Last week Lucy and Andy attended a careers event at The University of Manchester hosted by the NorthWest Biotech Initiative. This was a great opportunity to get out of the office and share some of their knowledge on how to find a job in science, and also talk about careers in recruitment.

The Northwest Biotech Initiative is a student-led organisation that focusses on fostering relationships between academia and industry which we think is a fantastic idea! Collaboration between ‘academic’ scientists and ‘industrial’ scientists is great for furthering scientific progress and getting discoveries out into the real world and VRS are keen to get involved in these kinds of partnerships.

The event was really well organised and started off with Careers Talks from 5 very different scientists:

• Recruitment Consultant (Lucy from VRS)
• Patent Attorney
• Medical Writer
• Product Manager
• Company Director

Lucy gave the audience of 70+ soon-to-be PhD graduates a brief run-through of her scientific experience and then enlightened them in what it’s like to be a Scientific Recruitment Consultant. It seemed this was a career path many of the students had not considered before! She also covered a few slides on how to find a scientific career outside of academia and how VRS as a recruitment consultancy can help in finding a job in the science industry.

After the talks, there was an opportunity to have a bit of an informal chat with the speakers and Lucy and Andy proved very popular. There was a queue of students lining up to get opinions on their CVs and ask their own questions on how VRS can help with their job hunt and what they need to do to improve their chances. It was really nice to meet so many enthusiastic scientists face-to-face, and hopefully we helped some of them decide where they want to go next after their PhD studies!