I'm open to any career-related suggestions:

• Brand new PhD, semi-STEM field, more of a social scientist of tech
• Looking to return to tech industry
• 10-12 years of tech experience before I went back to school, largely software QA, little bit of PHP
• Enjoy research. Grad studies included both quant (incl. R, Python/numpy) and qual skills. Dissertation was qual.
• Enjoy coding
• Would love to manage people in future, hopefully within 1-2 years; limited mgmt/leadership experience (twice I managed a TA).
• Lots of teaching experience incl online.
• Definitely wouldn't pass myself off as a "data science PhD" whatever that even means, but I have done a bit incl some self-teaching on the side. The R project was a published paper that involved automating and scoring 5M regressions.
• Open to starting at entry level but for "perm" jobs will need a growth path beyond entry level
• Very very open to contracting.

I would highly value any and all ideas regarding industry jobs. I would probably need a few months to build up my skills to be, e.g., a Python dev above entry level. People analytics only recently come onto my radar but might be a good fit. I don't really have specific UX experience but that area might be a good opportunity to unite qual, quant, and coding skills, if I could study up on the fundamentals.

Academia-to-industry is definitely a culture shock but one I'm prepared for from previous experience. I think I'm better than most PhDs at describing my transferable experience/skills to nonacademics and general workplace communication.

If anyone in the tech industry would be willing to do a 20 minute informational interview, either by phone or in person depending on location, I'd be really appreciative.

I’d be open to a chat, I have less experience than you in tech - currently working as a dev at a fintech startup though - and have recently gone through the process of (re)learning coding, learning how to learn etc, so things I’ve learnt on my journey may be applicable to you.

Send me a pm if you like

I think alot of this is dependent on what end/side of coding you're more excited about and then tailor your study/training to that and go from there..

As far as growth path in tech, I'm guessing your best bet to do 1-2 years from start to PM/CTO type route would be in a startup environment, if that's the case then learning a full stack of Javascript (MEAN... or some close alternative) would make you extremely valuable to a startup and its need for rapid development, etc.

I own a JS centric bootcamp so I'm bias but I also see how many jobs in JS there are and it's really astounding how many options you have.

Well, drat. I wrote most of a reply but didn't post it in time so the token expired and it got lost.

Long story short: From an informational interview with a friend, I decided on a path of teaching myself AWS and to do some datasciency stuff using one of the many open datasets at https://registry.opendata.aws .

Other primary job search activities are continuing with informational interviews, but more targeted, and of course applying for jobs (and going on a couple of job interviews). I don't apply blind as much as most people would because I think it's a low-probability strategy, but obviously you can ramp up the volume once you have a few applicable résumé/cover letter versions as needed.

Always eager for more feedback and ideas, so... feedback? ideas?



I'd love to talk about the owning a bootcamp part of this. I have some longer-term ideas in this area. Some of my background is in higher ed, but IMO conventional academia is not good at articulating its value add and frankly is in the process of getting run over by more targeted education that can communicate its value.

Anyway, mind if I PM you to ask more and share some ideas?