u/Mindless-Return-5558

I was recently laid off. While applying to jobs I have some bandwidth for other activities that will hopefully make me more employable for Sr. Scientist R&D roles. My options:

1. Write up a paper from my recent industry job on the biological characterization of one of our preclinical drugs. I would be 1st author. All the data has been generated and it is just a matter of putting it altogether. It is unlikely at this point that anyone else would write it. The target journal would likely be a low to mid tier to expedite acceptance, i.e. not Nature/Cell/Science.

2. Try and teach myself coding, AI, bioinformatics, etc and add new skills to my CV.

For someone on the job hunt (PhD ~5y experience), what is the best use of my time?