that country is to some of these most of these aerospace companies. So it took an informational interview for it to kind of click that at that point I was sending out CVS to jobs that they were never going to call me back. This is kind of partly in the stage that I'm in now. I'm sending out CVs to jobs that I think match, but also at the same time trying to have informational interviews to make sure, because I've heard horror stories where students are sending out thousands of CVs and never hearing back, and you're like, no one wants to do that. You really need to understand why are you not competitive, I think, in that situation, because sometimes it's a little tweak to figure out exactly where you can go and actually be competitive.

Ruth Winden [: 00:21:53

In the job market, we always say let's go for quality, not quantity, because a really good application is labour intensive. It takes a lot of time, a lot of targeting, thinking it through, positioning yourself, adapting your background to the opportunity, the organization. And that's always been our philosophy, hasn't it, Niclas? Quality over quantity. And what I really like about your approach is you're so open minded. You really do your research, you talk to people, you find out what's happening, and you're open minded. And for instance, yes, data science is still a massively growing field and you're always learning. And I think one thing that you personify so much as a researcher, the most important thing, I think, is that you're all such brilliant minds, but also so good at learning because the world is changing at such a rapid pace. It's really important that we keep learning and developing because who knows what the world will look like in ten years time? I mean, I don't think many people will be able to answer that, with AI coming, all these things. And someone like you, Niclas, who's got obviously so many talents, you have so many interests, you're really good at learning, and you're looking at pushing yourself and learning and developing. You will find your way. And you also know you've already changed several times. You've changed universities, you changed countries, you changed roles, and that must give you confidence. That, okay, this time it's Italy, it's another change. But I know I can do this because I've done it before and it's worked out.

Dr Niclas West [: 00:23:23

Yes, that's what I want to have.

Ruth Winden [: 00:23:25

Yeah, absolutely. Niclas, when you think back to when you were in that space, I'm a postdoc. I know I love playing with things, and if I stay in academia, I will become at some point, too remote to working with the equipment. When you think back of that time, wanting to develop that career path, what are some tips that you can give people who find themselves now in that situation? Any words of wisdom from you because you're so good at this career management stuff!

Dr Niclas West [: 00:23:59

I think I had the sense that I knew what I liked to do out of the stuff that I did with my postdoc. But again, I didn't know what jobs were even out there. And then they go by so many different names, even the same role in different companies, all these things. I mean, personally, it helped me to go to the Careers Architect programme to be led through a lot of that stuff. But otherwise, as I was saying, get feedback any way you can when you think you're finding the right pathway. Again, besides the informational interviews, I liked the LinkedIn approach because I was able to see, even though I probably didn't narrow it down as well as I should have, before making my LinkedIn really well for one job versus another, it actually was really interesting to see, okay, what are recruiters actually coming to me for? What are the roles that they think I would be good in? I think these roles, the one that I'm in now, and similar ones, take really specific type of people. So while there's not too many of them out there, there's not too many of the people that fit in just right. And so compared to okay, so my brother does app programming. He gets recruiters coming to him every day on his LinkedIn. He puts silly things like he has night vision on LinkedIn and the recruiters are still coming at him. I'm trying to get the surgeon and the optimization, all that, and I get one every week, couple of weeks, just kind of depending on you use the "open to work thing", every little tool to when it is the right fit, you feel it. I think you get most of the way there and the rest is convincing yourself and the other person that the people that are interviewing you, you can make it to all the way there because they almost never are going to find somebody that's an absolute perfect fit.

Ruth Winden [: 00:25:47

There will be opportunities out there where that is a perfect fit. And you've been really good and patient because you have that additional challenge with a visa because not every company sponsors international professionals to come in. And I've learned so much from you and you've been such a joy to work with and all I can say is the very, very best for your journey to Italy. And ciao.

Dr Niclas West [: 00:26:11

Thank you to you as well Ruth. I've loved getting all the feedback from you as well, Ruth. You're one of these amazing people that shower of information on every time we chat about the career stuff. So, yeah, thank you very much. It was good talking to you.

Ruth Winden [: 00:26:22

Yeah, thank you. And we'll go off now onto LinkedIn and I'll just share some of the latest things I've just learned. So to help you with your job search. Thank you so much, Niclas. Take care. Bye bye.

Dr Niclas West [: 00:26:31

Bye.

Introduction [: 00:26:34

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