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Forum: Transition into industry and a bit confused about what I should target like role

Hello everyone,

I’m reaching out for some honest advice and guidance about my career direction.

I am currently in the final year of my PhD in Animal Breeding and Genetics, with a strong background in genomic analysis (GWAS, R-based simulations, Python data processing). Over the past few years, I’ve realized that I want to transition fully into bioinformatics, biostatistics, and computational biology.

I’ve invested heavily in building this skill set:

  • Completed the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification
  • Taken several bioinformatics pipeline development courses (Nextflow, NGS workflows, human genome databases)
  • Worked on multiple projects involving human genomic datasets to broaden my expertise beyond animal genetics

Despite this, I’ve struggled to get interviews or offers in bioinformatics or biostatistics roles. I often feel that my animal genetics background makes recruiters overlook me for medical genomics or human‑focused computational positions.

I’m also based in Japan, and language barriers add an extra challenge, so I’m exploring opportunities on the international level as well.

At this point, I’m trying to understand whether I’m approaching things the right way.
My goal is simple: to build a stable career in bioinformatics or biostatistics, outside academia, and stop moving from one short-term research contract to another.

I would truly appreciate any advice on:

  • How to position my profile better
  • Whether my background is a disadvantage or simply needs reframing
  • What steps I should take next to increase my chances of acceptance in industry roles

Thank you for reading, and I’m grateful for any guidance you can share.

discussion
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updated by nelnour • nelnour • written by dossoukponganfleming • dossoukponganfleming

1 answer

Can you get your PhD advisor to help you network internationally? You're already in a better position than a lot of candidates since you'll be applying as a PhD holder with several analyses under your belt, possibly also publications? It could be a case of the job market not being great right now, maybe your CV is not showcasing your skills well too. I know that there are forums and certain services dedicated to professional CV writing, so that could be something that helps here.

Another solution would be to connect with recruiters or people who have made similar transitions in the industry (and country) you're interested in, e.g. biopharma, to get an idea of how hiring works there. I don't know if recruiters are all required to be domain experts, but in the chance that they rely on CV term matching, then it could be a matter of emphasizing transferable skills more than the specific animal(s) background.

It might also help if you narrowed down your goal just a bit. Bioinformatics' work in industry is really broad. You have:

  • pipeline technicians and Ops responsible for the infrastructure and maintenance of pipelines, e.g. integration, monitoring, and deployment of pipelines, and production investigations.
  • software or web developers focused on building bioinformatics/comp. bio tools/pipelines to be either publicly or internally deployed.
  • data engineers responsible for curating and creating databases, modeling the data into meaningful/usable data structures and data systems, possibly also defining APIs for other people/services to interface with the database
  • bioinformatics analysts responsible for data cleaning, analysis, entry, tool/pipeline application, and reporting
  • bioinformatics scientists responsible for analysts' work + tool innovation
  • bioinformatics engineer responsible for bioinformatics scientists' work + software engineering
  • bioinformatics managers/leads responsible for planning, organizing and/or leading teams for research and development of tools, analyses, or pipelines.

And more since some of these roles are not super distinct or standardized across different industries, companies, and/or countries. Regardless of the title, however, the responsibilities and competencies have different foci. For example, unless otherwise explicitly required, bioinformatics Ops are not expected to engineer and administer a database.

It sounds like you have experience geared towards infrastructure + analyst roles. Is that where you want to go?

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written by nelnour • nelnour

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