Skill learning for market resilience
Hi fellow postdocs
TLDR: how are we finding bandwidth to learn new skills in case funding remains tight? Also I am angry
I am one of the many in a field with funding being stripped in the US. I love what I do and have taken pay cuts and worked long hours to do it. Now, when I am in a position to finally push for big projects and start a lab group, I instead am wondering if it’s more responsible to retrain and take my skills to a new field. I am a parent so I can’t risk being unemployed if the midterms aren’t favorable to science research funding.
The typical early career grant in my field is suspended so I am now working to broaden my skill set to apply for a grant offered to an adjacent field. (Paleoclimate work on geochemistry proxies to satellite data work on atmospheric climate dynamics) While a new shiny skill set is mentally rewarding and challenging and marketable, I still have my ongoing project and some potential projects within my original field. I am just exhausted and refuse to trust anything AI has to tell me about a field I am rapidly trying to catch up on.
Partly I am angry and making my way through the stages of grief. I am blessed that my work so far has been driven by passion, retraining on a topic I am less passionate about is draining. I am trying to remember these new coding and dynamic concepts are important to know and sometimes really interesting but I am tired of doing both jobs. My PI knows my pivot and is supportive as I try to bridge the fields.