Nine books to help shape your science career in 2025
Researchers seeking to banish workaholic behaviours, boost their pay, have more influence at work or quit academia will find plenty of advice in these books, all published this year
Jasmin Graham Pantheon (2024)
Burnt out by a ”toxic, white, male-dominated publish-or-perish environment”, tired of being left to clean up rooms after a meeting and talked to as though she was lazy, Jasmin Graham quit academia in December 2019. Scrolling through Twitter (now X) one day in 2020 — during the pandemic and at the time of the Black Lives Matter protests — Graham found photographs of Carlee Jackson-Bohannon, like her, a Black woman and shark scientist. The pair connected and then two more Black women, who were also marine biologists, got in touch and a movement was born — Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS). This part family memoir, part manifesto charts Graham’s love of sharks — comparing their struggle to survive and thrive with the challenges faced by Black women in science. As an independent scientist without a PhD, Graham cannot apply for grants that are earmarked for projects led by people with a doctorate, and her first summer of going “rogue” with no academic affiliation, involved “hustling for funding and boat time”. Graham used some grant money to erect a prefabricated one-person laboratory, her science shed, in her backyard. In doing this and building her MISS network, Graham creates her own research study group and finds her place, realizing that she doesn’t miss the prestige, routine and rigour of the academic career track.
Hilke Schellmann Hachette Books (2024)
Nature’s 2024 survey of hiring managers in science suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) is yet to transform recruitment, although almost half of industry hirers report using the tools either to design interview questions or to screen and manage applications. Overall, 25% of respondents across academia, industry and other sectors worry about applicants using AI for writing their cover letters and CVs.
But as Schellmann’s book suggests, AI is set to revolutionize the workplace — but the potential for misuse is huge. Although most warnings about AI and work are about humans being replaced by robots, Schellmann, who is an investigative journalist, predicts that AI will become like an evil and unaccountable human-resources director: screening CVs; conducting interviews; and spying on employees. For example, if a student writes a negative review of a lecturer, AI could pick that up and use it against the teacher. AI is not immune to bias, and a biased algorithm that is used on a large-scale “making high-stakes decisions, including hiring, is one of the most important civil rights issues of our time”, Schellmann warns.
Isabel Berwick Pavilion (2024)
This book, by the host of the Financial Times’s ‘Working It’ podcast and weekly newsletter, looks at the human side of work and getting on with people. It’s divided into two sections, one for employees, which includes advice on dealing with toxic managers and the post-pandemic workplace, and a section for managers that covers, among other things, poor communication, micromanagement and bullying. Berwick advises employees who are seeking a pay rise to create a narrative for why they should get more money and back it up with data.
In April, at a launch event for her book at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Berwick said: “Treat any pay negotiation as an adult–adult scenario. Too often we get trapped in dynamics where we feel we’re the child and our boss is an adult and that infantilizes us. We get nervous.” She adds: “We have a perfect right to ask for more money. Decouple your sense of worth from what you’re paid. Bosses can make you feel bad for asking.” Berwick says pay-rise negotiations are often about more than money, and instead of getting a rise you might get useful training, an interesting secondment or a better job title.
Emma Williams Intellectual Perspective (2024)
Emma Williams, a medical physicist turned professional trainer and coach, aims her latest book at postdocs (which she defines as someone working on a fixed-term contract on a project that someone else got the money for) who want to leave academia but aren’t yet ready to take the plunge. The book is split into three parts: the first looks at your working life as it is now, including the sobering reminder that an average career swallows up 80,000 hours. Section two focuses on getting ready to make the leap into the unknown and thinking about your strengths and values — and how courageous you are.
Williams advises you to curate a network of people — some you might already know, some you might not. Ask them for advice, don’t beg or plead, respect their time and never directly ask for a job in your introductory e-mail. She also urges you to stop looking like a postdoc by rewriting your CV so that it focuses on your skills, rather than grants. When the time comes to tell your principal investigator (PI) you’re leaving academia, William urges tact, saying: “Be mindful you are choosing a career course your PI has not; try not to malign their career.” The final section looks at post-postdoc life. You’ve got the new job — so what now? Williams gives advice on how not to create a new comfort blanket after abandoning the “itchy scratchy” one that cocooned you in academia. Have monthly check-ins with your new boss, to ensure you’re on the right track. Look at others in your industry — where are they and how did they get there?
Brigid Schulte Henry Holt (2024)
It’s not you, it’s the system, is the message of this book. If you’re feeling burnt out you can try deep breathing and yoga, but that’s only tackling the symptoms and not the causes. Brigid Schulte, gender equity advocate and director of the Better Life Lab at New America, a think tank in Washington DC, investigates the reasons for toxic workplaces — lack of employee representation, profits over people, weak labour laws — and what can be done to fix them.
