Pathfinder Career Narratives 29: Senior Digital Business Analyst

Pathfinder Career Narratives is an ongoing series tracking the career choices and experiences of doctoral graduates. You can see all of the posts in the series here. You can find all the Pathfinder resources and opportunities here. Today’s blog is written by Dr Samantha Baggott, Senior Digital Business Analyst at eSafety Commissioner and cofounder of Sequitur Consulting. You can find Dr Baggott’s LinkedIn profile here and Sequitur Consulting’s Beyond Academia series here.

Name: Dr Samantha Baggott 

Doctorate subject area and year of completion: PhD in Cognitive Science, 2012 

Role and Employer: Senior Digital Business Analyst, eSafety Commissioner 

Approximate Salary bracket of this type of role: Very variable, depending on experience and seniority – business analyst salaries in Australia range from anywhere between AU$80-180k pa (or AU$450-$1200 per day for daily rate contracting) 

I was a little uncertain about what my post-PhD career would look like for pretty much all of my PhD. I didn’t really have an explicit career plan then, nor have I had one since, but I have always tried to be ready to seize interesting opportunities as and when they appear. As a result, my career includes periods of full-time work, part-time work, a job-share, and some project-based, casual and contracting work. I’ve worked at various organisations, one for as little as a few months and one for nearly 15 years (spanning many different roles). I’ve interviewed for a role at something like 36 weeks’ pregnant – and I got the job! I’ve changed roles, I’ve changed sectors, I’ve changed fields. And, with Dr Jonathan McGuire, I’ve co-founded a small business dedicated to helping PhDs understand how the skills they develop in a PhD are transferable to non-academic contexts, something I became really passionate about as soon as I’d seen the value of my own PhD beyond academia.  

My PhD was definitely one of the most rewarding and one of the most challenging experiences of my life. But, as a PhD student, I got to see how the research process worked and I wasn’t all that keen: I saw researchers around me applying for grants, I saw the highs if the grant was successful, and the very, very deep lows if it wasn’t. I did not like the idea of living grant to grant one little bit. I couldn’t imagine living life like that. I knew I wanted something more stable. While I didn’t love the process, I really did love research and wanted to stay connected to it – I also wanted to try to help! So, the first jobs in my career story were at the University where I completed my PhD, working in research-adjacent roles.  

My first post-PhD role was in research administration, which included helping researchers to develop their grant proposals. Some academic colleagues asked at the time why I’d done a PhD if I wasn’t going to ‘use it’. But I think I did use it: in that role, and in my roles since. In that role, I certainly used my skills around how to craft an argument and tell a logical story to help researchers tell their story in these grant proposals, and I do think people understood a bit more about how my PhD skills carried over once they’d seen what I was doing in that role. I also recently had the opportunity to ask my supervisor about his take on non-academic post-PhD roles, and he was supportive – we even talked about how PhD supervisors are, for those PhDs seeking to stay in academia, kind of training their competition! 

After some time in that research administration role, I moved first into an outreach and communications role, helping researchers talk about their research findings to the general public, and then on to a research evaluation role, supporting the process of collating and coding University research outputs. In this evaluation role, I quickly discovered that this process was extremely manual, so I got involved in some conversations about potential IT options to make the process less onerous. Before I knew it, I was working on drafting a business case to request funding for custom software development and, when funding was awarded, an IT project kicked off and I moved to that project as a process analyst. That was the beginning of a series of technical projects that I worked on as a process or business analyst, first in IT then in data. I was keen to do more in the data field, so I then moved to a role as Assistant Director then Director of a Data and Analytics team, before moving into a data strategy role. 

I still love data, the chance to do some strategic work and some hands-on problem-solving, and the opportunity to craft a good narrative. I’ve found that project-based work is a really good fit for me at the moment, and my current role is a pretty ideal combination of all of these things – working on digital, data, technology, transformation and innovation projects, as needed by my organisation.  

I think all of these non-academic roles have benefitted from the skills I developed in my PhD. Things like the ability to look at things with a really broad, strategic mindset as well as being able to zoom into detail when it’s needed, being able to make sense of piles and piles of information (and to do so fairly quickly), and, as was the case with my PhD, the ability to ask the next right question when I don’t really know where a particular project is going to lead. 

Of course, there are differences too. For instance, there’s a bit more hierarchy and structure in non-academic roles – you’ll almost certainly have a manager, your manager will almost certainly have a manager, and there will probably be some rules of engagement across the hierarchy. You’ll also probably have some agreed performance expectations and/or performance measures, and you’ll likely have to meet some quick turnaround times for particular pieces of work (and you won’t necessarily have time to give all the caveats and/or all the references).  

Reflecting on the big switch out of academia, I think my major fear was that I didn’t have anything to offer. I felt like something of an “expert” in an incredibly niche topic that wasn’t really useful to anyone. That was a big part of the reason why I kept going back to my uni, and other unis, to talk about how we need to think bigger about PhD skills, and how those skills can be useful in the world outside. I genuinely believe that a PhD prepares you for your career (and life!) in a bunch of ways that you might not realise or expect – something I certainly experienced first-hand.  

With the benefit of hindsight and a bunch of different experiences, this has only become clearer and clearer to me. And it was a key motivator for me in co-founding our small business – we want to get this message out there more broadly! Speaking of, co-founding that business was an unexpected positive of my switch to a non-academic career – these opportunities to share my little career story, to chat with other PhDs thinking about making the switch, and to hear incredible stories from people who have successfully switched, all of which, hopefully, might get more people thinking about a non-academic career as an equally credible post-PhD career pathway. Because it surely is!