There is a common misconception that soft skills like communication, teamwork and leadership are not much needed if anyone wants to create their career in “R&D”, that is, research and development.
This leads to many unwanted obstacles in the progression. The career path of this specific field is quite different from other professions in the market.
And from personal opinion, soft skills play a huge part in overcoming obstacles.
First of all let’s see what the career path and prospects in research and development are like.
Prospect of research and development :
Those aspirants who want to make a change in the world by their innovation and do something meaningful in their life, research and development are for them. But there are some conditions.
The work in the field might seem quite monotonous to some. One needs to work in laboratories in uncomfortable coats in a single project for months just to get some data on the research.
Making groundbreaking inventions might seem daunting, but the feeling of accomplishments afterwards do not feel less than heaven.
In the perspective of a third world country like Bangladesh, those who want to get settled abroad, this career path might be the golden ticket for them.
Universities of the west seek a large amount of researchers from various fields every year. But there is a specific path to take to grasp those opportunities.
Progression towards R&D
Many aspirants fail to take research as their future path as they are unaware of the prerequisites to enter this field.
As a result when they start trying, they lose many chances as the time has already gone long ago.
A step by step guide which has to be followed for this career path is given below:
Academic resume : To get into a foreign university, one first needs to catch the attention of one of the professors in that university who is within your field.
In order to do that, one must have a great academic result. Alongside this, the extracurriculars must be set round academic subjects, like, organising conferences, submitting research papers for journals and such competitions.
Irrelevant curriculum should be avoided as that will not add to the resume.
Thesis : Most of the universities in Bangladesh have an option for doing either a thesis or a project or an internship in the final year.
Those students who are interested in research and development have to take the thesis option as this thesis will be showcased while applying for further higher education.
Networking : One thing is really important in getting into a good university for research. They highly value a reference from their alumni.
So networking needs to be done with other professionals so that reference can be received. This reference does half of the job to the progression.
Teamwork : Often, students will need to work under professors for thesis and dissertation. They might be grouped with other students as well. In this case good team work is highly required for the best performance.
Leadership : One might need to lead certain projects for the research they are doing. So they should have a good sense of leadership for the progress of the project.
Failure might lead to bad reputations and the total disruption of the project.
Communication : In this field, a researcher needs fundings for their work. For this they have good communications with the university boards, various organisations and companies which provide fundings for research.
Thus the progression in this field is quite straight forward. One needs to do hard work and maintain some soft skills and that’ll be enough to secure a stable job at research and development.
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Writer
Rifah Zakiah
Intern, Content Writing Department
YSSE