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Episode 0018 Shownotes
Business roles requiring
teaching skills
So, you've got strong teaching skills as a PhD, postdoc and/even as a professor. Now, for which jobs in business do you qualify? Listen to Prof. Dr. Eleonore Soei-Winkels as she shares your potential job roles in this episode of the weekly PostdocTransformation show, e. g. internal and external communicator, corporate trainer and learning developer, analyst and requirements engineer, customer experience designer, customer support, marketing, sales, business consultant, advisor, leader, manager, business & partnership developer, faculty at an applied university.
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Internal and external communicator, corporate trainer and learning developer
So, you wanna leap out of science (if you want to check your readiness in an instant and for free, click here!) . You have teaching skills that are really strong, but you don't wanna become a teacher. Then [00:01:00] this episode of the PostdocTransformation Show is for you. We're talking today about job roles in business that require strong teaching skills. All right, so without further ado, let's dive right in.
So, when my team and I have collected all these roles, we also reviewed them under the consideration of have I did them in my past. So, I can attest to the significance of teaching skills in these business roles.
All right. Internal and external communication. So, when you are in research, you probably wouldn't have expected but in large corporate companies, it's usually also that they have an outreach and also an inward reach. That means that in the outreach, it's public [00:02:00] relations, it's external communications, creating a buzz beyond marketing, more like on the legal side& political side, campaigning, lobbying, and something like that. So, all of that requires teaching skills because you cannot win an audience, whoever that is for your product, for your services, and to get more.
Money, without being able to convince the others to support you. Right? So, that's also teaching.
Then you can have the inward communication roles where you sort of like inform the company employees about new things, et cetera. There are not so many, but these are roles I supported as well as a consultant at Accenture.
All right. Next roles would be corporate training and learning development. Actually, and to be honest, my bachelor master's students of industrial and occupational psychology, they are much better prepared [00:03:00] for corporate training and learning development.
However, I think that PhD students can also do that if they get the right equipment and get the right knowledge, et cetera. But essentially, corporate training and learning development means that companies need to upskill, right? So they need to upskill their employees to maintain the certain edge towards the development on the market, et cetera. So they have to upskill, learn new things, insights, knowledge, procedures and stuff like that.
And corporate training and learning development means that you would create the material online, offline, and to strategize about which of the employee groups would need to have this knowledge and stuff like that. So, it's like train the trainer inside a company.
Analyst and requirements engineer, customer experience designer, customer support, marketing
Number three, analyst and requirements engineer. And yeah, this is also a role that I have loved to do because it's, it's actually also research based in the sense that as an analyst, you look into the data, look into the behavior and then you reverse engineer the requirements from all the stakeholders, so the people who are working with a software, with a product, with a service, whether they have problems. So, once you understand where they are coming from, what they want to do with the product, with the service, et cetera, then you can redevelop the underlying product service or whatever. So, this has been a great opportunity for me to network and collaborate within the companies I have been working for as an analyst.
[00:07:00]
Eleonore: All right, number four, which is customer experience and also customer support. Well, in all these roles, you need to understand the behavior and the goals and how the customers respond to the product, to the service they, how they use it. And that's customer experience. So, you need to analyze and also guide them from where they are to where they want to be. And that will be support. And that's why being able to teach them what they need is really important.
All right, number five, which would be marketing. So, one of the things that I learned as an IT analyst, supporting marketing for corporate buying, is that you need to educate the market before you market.
So, even if you have goods that are obviously easy to use, I mean Aldi [00:08:00] Süd, I mean Aldi South. What do they sell? They sell groceries. You know what to do with the grocery. But the thing is that, the way Aldi operates is different to some of the discounters or groceries in the different countries. So, that means, they weren't, they weren't screaming hooray when Aldi came to the market, right? So, they had to educate the potential customers in how to use the things within an Aldi market to make the most out of the budget.
And that is important that you always understand that marketing is also about teaching the customer to use the products, to want the products and to use them, right?
