The Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, California, has established the first US professional master's programme offering business and industry training specifically to postdoctoral fellows. The programme builds on the Professional Science Master's degree, an increasingly popular business-skill building option offered to graduate students.

Credit: T. ZASADZINSKI

The institute's president, Sheldon Schuster (pictured), says that the programme aims to respond to industry complaints that academic postdocs often don't understand the corporate culture. A pilot programme will begin this September with four or five students taking existing business courses at Keck. By January 2010, Schuster expects up to two dozen openings as the institution customizes the programme to meet postdoc-specific needs, such as developing industry projects that tackle more complicated scientific questions than graduate students address.

The institute was the first to offer a degree aimed at producing PhD students with business skills. Now there are more than 120 such programmes across the United States.

Many in industry are eager to couple the postdoc's scientific sophistication with business savvy. “For technical companies like us, there is a lot of value in educating people who have demonstrated strong scientific depth with some business skills,” says Jim Widergren, corporate vice-president of Asia Pacific and Latin American operations at Beckman Coulter, a diagnostic biotechnology company based in Fullerton, California.

Joseph Panetta, president and chief executive of BIOCOM, a biotech industry organization based in San Diego, California, says that BIOCOM created a two- to three-month programme — dubbed the Life Sciences Immersion Program — last year to offer industry skill-building and networking opportunities to postdocs. “Our idea is to give postdocs a bridge into the world of industry,” he says. The economic downturn put the programme on hold, but Panetta hopes to launch it within the next year.

Some postdocs are likely to scoff at yet more training, but those having difficulty securing an academic post may appreciate a new opportunity. “There is going to be a very targeted population of postdoctoral scholars for which Keck's focused industry programme will be a welcome option,” says Cathee Johnson Phillips, executive director of the National Postdoctoral Association in Washington DC. She says that there is a growing trend among postdoctoral students to acquire the skills necessary to compete for jobs outside of academia.

Schuster emphasizes the importance of exposing postdocs to all the career options available, especially given the paucity of academic posts compared to the large number of postdocs. “I would be shocked if more professional master programmes specific to postdocs don't pop up in the future,” he says.