What do journalism and X have in common?

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X = science, consulting and almost every other intellectual profession.

The most difficult point for every fresh graduate or someone trying to switch careers is to verbalise their transferable skills. You may have spent years studying for your degree or taken multiple online courses, yet when it comes to filling out jobs applications you feel like you have nothing to offer.

Having been part of several different worlds, I came to slowly realise how heavily interconnected all “information-rich, intellectual” fields really are.

I started off studying biology, completed a PhD in Biochemistry and moved on to join a science media start-up team in London. They gave me a once in a lifetime opportunity to build a whole new section of their online platform, while picking up the necessary journalism skills through part-time courses and on the job training. Within a few months, the new features section was off to a great start. And I thought: finally I can identify myself at parties now, when people ask you that dreaded question “What do you do?” but instead of a verb expect to hear a perfectly defined noun in response. I am a science journalist. That’s it, right?

I was about to be surprised. Among the various HR messages on LinkedIn, I began receiving calls from agents asking whether I was interested in jobs like consulting — something I never thought I had the skills to do. To be fair, I wasn’t sure what those jobs required so I picked up the phone and started talking to the hiring agents, partly out of sheer curiosity and partly because my ego felt very flattered by their attention. It wasn’t long before I realised how right was my favourite holistic detective Dirk Gently: “Everything is connected”.

So here is the summary of all things I learned from my conversations with recruiters, complemented by some reading and presented from a journalism-centred point of view.

The skillset of a journalist:

Interpersonal communications — interviewing people of all backgrounds, being persuasive and inquisitive enough to get the people to talk to you. Even the people who are allergic to the word “journalist” — those include, perhaps, the majority of the world’s population but especially academic researchers.

Written communications — that goes without saying if you work as a journalist.

Storytelling — this skill, although rarely mentioned explicitly in job adverts, is nevertheless a must-have for any persuasive communicator. Being able to present information not just as a summary, but a full-fledged story, with suspenseful twists and turns that keep your reader engaged, is a whole separate skill in itself. And journalists are great at it (tabloid journalists are even too great at it, to my taste).

Quick learning, on the go (otherwise known in job postings as “adaptability” and “flexibility”) — as a journalist, you move from one project to another within weeks or sometimes even days. You often end up working on topics completely unrelated to each other, having to acquaint yourself with a new field in a matter of days. And your knowledge of each new field has to be deep enough to be able to interview experts. At least, in an ideal world where you want those experts to talk to you again and provide you new stories in the future.

Data analysis — yay, here comes one of the most discussed and hyped up skills of our time. It means a lot of different things to different people, but in the case of a journalist it includes the ability to collect, filter and analyse large amounts of information from various sources (especially when it comes to numeric data), derive conclusions from that information load and presenting the data in an engaging and understandable form to the audience. If you have some basic programming skills, you have a great advantage. If not, there is a zillion of education platforms online where you can learn coding for free. But even if your ability to deal with data is limited to Excel sheets, for as long as you can produce clear, insightful conclusions, data analysis today is a skill highly sought after.

Specific field expertise (whichever your focus field is) — I deliberately held it off since people often forget they even have such a skill, or don’t consider it a skill at all. But the expert knowledge that you have can be your greatest asset, and open doors for you into other, seemingly unrelated career areas.

Let’s now look at some career options and transferable skills you have as a science journalist.

1. Science (research).

People tend to think of this transition as a one-way path, from science into journalism. But my experience showed me that the process really works both ways.

Similarities: The same principle of conducting research studies as putting together an in-depth article. Background research, collecting the material, synthesis and writing. Putting the material into a story. However, academic pieces are written in a lofty old-fashioned language, which sounds like it has changed very little from the early science magazines of the 18th century.

Transferable skills:

• Research. Literature research skills are exactly the same for both scientists and journalists. Except that as a journalist you will also pay attention to non-academic articles. Hands-on research may be pipetting solutions into a test tube or conducting a full-scale animal experiments in academia. The same function in journalism performs interviewing.
• Data analysis — the essence of what you do as a scientist. These along with your research skills you can directly apply to your journalism work.
• Information synthesis and storytelling — both journalists and scientists will ultimately present their results in a form of a story. Only the stories of academia are obsessively detailed and impersonal, while journalistic stories revolve around the human element, emotions and drama.

Main differences: your tell your stories to a very specific audience of academic peers, which ultimately influences the story language. Academic articles exist to be read primarily by other academics. Academic publishing itself was born out of the need for the scientific community to keep informed about each other’s work. Hence, academic journals have evolved as a tool for scientists to inform other scientists about their discoveries.

Ultimately, a broader audience, which journalists are part of, will often read academic works. Journalists write stories with the purpose to inform (and often influence) a much broader audience than just their peers. They do not necessarily produce new knowledge as academics do, but rather collect, synthesize and sometimes “translate” existing information, making it more accessible to communities they serve.

2. Consulting.

Jobs is consulting are very diverse but essentially every project includes one or another type of problem posed to you by the client. Your job will be to effectively use all kinds of skills and knowledge you possess, in order to creatively solve this problem. At the end, you will need to present your conclusions and suggestions to the client in a form of a written and / or oral report. No matter what you end up doing, be it market analysis to present your pharma client with the best options for a drug market entry or optimising the company’s structure to boost productivity and reduce the running costs, your journalistic skills package will be directly applicable to a job in consulting.

