In June this year developmental biologist Ottoline Leyser stepped down as chief executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the country’s national research funding agency. In the final episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about career planning, Leyser tells Julie Gould how the opportunity to lead UKRI came about, and how, for her, good career planning starts with reflecting on who you are what your values are. Leyser also finds the notion of work-life balance problematic, arguing that you cannot easily segregate the two from each other.

“You’re not your job. You are who you are,” she says. “And you can build a really fulfilling career by following who you are, and keeping your eyes on the full range of opportunities available to you to be who you are. And it’s not going to be one thing.

“In research careers, people get locked into this idea that there’s really only one pathway, and that’s the only way you can make use of your research skills and your research interests. And it’s so untrue.”

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In the penultimate episode of this six-part podcast series about career planning in science, Julie Gould discusses some of the setbacks faced by junior researchers, including political upheaval, financial crises and a change in supervisor.

Shortly after embarking on a PhD at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, Katja Loos’ supervisor relocated to the University of Bayreuth, taking his team with him. But weeks later he died of an aggressive cancer.

Loos, who is now a polymer chemistry researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, describes how she worked through the various choices and challenges she faced as a result of her supervisor’s sudden death, and why she abandoned plans for an industry career.

Funding struggles in Argentina led to paleontologist Mariana Viglino relocating to Germany. But before moving she describes how a very prescribed career path denied her the opportunity to think about her long-term plans.

Tomasz Glowacki says abandoning a rigid career plan helped him to better navigate the various challenges he faced after completing a PhD in computer science at Poznan University of Technology, Poland, in 2013.

Finally, Julia Yates, an organizational psychologist and careers coach at City St George’s, University of London, reassures early career researchers facing a sudden disruption to their careers. It’s fine, she says, to put career planning on hold. Sometimes paying bills and putting food on the table has to take priority.

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In the fourth episode of a six-part podcast series about science career planning, Julie Gould investigates "planned happenstance," a theory which encourages workers to embrace chance opportunities during their working lives.

Holly Prescott, a careers guidance practitioner at the University of Birmingham, UK, suggests a slightly alternative approach, whereby a professional reflects on their experiences to decide what they would like more or less of in their current or future role.

Listing the things you want to keep, lose or add in a job description, she argues, enables researchers to have happier working lives.

In her view, the technique is preferable to devising a plan at the early career stage and then slavishly following it. This course of action, she says, does not account for new skills, technologies and life events that can open up fresh opportunities.

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