Chief Change Officer - #311 From Research to Relevance—Helping PhDs Get Heard (and Hired) — Part One

Episode Date: April 20, 2025

Mark Bayer spent 20 years in the U.S. Congress shaping major policies and managing high-stakes communication for senior lawmakers. In Part One, he reflects on what those years taught him about messaging, persuasion, and why most PhDs—despite their brilliance—struggle to translate their value. From Capitol Hill to Harvard Medical School, Mark now helps scientists and researchers communicate like insiders.This episode is a masterclass in what PhDs get wrong—and what they already have right.Key Highlights of Our Interview:The First “R&D” Mix-up“I thought they were talking about research and development. But it was Republicans and Democrats.”The 8% Problem“Only 8% of PhDs stay in academia. But nearly all are trained as if that’s the only path.”Misunderstood Advantage“PhDs are analytical, resilient, focused—yet many don’t see those as selling points.”Beauty vs. Relevance“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Importance is in the eye of the stakeholders.”Your Message Has 10 Seconds“Lead with the punchline. Or your audience will drift.”Why Communication ≠ Dumping Data“Scientists want to show everything they know. But that’s not the job. The job is to answer the question.”_____________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Mark Bayer  --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Oshul is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Mark Bayer, former US Senate Chief of Staff, now a communications coach for scientists, researchers, and policy leaders. He spent two decades on Capitol Hill and now works with people at Harvard, MIT, and beyond to help them get their message across clearly, confidently, and without losing their voice.

For this interview, I was so excited. But I also got nervous. I'm talking to someone who's worked with politicians and policymakers at the highest level. Two decades on Capitol Hill, his experience goes way beyond mine. And now here I am on the other side of the table interviewing him. In this two-part series, we talk about the art of translating complexity, what most PhDs get wrong about persuasion, and why your audience probably tune out after the second sentence. Let's get started. Mark, good morning! Welcome to Chief Change Officer! I'm so excited to host you here.

Thanks very much, Vance. It's so wonderful to be here with you. Mark, I have to confess. I'm a little nervous about today's interview. I'm talking to someone who spent years working with US president, senators, and some of the biggest names in politics and policymaking. Oh, you're welcome. And the privilege is mine.

You've gone through so many things in your career and your life had so many different experiences. So I'm just really interested in having this dialogue with you. Mark, I introduced you earlier as someone with deep experience on Capitol Hill. But I'd love for you to tell us your story in your own words. What have you done in your career and life so far? What are you focused on now? And then we'll dive into today's topic, career transitions for PhD students and graduates. So great and maybe I'll start by talking

about the transition a little bit, since that's really going to be our focus. As you said, 20 years working in the United States Congress, I was a chief of staff in the Senate and also in the House of Representatives. And I had the privilege of being in the middle of a lot of big issues, Obamacare, health care reform. After the 9-11 terrorist attacks in the United States, I was focused on the Hill on aviation security and trying to close loopholes that had been exposed as a result of those attacks, working with my boss, who at the time was Congressman Ed Markey.

He then subsequently ran for Senate. And so that's when I moved over with him. I think the big kind of takeaway for people thinking about careers and career transitions and how it relates to my own transition is really thinking about the skills that you develop along the way and what you like to do and but also really what skills, so public speaking, being able to really distill complicated information into shorter, accessible, memorable pieces of information for various audiences. I worked a lot with the press. I worked a lot with trying to persuade other offices that the initiatives that we were

developing were ones that were worth support. And so you have to figure out how to persuade in authentic and honest ways, how to write under tight deadlines, and then really how to distill and present to someone at the New York Times who's got a deadline coming up in a couple hours. Those are really skills that have served me well,

both in my career in the US Congress and then what I'm doing now. Your background is in public administration. But now, your work focuses on helping PhD students, graduates, and scientists, especially those in academia, to transition into the private sector. What led you to that switch? Or to go a little deeper,

what personally motivated you to focus on this group in particular? Yeah, it's a great question. And so a little bit more about my time on Capitol Hill, we in our office always had PhD scientists who would spend a year taking a break from their academic journey and they would really learn what the legislative process was all about. And it was through a fellowship that was administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which some of your listeners are familiar with it, the AAAS fellowship program.

And so they would, we took this very seriously as far as finding well-qualified people for our office. And the thing is, when they would arrive, it would be like being dropped into a foreign land without any GPS. It was different language, different deadlines, different things and considerations to take into account they'd never thought about. And I did a lot of mentoring of PhDs as a result of that senior staff member. And we had really sharp, motivated people, but they were learning all of these different things

at the same time. The subject matter they were working on was different from their expertise in almost every case. The language, I heard, it was a funny story. I was talking to someone and she was, she was saying she came from academia and one of the first days in the office, she heard someone in the office, one of the staffers say,

oh, we need to really focus on R and D. And she thought to herself, oh, this is great. I'm already understanding. They're talking about research and development. But then she realized long after that, not long after, that they were talking about Rs and Ds, meaning Republicans and Democrats. And so she got a quick preview of the different lingo that is used on the Hill, and it just explains the learning curve that anyone would have being dropped into a new place.