Transferable skills:

• Interpersonal communications — a must have for a successful consultant. You will work on your project as part of the team and often need to conduct personal interviews with the company’s representatives, to learn about their operations and their needs. Your interviewing experience as a journalist, your ability to ask the right questions and synthesise the information will be a valuable asset in your portfolio.
• Research — another skill that will enable to you to successfully carry out consulting projects. Just like in journalism, you will often need to conduct extensive literature research and combine that with the insights provided to you by the people you interview.
• Storytelling — another must have for a successful consultant. The creative element of journalism — putting a vast amount of information into an engaging story form — will serve you well when it comes to presenting your findings and persuading the client to accept your solution to their problem.
• Data analysis — in consulting, you will be dealing with a lot more numerical data. You will need to be able to handle large spreadsheets and will often be asked if you have basic programming/data analysis software skills. The ability to extract valuable information from the data and present it visually, so that your client can easily understand your message, will be even more important than in journalism. Software packages such as Tableau will help you create engaging visualisations, even if you don’t feel comfortable with programming languages. But if do know a bit of Python or R, along with a solid understanding of statistics, you are in a good shape.
• Specific field of expertise — one of the reasons why you will be hired, in addition to the above mentioned “soft skills”. Your insights into an industry, be it engineering, biotechnology, pharma or the media world, will be invaluable for your success.

Main differences: You will need to know a lot more about business operations and basic market economy. You will also need to have strong numerical skills — most consulting interviews involve some or another sort of mathematical questions. You won’t need an MBA if you have strong expert knowledge in a specific field (e.g. biotech) but you will need to understand how companies operate and what corporate clients need. However, knowledge like that can be picked up by reading industry-related news and reports from consulting firms. One of my recent favourites is a McKinsey Insights app — a free collection of their articles, reports and interviews with industry leaders in many different fields.

3. Journalism vs Public relations

These are really two sides of the same coin. Public relations people are the suppliers of information to journalists in the form of news releases, regular email and social media updates, event announcements and anything else their client does, which is worth talking about.

Many journalists leave their posts after acquiring enough skills and experience, to become PR agents. Which isn’t surprising as PR pays (a lot) more.

Transferable skills:

• News writing will directly translate into news release writing. News releases are the backbone of most news articles we read. Except that the news release will be one-sided, meant to serve primarily the interests of your client.
• Interviewing skills — having interviewed people as a journalist, you are perfectly equipped to prep your client for interviews with the media. You can predict what questions a journalist may ask as well as steer the discussion in the right direction if you sense the journalist’s questions become unfavourable.
• Interpersonal communications in a broader sense — your ability to get along with people during interviews will serve you well as a PR agent. You will need to win over a lot more people and persuade them to pay attention and ultimately purchase your client’s products. You will be responsible for maintaining the public image of your client. You will often be maintaining the client’s owned media, such as a website and/or social media channels and handling publicity events.
• Knowledge of the media landscape — the main reason why you with your journalism experience will be hired in PR is your first-hand knowledge of the media environment. You have been exposed to the media world and have developed the fifth sense (or at least a pretty good idea) of how it operates. You know what journalists are looking for and where to find them. You can tailor-make stories for them and provide them exactly the information they need.

Main differences: Your audience is no more the general public but the community of journalists. You simply switch seats from being the information synthesiser and distributor to being an information provider.

4. Science / medical / technical writing

Requires the same amount of literature research, if not more, than traditional journalism. Your audience is often more specialised and can tolerate higher amounts of jargon. On the other hand, you may end up serving entirely different audiences for each project — like writing medicine instructions slips for patients on one day and a summary of research on a particular disease for doctors, on another.

Transferable skills:

• Research — this one never goes out of fashion, does it? :)
• Written communications — The ability to “translate” jargon-heavy texts into easy-flowing, conversational articles and the other way around,which is something that you can naturally do as a journalist. You will also need to be able to adapt your writing style to different audiences, depending on the project. However, to produce a piece, you will need less interviewing (or not at all) and a lot more literature research than you would as a journalist.
• Storytelling. Even if the job description does not explicitly say it, presenting information in form of stories is always a lot more engaging and persuasive than a simple information summary.
• Data analysis — not always but often you will need to use your numerical data analysis skills to produce things like market reports, drug pricing summaries etc. However, science / technical writing jobs are on average more about writing than maths.
• Expert knowledge — this one again will be one of your most valuable assets. The projects you will work on will vary a lot so your area of expertise will be a lot broader than it needs be for a scientist. But the ability to learn quickly and adapt, which you develop while working on journalistic projects, will underpin your success.

Main differences: As I already mentioned, the variety of projects and requirements for each project may be a lot greater than in journalism. You will not need as much maths and data analysis skills as in science, data journalism or consulting. But you will need greater flexibility when it comes to your writing style and language since you may be serving completely different audience with each project.

This list is by no means complete as it only includes career fields I am familiar with. But I hope that I have managed to demystify the job landscape for you, at least a little bit. And if you’d like a lean and clean take home message, I’d say this — everything is connected. The jobs out there, no matter how different HR agents make them sound, are actually a lot more similar than you may think. In the current career landscape, the job responsibilities for different positions become more and more intertwined, and changing careers today is a lot easier than it used to be.

About SciStory 2.0: If you are interested in learning science journalism and practicing your science writing with a group of like-minded people, I have created an online Science Journalism Club for people just like you. We share ideas, writing tips, learn elements of the craft and write and publish our stories here on SciStory 2.0. The next onboarding for the Club is happening soon — sign up here to be notified.