How easy is it to leave academia after being a PI? [closed]

Question

I've always been uncertain about staying in academia since my PhD. Now I've been offered a PI position, which I'm considering to accept, however I would like to know if this will close me other career perspectives if I eventually decide to quit at some point, considering I'm mostly a data scientist.

Answer 1

It depends on how you are planning transitioning to industry. There are several scenarios that come to my mind:

Jumping into the job market
Essentially, you quit or wait for the end of your contract, and start applying for positions in companies or even launch yourself as an independent researcher/consultant. What needs to be kept in mind here is that the more specific your skills are, the smaller is the demand for these specialized skills. In other words, e.g., there are plenty of positions for bachelor or masters graduates who know some machine learning, but there are a lot fewer positions for some specialized kind of method that you perfected during the PhD studies. In fact, many specialized research fields are not represented at all outside of academia, so you would have to fall back onto your bachelor/masters background, which would mean that even the years of PhD studies were largely a waste of time (in terms of the specific skills gained and age, but not in terms of experience - which matters.)

'Friend' option
Another common approach is that you know somebody already in industry, who will help you to get a job in their company by recommending you or even hiring you into their own research team. In many cases this is a peer who did studies together with you, but left academia earlier. Even if this is not the case, there are will be people around who fit this profile. This implies two things: a) your training is likely not needed for doing this job, that is falling back to bachelor/masters level; b) there may be some resentment between you and your colleagues (or even superiors) due to the disparity of education levels. Note that it goes both ways - I have heard of PhD's in industry being called "pretentious", "arrogant", etc. A human resources person once confided to me that they even don't call the candidates with PhD indicated in their CV, since these cannot fit in the dynamics of a company, although their ambitions are high.

Research labs
If you (or your group leader) are an outstanding person in the field, there is a possibility of being hired to a research lab - e.g., I have seen biology PhDs/Postdocs from a well-known group to be hired directly to a research lab of a large pharmaceutical company, which was using the same organism. This also may work, if your University has close ties to companies, which use the University as a pool of potential candidates. Also, I have also known a renowned PI moving back and forth between leading groups in government research institute and companies - this obviously involved personal connections and having a name in the field, making him the best candidate for leading a specific research direction. (It is not uncommon for companies establishing a new research activity or reorganizing to invite managers from outside, but usually it means hiring people from other companies.)

In my experience, a PhD (especially with a post-PhD later research experience) easily gets interviews for positions in research labs of such big companies (such positions are few, but not nonexistent) - it takes just a bit of preparation to pass the HR interview... but then one is usually stopped by the mismatch between the actual and required domains of experience or by a too academic an attitude (not being sufficiently pro-active, goal-oriented, etc.)

Note also that skills mean different things in academia and industry - in industry it is not what you can learn quickly, but what you can start doing right away.

Disclaimer: this is not intended as an authoritative answer, but rather as sharing personal observations about academia-industry transition.