Three Essentials to Advance Your Life Science Career - And Advice for Employers Too

Robin Toft is the Chairman and Founder of The Toft Group, an executive search firm and author of the book: We Can: The Executive Woman's Guide to Career Advancement.

In this episode she shares three things you must have to advance your career Confidence, Competence and Connections) and how to develop/deploy them. 

This episode is packed with good advice. Here are some highlights.

You are the CEO of you. You should spend 75% of your time creating excellent value for your company. The other 25% should be spent planning how you can add more. Every CEO is thinking ahead and you should to. Companies value people who can think ahead strategically.

Your resume should be nothing but a series of value creation events. For every job you had, why did you take it and what value did you create for your employer?

Relationships make the world go round. Talk to people ahead of you in their careers to find out what it takes to get where they are. And don't forget to develop the people behind you! You can't be promoted unless there is someone who can step into your role. Making yourself irreplaceable in your current job means you will never be moved out of that job.

If you are an employer, realize we are in a talent crisis caused by over-investment in our industry. There just aren't enough people to do all the jobs. This means you must:

• Be flexible about where and when people work
• Trust your employees
• Embrace diversity

Robin will be moderating a panel at the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference in San Francisco on March 4 at 7am. This episode is kindly sponsored by Cambridge Healthtech, organizers of the conference.