Entry-level career paths in the life sciences: generic skills in Dutch job postings

ABSTRACT

The importance of generic skills for life scientists is commonly recognised by employers, graduates, and higher education institutes. As it remains unclear which generic skills are relevant for different life sciences career paths, this study aims to give an overview to inform and inspire universities and students, by analysing 179 Dutch entry-level job postings. We deductively coded nine career paths, namely: life sciences industry, PhD-student, quality compliance, research-related, sales & business, communication/education, information technology, consultancy, and policy. We coded generic skills using an adapted categorisation consisting of 46 generic skills within four categories, which were: self, others, information, and tasks. The descriptive statistics and cluster analysis results showed that although language, communication, and collaboration were the most requested skills, differences in requested generic skills between career paths and cluster composition were observed as well. We concluded that although some generic skills are important in general, other generic skills are relevant for specific life sciences career paths. To educate skilled life scientists, universities should consider the flexible integration of these generic skills in their life sciences programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Generic skills
• life sciences graduates
• career paths

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors contribution

HR and SM collected the data, coded the data, and discussed the results. All authors designed the research project, interpreted the results, contributed to the practical implications, and commented on the manuscript.

Data availability

Data is available in the repository via https://figshare.com/projects/Generic_skills_in_Life_Sciences_careers/155255

Ethics statement

This manuscript used publicly available data and does not include any data collected from humans (i.e. no human subjects research) and therefore no ethics approval was needed.