What happened with me is that I love doing the mentoring. I was very familiar with AAAS. And then after Donald Trump got elected in 2016, and I had left the Hill at that point, I became concerned that policymaking in the United States was not being driven by data, science, and evidence, and really the best facts available. Because that's how we did policy. That was always our beginning, like what makes sense based on the evidence, based on the science.

And so I started digging into this question of helping scientists get more involved in the policymaking process because at that point, 2016, 2017, they were really feeling marginalized. We didn't even have a head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the United States. Advisory boards were being disbanded. Scientists were feeling pushed to the side. And they started to realize they didn't have the skills, the knowledge to really survive in that environment.

And it was around, and I was thinking, I want these people to be involved in the policy making environment. I don't want me decisions being made by strict ideology, of course, that political interests do have a place in this. But I didn't I wanted science to have a really big seat at the table. And that's when I started really working with LAS. I did a workshop for all of their incoming fellows. I did a talk at a big conference, the annual conference for AAAS, on how to actually respond and debunk misinformation. That became a big hit.

There was an article in Science Magazine written about the interactive discussion that I did on that. People were hungry, people meaning scientists, were really hungry to learn about how they could get involved, influence, make an impact. It was March for Science. All of these things were happening in 2017, 2018. And that's when I really started to focus on helping scientists get more involved and

embedded and comfortable making their case in a policymaking world. So you were trained in public immigration, Harvard pre-2016, and then the political climate shifted. With that, you started to notice a gap, or maybe even risk, in how policy outcomes were being shaped. Less data, less science, and less diverse input. And that led you to focus on empowering scientists and PhDs to bring their voices and expertise into spaces outside of politics, so as to stay relevant and still make a meaningful impact on the society. Would you say that's a fair way to sum up your motivation? Absolutely, Vince. And really, COVID is the historic use case of the importance of scientists being able

to operate, communicate with the public. Thanks, Anthony. Move them. Sorry. Sorry about that. If COVID was really that historic use case where we saw scientists, Anthony Fauci all the way down, Anthony Fauci does an excellent job. He also had been in D.C. for over 40 years, so he was very used to

that kind of shift in ecosystem where he has to really talk to the public and how do they craft messages. When COVID happened in the U.S., we're talking about spring of 2020, it started happening everywhere, I had already been focused on helping scientists translate and communicate going back to 2018. So it was just this historic example of the importance of scientists being able to translate their work in ways that preserve accuracy, that are true to the facts, and also resonate, are relatable to, accessible to, memorable by the general public. And that was my real focus starting back in 2018. And then by 2020, I think scientists started to realize that if they didn't have this skillset,

that they were really in jeopardy of becoming much less relevant in society. When you say scientists, are you mainly working with people in medicine, engineering, or other STEM fields? Or is there a particular type of PhD holder you tend to focus on? Sure. For the last two years, I've actually done the keynote for Harvard Medical School's orientation.

So I also do talk to MDs, and they're the same challenges in many cases. So it could be a researcher at the University of Chicago, which I've worked with for a long time, that decides they wanna learn these skills because they're thinking after earning a PhD, say in biology or neuroscience, that they're not going to stay in academia, that they're actually going to look for a job.

Could be at a startup, could be at a place like Pfizer, it could be for a biotech company. It's like, I want to go to Amgen, I want to get involved in public policy. In the U.S., only about 8% PhDs across the board are actually staying in academia for their career. However, almost all of them are trained as if they're going to be tenure track professors. So they don't have this other dimension, generally speaking, to their skill set.

And I led off with gathering these types of skills. Whether you do stay in academia or you decide you want to do something different, the skills that we're talking about are really essential skills. Let me clarify. Only 8% of PhDs stay in academia. Are we talking across the board? Like in social science, medical science, engineering, and everything? And that means the other 92% are moving into industry or other fields.

Then I become curious. Has it always been this way? Or is that 8% a more recent trend? Think about it. If we are training 100 PhDs and only 8 of them stay in academia, that suggests a pretty big imbalance between how many people would train at that level and how few opportunities actually exist in higher education. and how few opportunities actually exist in higher education. That feels like a serious distortion in the academic versus private sector job market.

It's really interesting. Over the years, this dynamic, I think, has been changing. One question is why is that? Why only 8, 10, 12 percenters say stay in academia? It can be a variety of reasons. First of all, actually the number of tenure-track positions has been shrinking. So there aren't really that many jobs. The other is the lifestyle.

