Careers in Life Sciences

1 Nov

Introduction

I helped a friend out this week by manning a school careers fair stand representing Blackwater Sciences. Somewhat counter to the stated mission, I slipped in some subliminal messaging that work is not everything.

My rolling slide deck included the 'three buckets' (it might have been baskets in the original!) philosophy of work / life balance. You have three buckets - your work, your hobbies and your home / family life. If you can keep any two of these buckets full, the chances are you will be happy and fulfilled.

I first heard this approach from Alan Horgan, who was the UK managing director of GH Besselaar Associates (Covance, Labcorp and eventually Fortrea as it is called now) about 30 years ago. It has stuck with me ever since.

Behind the Scenes

I was not expecting to actually have to present anything but wanted some visuals rolling behind me that would be colourful and perhaps eye catching enough to cause shy ‘high school’ students to stop by and chat.

Apple Keynote and Unsplash to the rescue!

I’ve always been conscious of the risk of death-by-powerpoint, but I also understand that we are often required to transmit information to a wide range of stakeholder groups and audiences.

Early in my career I was fortunate enough to attend a three-day (yes day, not hour) course on developing presentation skills.

One of the previous cohorts of students on this course, a colleague in Sales, had ‘graduated’ by producing a pitch deck with only pictures, no words.

The pictures are triggers for talking points and should lead to a less scripted and more relaxed talk, whilst delivering all the necessary information.

That’s pretty tough, and very impressive, it has stuck in my mind ever since.

I do my best to reduce the word count, sometimes I am successful, sometimes I am not.

I think it also depends on the purpose of the information transfer and the context. Are you standing up to deliver information in an interactive format, or really writing a fact-rich technical document, that is not really intended to be talked to, but is intended as a handout to be scrutinised and referenced later?

Tools

I’ve always liked the look of presentations in Apple’s Keynote, so I use that over Microsoft PowerPoint where possible. If I am collaborating with Windows users, that gets tricky, so I then have to failover to PowerPoint.

I also love writing presentations as ‘plain text’ and having the software take care of the styling for me.

My favourite tool for this approach is Deckset (Apple macOS and iOS only).

For photographic images (both free and paid), I almost exclusively use Unsplash.