Business consultant & advisor
Next thing. Business consulting and advisor roles. I would say that with more experience in business, you can then become a business consultant.
I always sort of laugh about the consultants who come fresh off graduate school, fresh off university, have no business experience, but want to be a business consultant. I understand. And I recommend this as the best internship, but it's an internship at the expense of the client. And this is why I'm advocating that if you wanna become a consultant, you should have some serious, profound business experience before you consult on business topics. So, this is more for the advanced career transitioner who has been thriving in business. But yeah, this could be a great lookout for you for your career perspectives, right?
[00:10:00] Now here's another role, so, sales is more with the customer themselves. So face-to-face, frontier at the market place where you teach the client to use the product, the service, or whatever, in the way that they need that, because obviously every client is different.
And while the marketing side is maybe more like looking at countries, geographies, regions, looking at whatever, on a larger scale, the sales side is more like client account base. And that will be more individualized, customized towards the customer.
But either way, it also has a strong teaching requirement. And the better you teach, the better they will use the product. And a used product is certainly utilized much better. That means it has a bigger return on invest, and that means that the client is probably more happy with his investment or her investment, and that means that they probably will, buy it again or [00:11:00] prolong the lease or whatever it is, right?
So, more money for you, for your company.
Manager, leader,
business and partnership developer
All right. The next one is, leadership and management, [00:12:00] and obviously as a leader, a manager, you should be a good people developer as well. So, your team members rely on you that maybe if they're unexperienced or maybe if they're new to the team, that they will learn whatever it needs to be successful in your team. And that could be in logistics, in marketing or whatever. But definitely it's about the leadership and the manager role. That requires a strong teaching skill because if you can't do this, then they will never learn what it needs to succeed. And that means, you will have a lot of work and you won't be able to delegate. And the only way to delegate things to your employees is that you know that they can do this stuff and that means to continuously upskill them. And that's leadership, but also teaching.
All right, so on to number nine, and that's business and [00:13:00] partnerships development. So, when you are creating a new business model, Then you will have to find new sponsors within the company who say: this hasn't been in our pipeline, but we should go into there.
So, you have to find the right sponsors, but also external partners maybe. And these external partners, they need to be convinced to invest in new ideas and stuff like that. So, unless they understand what's in it for them, they won't invest. And that means you have to teach them why it's great to partner with your company and this is a great role also.
But I would also say that this is also maybe on your bucket list to develop further.
Professor at a business school
Now onto the last one, which is number 10, business school faculty or you know, faculty at an applied university. This is actually what I did. I am a professor for industrial occupational psychology at an [00:15:00] applied university. That means we have a strong teaching focus. Our students actually are professionally very much experienced. They come to us when they are already in their mid thirties. They've been successful without an academic degree, but now they feel that they wanna expand their academic horizon and that's why they come to us. This is where my experience in business is needed, but also my strong teaching skills. And maybe this is an option for you. It doesn't have to be, I created an episode about that: the best reasons to come back to academia after you have thrived in business. When I look at the numbers and the stats, it's one of the most listened to episodes.
So, I guess that this could be also on your bucket list when you leave. Don't forget that. There is also a return ticket if you needed one (check out episode The best reasons to come back to academia).
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All right. I hope that this short episode was really helpful for you. there's only one [00:16:00] thing that I wanted to also say: I want you to listen also to the episode number four, because that's on the future of work for new PhD holders in business. It's absolutely key to overlay this episode to the other one so that you can do all these roles that are promising to you because of your teaching skills in the industries that we have discussed in episode number four. Alright, so I didn't want to be redundant here, but instead I wanna recommend to you listen to this episode number four so that you have a better view on that.
Until the next episode,
Cheers,
Eleonore & Team PostdocTransformation
Enroll in your free email course for your career transition into business! Especially emails no 2 & 3 focus on creating a LinkedIn profile and using LinkedIn to network for your career transition!
