WWCode Career Nav #27: Tips To Boost Your Research Career

Women Who Code Career Nav 27     |     Spotify – iTunes – Google – YouTube – Text

Dr. Houda CHIHI, Senior Researcher at Innov’COM Laboratory of Sup’COM, Tunisia, shares “Tips To Boost Your Research Career.” She discusses the questions to consider when trying to decide if a career in research is right for you and goes through the steps of successful research.

I want to share with you some tips to boost your research career. We start by planning for career advancement, then pass on the skills, network, and training needed for career advancement, and the habit of a successful research career. The first step is to know ourselves. What is the dream job that we want? We have to ask ourselves some mini questions. What am I an ambassador of? How long do I want to be in school? What are the values that I want to bring? What is the impact? How much impact do I want to have? What am I good at? If I find the right response to this question, I will find the right path. Suppose that I identified as a researcher. In this case, you have to identify your research project. You have to know what research centers are related to your subject. What are the fellowships that can give me funding for my research? What is the cooperative agreement with my institute? That is mandatory for funding. We also have to know what the related research projects are worldwide.

Let’s start with the planning for career advancement. Here, it’s a journey that begins. We need to develop hard and soft skills. We need a mentor. We need to be visible online, on LinkedIn for example, and connect with experts worldwide. We have to develop brainstorming, and passion, and exchange ideas with experts that can help us to find new ideas in research. We need an affiliation with a research group. We need to be open and direct toward our needs and justify their importance. The necessary skills for a successful researcher are to be a good writer and communicator. When presenting our paper, we need to know how to convince the audience of our ideas. Before meeting our supervisor or other experts, we have to be prepared. We have to be strategic. We need to have a voice. We need to establish good relationships with experts and build a network. We need to build a good curriculum vitae that advertises our experience and our expertise.

It’s important also to know the research areas of other laboratories for you to find good collaboration. It allows us to find new jobs, internships, and positions. Here, we need personal interactive skills to convince other experts through our experience, achievements, and degrees. We need to get involved in undergraduate research because, after Ph.D., we need always to update our research ideas and articles. It’s a habit to pursue successful career research. We need to be open to criticism because sometimes we have comments from reviewers that sometimes hurt us. Keep calm and be creative and reply to the comments, kindly put it to the reviewer and build international collaboration to benefit from their experience and to get their advice.

We need to do better at submitting a new version of our articles. We need to keep good relationships with our supervisors. If we want to submit an application for a good position, sometimes they ask us to submit a reference letter from our supervisor. In addition, to find a good position in an academy, we have to subscribe to academic websites to know where the positions are available. If we want to promote our article or research, we need to target indexed journals. To be a good researcher, we have to stay updated, to follow webinars, participate in meetups, know more about what is new in the market, and keep reading new articles. Another step that helps us to advance in our career as a researcher is to find the specific or the correct funding websites that advertise the training opportunities, such as Indeed, Myjobscotland, ScholarshipPortal.

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Guest: Dr. Houda CHIHI, Senior Researcher at Innov’COM Laboratory of Sup’COM, Tunisia
Producer: JL Lewitin, Senior Producer, Press and Digital Content, Women Who Code