The book includes examples of good practice. For instance, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland, found — through an employee survey — that heavy workload was a key problem. Christian Rathke, a clinician who leads the organization’s Total Worker Health Program, tells Schulte how the organization then redesigned work: matching workers to workload and monitoring and discouraging after-hours work, including tracking late-night e-mails. The book concludes with an analysis of Iceland’s drive to reduce the country’s maximum full-time working week to 36 hours, and whether or not the policy is easier to implement for highly educated white-collar workers than for those in lower-paid, unskilled roles.
Malissa Clark Harvard Business Review (2024)
Although this book is critical of the same structural issues that Over Work identifies, it tackles the problem from an individual perspective. The book points out that showing enthusiasm and commitment isn’t a sign of workaholism. Neither is being immersed or absorbed in your work. Workaholics feel that they can’t rest, they experience anxiety and guilt when they’re not working and live with the fear of losing status, money or their job. Some languages even have a word for it. In Japan, the word is karoshi — meaning death from overwork. In China, some reports say that more than one million deaths each year are linked to it.
But workaholics are not just a product of the system, argues Malissa Clark, an industrial–organizational psychologist at the University of Georgia in Athens. They are also partly responsible. Her book includes exercises to identify whether you are a workaholic — and asks if you are enabling workaholism — for example, by congratulating colleagues for putting in long hours or dumping work on someone late in the day and expecting it to be done by the morning. Many workaholics deliver humble brags about their packed schedule, missing lunch or skipping a trip to the beach on their day off to concentrate on an extra project, she says.
The book offers advice on how you can change — for example, by recording your workaholic patterns and thinking about what you want in the future.
Tessa West Ebury Edge (2024)
Are you dissatisfied with your job, but don’t quite know why? Tessa West, a psychologist at New York University in New York City, will help you to identify why you’re unfulfilled and provides tips and exercises to help you work out what you want. She has identified five archetypes: the worker that used to love their job; the stretched-too-thin employee; the runner-up who has been passed over many times; the underappreciated star; and the employee experiencing a crisis of identity. This last one will resonate with dissatisfied academics.
West highlights the case of Susan, who had reached the academic pinnacle: a tenured professor. Her job changed starkly over the pandemic. Her colleagues were laid off, courses she taught were assigned to others and the disengagement she started to feel affected her confidence. At the same time, the thought of giving up on her hard-won career filled her with anxiety. Once Susan had realized that being a professor was no longer an important part of her identity she was free to move on and now works as a user-experience researcher, a role she loves.
Steve J. Martin Profile (2024)
According to Steve Martin, one of the most common attributes that employers are looking for in candidates is their ability to negotiate and influence others. In the case of scientists, this applies to hiring and line managers, peers, team members, tenure panels and funders. And being influential at work can also help you to land a pay rise. But if you’ve ever felt like your ideas aren’t listened to or that you’ve been overlooked, this book can help you to make your case well. In his book, Martin, who leads Influence at Work, a professional consultancy company in Harpenden, UK, describes influence as a skill that can be learnt and mastered. He says the process of influence is underpinned by research undertaken by psychologists, neuroscientists and economists.
The first section of the book includes a short test to help you work out what sort of influencer you are. Do you use evidence, emotions or economics to back up your case? The second section shows you how using all three of these levers, combined with an understanding of the context you’re operating in, is the way to get what you want. And the third section looks at how to put this influence into practice without manipulating people and staying true to your values.
Cal Newport Penguin Business/Portfolio (2024)
The computer scientist’s latest book is a rejection of the performative “busyness” that blights today’s e-mail-dominated workplace. Instead it urges its audience of knowledge workers (including scientists) to “do fewer things”, “work at a natural pace” and “obsess over quality”. Stressed researchers grappling with academia’s publish-or-perish culture, perhaps also preparing for tenure committees and struggling to meet grant deadlines, might baulk at some of the historic examples provided by Cal Newport, who is based at Georgetown University in Washington DC. These include the 30-year period between Isaac Newton’s first musings on gravity in 1655, and the eventual publication of his paradigm-shifting theories, interspersed by periods of reflection in the Lincolnshire countryside.
Meeting-free Mondays and five-year plans might be more achievable. One professor, who submitted a book manuscript that took her too long to complete, warns Newport that obsessing over quality can be paralysing. He urges her and the reader to allocate enough time — but not unlimited time — to produce something great. Masterpieces aren’t required. Progress is what matters, not perfection, he argues.
Nature 636, 509-511 (2024)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03995-x
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Anne Gulland
