Stem Initiative – sponsored by the James Tien Family Foundation
Supporting advancement of women is important to many since women and men begin their careers nowadays in relatively equal roles, yet once things progress, there is markedly less progress in advancement for women into more senior roles.
The Job Forum’s Advancing Women series focuses on what women in engineering, science, and finance jobs can proactively do to themselves to effectively influence recognition of their contributions and signal they are indeed ready and interested in advancement.
At a recent meeting, Advancing Women in Science, we had experts in biotech giving candid advice and sharing stories of who they have seen communicate readiness for promotion well. The expert panel included Jennifer Troia at Assembly Bio, Derrick Richardson at Alumis, Surina Gulati at Align Technologies, Leesa Meintzer, a recruiter at the 2Go Advisory Group, Elly Grimaldi a recruiter in bio tech , Betiel Haile with Roche Diagnostics , Erin Gunther at UC Berkeley Extension and Elise Brownell a consultant and fractional C- level project manager for biotech .
Many great tips were discussed such as actively setting out to find mentors, adding new skills and certifications, talking to Sr leaders about your wish to advance, creating “lunch and learns” for more cross functional collaboration and visibility, volunteering for extra projects, manifesting a learning mindset, signing up for any training programs (Six Sigma or the like). One discussion that was particularly rich was the importance of striking the balance between making the most of the role you are entering as a job hunter and not prematurely signaling that you are going to leave too soon.
Our team agreed that being quickly identified as a “flight risk”, is not going to be helpful for getting a job. You may be the strongest candidate of the mix, but it’s so difficult to find great talent, and so hiring managers do take notice and factor in a judgment of if the person will stay a few years. Someone who is already talking about being in a rush to get promoted in an interview, may communicate that they are not actually interested in the role they are applying for and will be doing. Certainly the recruiter knows their organization probably won’t be ready to promote this person in a year or two, and since the recruiters don’t want to go through this hiring process again, right away, they may go to the person who is a “runner up” but not already interviewing about advancement.
Advice: Look for other ways to check the advancement cadence at a company (informational interviews, study their people on LinkedIn… have they kind of been sitting in their roles for many years, kind of collecting dust for a while.? Are you seeing movement in that organization?) Always convey enthusiasm for the role for which you are interviewing!
