David Bogle and others tell Julie Gould about porosity, the movement of people between academia and other sectors.After more than three decades working for the same chemical company, Joan Cordiner accepted a senior role at a university. For many, she says, the move from industry to academia can feel like being a square peg in a round hole. Academic colleagues sometimes need to be persuaded that skills acquired elsewhere have value.
Chris Woolston is a journalist who writes regularly for Nature Careers, and is the editorial lead for its global annual surveys of working scientists. In 2021, he reported on salary and job satisfaction, and how careers in industry and academia compare. And he said that there are a lot of barriers across the membrane between the two worlds.It's not just a membrane. There's all kinds of systems that are in place to keep people where they're at.
So, the membrane has round holes and square holes. And I imagine many other shaped holes too. But the more I talked to people about this concept of porosity, the more I realized that it's more complicated than just fitting the right people through the right holes, and back again, These collaborations aren't easy to manage, she says. Academics and those working outside have very different working cultures that quite often clash. But the most important thing is to make sure that expectations are set at the beginning of the conversations,It's really important that everybody is very honest at the beginning about what they want out of it.