People are drawn to want to discover and create and do new things and that's really what we need. I think part of it is that sometimes they find I have to move around a lot, get to look at these different positions. Or the salaries as you're coming up through to try to get to that tenure track role can be really small. And it's very challenging to be able to operate

in these different places with such a small salary, then you say, I wanna have a family. It becomes even more difficult. And then people do realize that this just isn't the type of maybe work I wanna do. I wanna do something that is maybe more tied to maybe instead of basic research, which of course is fundamental really,

we're trying to figure out fundamental questions. It's not basic, like easy. It's instead of basic research, which of course is fundamental really, we're trying to figure out fundamental questions. It's not basic like easy, it's so critical. They say, I wanna do something where I'm applying the research in ways that are different. So there are a variety of reasons why people don't stay in academia, I think the whole academic model in the US has been going through a lot of change as well. Then people sometimes they get to the end of their program.

I had a student in one of my, in my online course, who decided she was really sharp. She had come over from China. She had gone to Johns Hopkins. She had excelled. She had then gone to University of Chicago. She'd worked in the lab there, really a superstar. And she decided she wanted to go work for

a life sciences company in the Chicago area. And her challenge really was how to translate the skills that she had developed in the lab in a way that was relevant and that resonated with, say, the managing partner that she was talking to during the interview. And so that can be a challenge too, because people think, what am I trained to do? And the answer is you are trained to do so much by just your analytical framework, your thought process, how you approach problems

and challenges that are really difficult. And I think sometimes PhDs lose track, lose sight of that for a little bit. They think it's the subject matter people care about. Why is this life sciences firm gonna care about machine learning for early detection of skin cancer? And the answer might be they don't really care about that very much. But just think about how you approach solving that problem and how you deal with different setbacks and creating hypotheses and then really testing them.

There was a recent article in Ink Magazine, I think it was basically Adam Grant was saying, scientists like you have this analytical framework you've been trained in how to think and that is so valuable regardless of what career you decide to take on. That's true. PhDs develop some incredibly valuable time-tested skills. One that comes to mind right away is resilience. Just think about it. To stay focused on a single topic for years, to dive deep and keep going despite setbacks.

That kind of persistence isn't something you're born with. It's built and it's powerful. That said, I imagine if you are helping people with PhDs make a transition into new areas, especially outside of academia, that means there are some gaps, things they haven't been taught or haven't practiced in a professional setting. So let's start with that. What are some of the common gaps or challenges you see PhDs facing when they try to transition out of academia? Yeah, for sure. I want to just underline something you said there, Vince, because I think a lot of people forget,

like you were talking about resilience. If you think about knowledge, skills, and attributes, the knowledge might be this skin cancer, you can drill down in the machine learning. But the attributes like resilience, this person I gave the example of who came from China that went to Hopkins and New Chicago, like the ability to handle ambiguity, all these different things that are part of your makeup.

I try to try to also have PhDs think about that too, because as you suggest, you're saying those are really important in the working world as well. I think some of the gaps that people have are ones that you would probably expect because the writing, for example, that you're doing in a scientific environment, you're writing if you wanna try to get published in a journal, for example,

it can be very technical, very jargon heavy. I'm sure your listeners are familiar with the perils of using jargon. I also will say that even the structure and the sequence that you're taught to write, you lead with your methodology, how you got it done. When you're in a general environment, the board member, the executive,

they don't really care so much about how you got something done. They just want you to answer a specific question. Should we license this technology from another company? Had another student in class who was an organic chemist at a big company and he was just going so deep into the science when he was in the boardroom. This was a story that he told me.

And really that question, should we license this other chemical process? Until finally he realized that wasn't the way they wanted this question approached. And he gave a very crisp answer to that. And ultimately, he gave the answer that they wanted. But I think that when you're in a technical environment and you're asked a specific question,

scientists often want to dump all that they know about the topic to answer the question. But I sometimes say it's not what you know, it's what they need to know. You have to do that distillation and that filtering, and then you have to focus on answering a specific question. It's not just demonstrating all you know about a topic. So that's a blind spot. I think the sequencing when writing,

when writing, this tendency to want to lead with a lot of background. Because that's what you did when you were writing for your academic audience. But you need to lead with the punchline. You really need to lead with the result or the real-world relevance, the impact, the answer to the question first. It can seem backwards, but the challenge is your listener,

your reader is not going to stick around for more than about 10 seconds. Then their attention is going to drift if you don't really address what they care about most. So another sort of blind spot is thinking about in the writing, in the presentation, really leading with what your audience, what your stakeholder, what your exec wants to know first. And then you can always backfill later if they have a couple of questions.

