Читать книгу A Guide to the Scientific Career - Группа авторов - Страница 137

A clinical oncologist/researcher is inspired to become an expert in designing study protocols after participating on a drug manufacturer's advisory board. Through that experience, she learned that the manufacturer's medical directors need insight into current treatment paradigms and patient characteristics. They need oncologists who understand the drug discovery, clinical study process, and how to anticipate potential problems that can arise with study protocols. They simply cannot readily find individuals who specialize in this. Our oncologist has experience in designing local clinical trials and collaborating with colleagues at her institution. She has collected a wealth of literature regarding clinical study design and in particular within oncology.

That same clinical oncologist is an active researcher who is interested in moving up a career ladder within her academic institution. She begins researching how promotion decisions are made, who decides, and what attributes are important to those decision makers. She uses her network and mentors to gain a better perspective on how she measures up and what attributes she has or can build to make her a standout candidate.

She creates her positionings separately based on her unique attributes that solve the problems already identified by her audiences.

A SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis is another exercise that can evaluate your positioning with respect to time and movement toward a goal. To conduct a SWOT analysis, simply label a sheet of paper with four quadrants representing each word of the acronym (Figure 15.3). Then list qualities in each quadrant as they relate to your positioning(s). Weaknesses can reflect how you need to build skills or credentials to support your positioning. Opportunities and threats can capture how you may want/need to evolve your brand in the future. For instance, threats can represent how a negative incident can affect your brand image. By performing a SWOT analysis, you can acknowledge threats while focusing on the big picture and the value of your brand.

Figure 15.3 The SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats).