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Networking event brings together CERN scientists and alumni

Physicists and engineers learn first-hand about career prospects outside academia

LHC & Alumni conference
Laure Esteveny, head of Alumni Relations at CERN, speaks to the participants (Image: Rachel Tessa Lavy/CERN)

The sixth ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb Career Networking Event took place on 12 November 2018, offering an insight into career opportunities outside academia. More than 170 young physicists and engineers from LHC and non-collider experiments gathered for an evening of networking with CERN alumni and peers. Various former members of the LHC collaborations came back to CERN and to their scientific roots to provide the audience with insights into their successful moves from CERN to areas outside academia, to roles such as energy expert consultant, data scientist, independent software engineer and site-reliability engineer.

For some of the speakers the road to success was relatively easy and for others it was challenging and bumpy. However, what all the speakers had in common was their desire to continue working in a distributed and multicultural environment, and to find a job that would be as fulfilling and enriching as their experience at CERN; they had all succeeded in this!

This year, participants were able to benefit from the wisdom of two external guests from the recruiting side of the process, who explained why CERN is an amazing pool of talent in so many fields of today’s economy.

During a panel discussion, all the speakers gave practical advice on how to prepare for a successful transition and, in particular, how to boost one’s CV so that it is not filtered out by parsing machines searching for specific keywords. Furthermore, CVs have to be read in 60 seconds, so it is better to speak, for example, about a “three-dimensional camera” than a “time projection chamber”.

You may be interested in the regular events under the ‘Moving out of Academia to…’ banner, organised by the CERN Office of Alumni Relations.


See more photos on CDS.