How did you get that? Or what else did you look at? That's fine. But if you lead with that, it's not relevant. And this window of attentional opportunity is going to slam shut. And there's going to be a lot of frustration all around, but you can learn that. Right. And that's one of the things, one of the things I teach often, just one

other thing on the speaking side. I find scientists can be really excited about the work they do and the discoveries that they're going to, that they're focused on making, that can make such a huge difference. The challenge can become in the presentation part where that excitement just doesn't come through. They tend to just want to present in a very monotone matter of fact way, not apply any real artistry, I would say, to their delivery. And if you don't, you have to really give energy to get engagement. Well, that you're enthusiastic and you're upbeat, you're

going to get your audience excited about it as well. And so try being emotionless, you know, is something that their scientists often are taught and presenting their results, but that's not something that works when you're beyond academia. You've talked a lot about communication, especially writing and speaking. And one line you said before really stuck with me, which is, And one line you said before really stuck with me, which is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but importance is in the eye of the stakeholder. That really nails it.

Because your stakeholder, whether it's your boss, your CEO, your colleagues, they don't want the full backstory. They don't need to hear how you selected a sample of a hundred. They just want to know what does the result mean. Can we use it? How does this help us make a decision? And I guess that's something you've learned firsthand during your time as chief of staff on Capitol Hill. You had to deal with journalists, policymakers, people who just wanted the information, the facts, fast, not the full breakdown, just the takeaway they could spawn.

So now you're bringing that hard-won skill to help people with PhDs communicate in a way that actually lands in a business setting. Yeah, so true. And I've learned some of the science behind this. Of course, I'm in no way a scientist. However, things like our brains are really wired to tune into new things and opportunities to learn new information, things like our brains are really wired to tune into new things and opportunities to learn new information, things that are counterintuitive, things that just are stimulating because we think we might be able to put them to use in some way. And I really think that goes back way back into our history when learning to do something could actually mean the difference between life and death potentially, or out there on the savanna in our tribe, or trying to put

things together, just the ability to learn something new. So we, in many ways, I believe, are still drawn to finding that information or paying attention to things. So when you lead with something that's surprising, did you know or imagine? These are what I call wake words. And it's really, if you're on the receiving end of something like that kind of phraseology, that phrasing, it's hard not to pay attention because you do want to know what is it that they're going to say. When I start out my keynotes, sometimes I'll say, you're going to the first words I'll say, I don't come out and introduce myself as the person who's someone else has done that. I don't want to lead with background. Oh, it's so great to be here again with you. People don't care. They weren't there the first time.

But even if they were, they're really not that interested. They want to know how can this person help me do something specific, find a job that I love, or build relationships professionally that aren't, don't make me feel dreadful and transactional and icky. And so I sometimes will start out by something that's totally counterintuitive, because I'm also playing in to this notion that people will tune in to things that they're not used to hearing together.

So I'll say immediately, you are going to forget 90% of what I'm about to tell you in the next 48 hours. And that's not because you're not, it's not because you won't be paying attention. It's just because that's the way our brains are wired. So you have, I have about 10% of mind share that is gonna be available to me for you to remember as you move forward well beyond this course. So I need to think strategically,

and this really applies to scientists and any, or really people in any kind of meaningful, high stakes conversation is what do I want my listener to walk away with and remember? And it's gonna be something very short. So that's something you learn. You reference journalists that you've referenced. You learn from talking to press is that when you have a line, this is something that my

old boss used to talk about. When you have a memorable line like that, that is something that reporters love because first of all, they don't have a lot of space in their article or airtime on TV. And so if you can really present something memorable and compact for them, that is a gift and you start to do that more and more. And then you start getting incoming requests. People really are, press is interested in hearing from you because they know that you're always good or a quote like that. And that requires some creativity, requires thinking along the lines of rhetorical devices

and all these things that I teach in my courses and workshops. You've pointed out some of the under-trained skills, like speaking and writing, that many PhDs struggle with when they enter the private sector. PhDs struggle with when they enter the private sector. How exactly do you help them bridge those gaps? Do you have a specific approach or method you use? Can you walk us through what that looks like? Sure, glad to. And I have different ways of explaining and different elements. But

one thing that I do is, and this is difficult for people to do regardless of their background, which is really distilling complexity and complicated things. You have so many details that you know, and you have to figure out how do I convey the thing that is going to be most important to the person receiving the information. That's it for today. We've covered what PhDs often miss when it comes to persuasion, and why being brilliant isn't enough if your message doesn't land. But next, we get into the how.

Mark's 11 keys to translating complexity, his take on AI, and a real skill that will make your voice unforgettable. Don't miss part two. Thank you so much for joining us today. your voice unforgettable. Don't miss part two. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.