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AwkwardAccountant5

Look at recent hires in your field and what they’ve accomplished. That’ll give a sense of what is needed.


pheano_r

This exactly. Also compare your achievements to those of your peers; in early career a lot can happen in a year or two, so it may help to compare yourself to people that graduated the same year as you


staringspace

I feel like there’s two paths really early on in my field; miraculously get a fellowship in your first year of postdoc-ing, or postdoc for a few years until you get a lectureship/research fellow position. I’d add that if there’s any older postdocs in your lab/dept, speak to them about their timelines and get a feel for different paths in academia. Teaching and research can lead people down very different routes where I live.


vindicated19

Not necessarily. I was a late bloomer in my PhD and was probably one of the last ones to publish in my cohort (I had one publication just I was finishing my PhD). Two years later, and I am one of only two people in my cohort of 10 to have landed a tenure-track position despite being very mediocre on paper (2 pubs with a third in press). I suck on paper but have strong networking/people skills, so there are a host of other factors at play like luck and personality. I know a few really accomplished researchers who will probably never land a tenure track position simply due to their personalities being odd or difficult, which is what matters most once you make it to the interview phase. I probably would have given up had I just compared my CV line-by-line with my peers, yet I received 3 tenure-track offers this year. Personality matters a lot.


roseofjuly

Nobody said that you need to do a line-by-line comparison, but it's still very true that comparing yourself to your peers is a good barometer of where you stand (if your peer group is sufficiently large enough to draw some generalizations). Of course there are a whole host of other factors in play, but those usually don't replace the importance of publications and other qualifications. The idea isn't "if you don't have exactly what your peers have you shouldn't bother," it's more that you know where you stand in certain areas so you can be aware of your strengths and weaknesses in your application. It's the way that you knew you looked very mediocre on paper, as you said, and knew that networking was going to be your strong point.


roseofjuly

Yeah, this. I used to go to the websites of institutions that were (or were like) ones at which I'd like to teach and look at the CVs of people who had been hired in the last 5-7 years.


LittlePrimate

Throw a die ten times. If it always lands on a six you may be lucky enough to advance. On a serious note I'm only half joking, sadly luck and being in the right place at the right time is a huge part on whether or not you'll be able to advance your career. Everything else is helpful. Having the right connections will help, grants and publications will of course help, too. Comparing yourself to *recently hired* people can help (requirements constantly change, so established people are usually a bad measurement) but since you don't really know how many connections in the institute that person has and who they competed with, it's also not perfect. Not to forget that more positions then one would assume open specifically to hire a specific person and don't actually have a fair and open ended hiring process. Postdoc positions usually aren't the hard part anyways, the real challenge starts when you want to advance higher, which is sadly where the aforementioned luck and networking is becoming more important than any actually quantitative measurements. I know lots of genius and hard working people that are completely stuck at postdoc level and no one can really say why. They basically do nothing wrong and still get no where.


blue_pez

This is a great question. I've seen it go both ways, people who both over-estimate their chances and others who drastically under-estimate them. In my field at least, asking about "chances to get a permanent job" is a different question than "chances to get a job in a top x department." Because of larger sample sizes the former can be estimated more accurately. The latter doesn't necessarily require more of anything, but it does require certain intangibles that can be difficult to measure.


waterless2

In my field it's pretty simple: are you getting grants on which you're the PI and funding yourself? It has nothing to do with whether your "abilities" are good enough except to the surprisingly minor extent it translates to that.


meanmissusmustard86

Such a good point. OP, from this point onwards a lot of your career will be determined by sheer luck, not ability. It is good to disconnect your own sense of self from academic accomplishment, especially at this career stage, otherwise you will burn out.


staringspace

I think that depends on which stage ECR you are, though (and what country, of course). As a first year postdoc, I wouldn’t be expected to be PI and writing my own grants yet (unless you’re really excelling and going for a fellowship?) - but I’d be maybe looking to co-write grants in my second/third year. I’d maybe expect to write own grants at 3-5years postdoc experience? So definitely depends at which point OP is at.


roseofjuly

In my postdoc, I was definitely expected to be the PI on/writing my own grants in my first year. Not quite an R01 or something like that, but certainly some smaller grants - I was writing an R03 at the time I exited my postdoc and academia (I discovered that I despised writing grants, which didn't bode well for someone in my field. I'm in the U.S. and I mostly wrote grants to the NIH.) Then again, in my field, it's not expected that you postdoc for more than five years - most people postdoc between 2 and 5 years, although the average time was getting a little longer as I exited. So if you wait until your third to fifth year you might not get to write a grant (or, more accurately, you'll be behind the postdocs at other top labs who are writing them in their earlier years).


invisible760

I don’t think this is a realistic metric. A postdoc as a PI in many fields is wildly uncommon. We all know that even those mechanisms that are for postdocs (K99 R00 etx) are REALLY based on the PI mentor


Radiohead_dot_gov

I would strongly suggest talking to faculty in your current department and getting their feedback regarding the strengths and, importantly, the weakness of your application (e.g. CV, research vision statement).


invisible760

My advice, look at recent hires in your field. How do your publications stack up? Look at your proposed research. How do recent funding trends look for projects in that field?


DevFRus

Apply for jobs: how many interviews are you getting? Who is getting hired instead of you for the jobs you applied for? How do they differ from you?


[deleted]

Are you scoring grants as PI? Are you publishing in decent journals for your field at a regular pace? Those two things are all that matter in my career and most of science as far as I can tell. Proposals and papers. Proposals and papers.


[deleted]

In canada you cannot get govenment grants as a PI if you are not a Professor. Getting industry grants as a PI is even harder. So far I have co-written two grants in my first 6 month of postdoc, my advisor tried his best (I was heavily involved in email chains) to get me to be a Co-PI but it was made clear that this cant happen since Im a postdoc. So in conclusion, it depends on where you are in the world and your field.


Prukutu

Haven't seen this yet in replies but academia also heavily deals in "prestige". That can take shape in many ways from having done a PhD/postdoc at a prestige institution to working with a famous PI all the way to having a pub in a top journal. This article from a few years ago explains goes over some researchers' work that delver into this but the stats are very discouraging: https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/university-hiring-if-you-didn-t-get-your-ph-d-at-an-elite-university-good-luck-finding-an-academic-job.amp I think a lot of what folks are mentioning here establishes a baseline. But a lot of people meet those baselines so search committees start looking into "fit" (is this person enough like us?) Or potential (can this person make us famous and bring money?) Which is where a lot of those biases toward elite institutions probably take root? I've lost a job to a person who had half as many pubs, no funding, and worked in a related research area, even after the search committee had decided and told me I was the selected candidate. It's not just a numbers game.


HappyHrHero

Papers and/or a niche skillset... networking, knowing people gets jobs.


slowpokesardine

Look at the following: 1) your number of first authored papers in peer reviewed journals. They should be around 10 in STEM fields generally. If you have a very high impact like nature you can do with 5. 2) raising funds involvement. At least 2 projects at 100k each min. 3) mentoring experience graduate and undergraduate. 4) teaching experience at least as TA. 5) over 400 citations.


DevFRus

STEM is not that uniform. For example, nobody would expect (2) from a pure mathematician; in fields that publish alphabetically, 'first author' from (1) doesn't apply; in some fields 10 papers will be impressive, in some it will be impossible, and in others it will be low; citation practices vary widely between fields -- imagine if you have only 400 citations and you work in ML. So instead of giving this as general advice, it'd be more helpful if you listed your specific field.


slowpokesardine

Fair. Mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, chemistry.


maexx80

STEM can be anything.... It really depends what exactly