Sr. Business Developer Advises on Broadening Your Skillset

Name: Ulrich Ramach

PhD: Applied Interface Physics, University of Technology Vienna, 2023

What is your current job?

I am a Senior Business Development Manager and Project Manager for In-Vision in Vienna, Austria.

I work to understand the customers’ technical requirements and needs as well as contribute to application engineering.

What is your favorite thing about your job?

I'm working at a European SME. We have a relaxed working atmosphere where I count as an individual, not as a number. My strengths and weaknesses are seen and understood.

What is the most important skill you developed or experience you had during your PhD that now helps you in your current position?

The honest answer would be none for my specific job.

The more abstract answer: Solving complex problems with multiple simple steps, trouble shooting in experimental setups, communication of complex problems with simple, understandable concepts.

How did you build the skills necessary for your current role?

I worked in consulting in-between my current job and my PhD in a completely different field (risk consulting). The mixture of different jobs, roles, responsibilities, and working areas helped in developing a broad, interstructural skillset.

How did you find this position? What were the career steps you took to get to where you are now?

Online

PhD graduate ➡️ Consulting ➡️ Senior Business Developer

If someone is interested in a similar role, what would you recommend they start doing now to prepare?

• Develop soft skills

• Expose yourself to new surroundings

• Show that you are able to work in new fields

Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia?

The university research system seems quite broken to me. People who get on top are people who pushed themselves through a dog-eat-dog postdoc environment where grants are given to the best-selling researcher, not the one with the most interesting scientific concept.

There was next to no supervision during my PhD, so people were mostly left to fend for themselves. Every single publication I'm on had to be "a novel approach" with "unique new insights", "potentially revolutionizing" etc. The best comparison I can think of is that a lot of academic research turned into boulevard media instead of journalism.

What advice do you have for someone getting their PhD and looking to pursue a career outside of academia?

Broaden your skillset; work with industry if possible, and be willing to take a step back after your PhD to pursue some lower qualified job in the private sector before going into something that you really like.

As an academic, my skillset for private industry was next to zero. Most things that you need to learn are very easy (private business is not rocket science), but you need to have some basic understanding of that when you want to start in a position where your PhD is relevant.

Are there any components of your identity you would like to share, including how they have impacted your journey?

I was dealing poorly with very little supervision. It felt like I had to fight for attention from my supervisor (I think an experience many PhD students have). I dealt poorly with it, and that was bad for my mental health and also prolonged my PhD to 4.5 years (instead of 3).

And for those interested, what was your main area of research?

Applied Interfaces of lipid bilayers and interaction forces of associated proteins. In short, I studied the functioning of specific transmembrane proteins as well as interface proteins in relation to either packing density of the proteins or the lipid bilayer.