FAQ

There are four reasons why STEM Career Services should be your TOP choice for career counseling if you earned your BS, MS or PhD in a STEM-related discipline.

1. We only focus on STEM graduates. We are experts in your disciplines and understand the STEM workforce from both the candidate’s perspective as well as the employer’s perspective.
2. Our career counselors also received MS degrees and/or PhDs in STEM fields. We understand the challenges of the academic environment, working in a laboratory, getting published, the lack of career support at institutions, etc. We empathize with your struggles and we know how to help you.
3. Our career counselors currently work in STEM careers in a hiring capacity. Therefore, we know what hiring managers across the industry are looking for in candidates, and we understand the hiring process for jobs. We can share this “inside” information with you so that you can be more informed than your competition when you apply for positions.
4. Our founder, Josh Henkin, PhD, is on the Board of Directors of the National Postdoctoral Association. Josh is deeply engaged in the lives of graduate students, postdocs and early career scientists. We understand the challenges specific to this workforce demographic and are the experts you want helping you find your next position.

There is no other career coaching service available that is more experienced or qualified to help STEM graduates at all levels of their careers than STEM Career Services.

The easy answer to this question is 100%.

We haven’t had a client yet that has not found significant value in our services, and nearly all of our services are in the domain of helping clients find jobs. We believe the more important question is “Are our clients finding jobs that are challenging, rewarding and in areas that they are passionate about?” That is the metric that we care most about, and we believe that our highly satisfied client reviews, strong word-of-mouth referrals and frequent invitations to speak at conferences, universities and institutions across the country prove that we are on the right track.

There is no magic recipe for finding a rewarding career that will happen after “X” number of hours of career counseling or after “X” number of months of effort. The job market is dynamic and every client has incredibly unique characteristics, preferences, needs and wants. This is why we do personalized one-on-one and small group career counseling instead of having you download a one-size-fits-all tool kit. We spend time getting to know you by reviewing your application, resume and career-aspiration information. Next, we help you identify the types of jobs that you will love and, lastly, help you get those jobs. On average, we probably spend about 10 hours working with each client. While some clients use us for a simple resume tune-up, others seek our guidance for everything from identifying their career calling to negotiating their signing bonus.

Our goal is to quickly and efficiently prepare you to be successful at finding a great job and help you gain the confidence to get that job by providing you with tools and insights that allow you to work independently from us. This streamlined mentoring approach is what gains us great referrals and has earned us a reputation as being the best in the business for STEM graduates.

Not only can the actionable and proven strategies, skills and techniques that we teach you immediately help you make the difficult transition from your current situation to your next job, but, more importantly, they can also help you throughout your professional career as you take on new positions and challenges.

No. We only want clients to work with us because of the results they achieve with our support. We provide tremendous value to our clients, which is why they keep coming back for follow-up sessions and continue to work with us to find their dream job.

We charge on an hourly basis for all client contact hours. We also charge for the time it takes our coaches to review your work during noncontact hours, when applicable (typically 30-60 minutes). We do this as a service to you in order to come prepared to every meeting and maximize the time we are working together.

We fully acknowledge that there is a “leap of faith” in choosing a career counselor and that you are choosing to invest a significant amount of your time and finances to jumpstart your career. Because of this, we waive the document review fee for the first session with all of our clients so that you get a chance to experience our service and see for yourself how valuable we are at assisting you in your career pursuits.

We invoice through PayPal and request that you pay the invoice in advance to reserve your time on our calendar.

No. The majority of STEM Career Services clients contact us from all over the USA, and we frequently get requests from overseas clients as well. The majority of our sessions are held on the phone or via video chat, but we see clients in person in the Washington DC metro region or when we travel for workshops or on corporate business. If an in-person meeting is your preference, please contact us and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.

It’s rare for a client to be dissatisfied with our work. When clients struggle to find positions or don’t find them fast enough, it often comes down to two things: lack of client motivation and/or lack of client time. Finding a great job that you will love can take time, and you need to be motivated to do this. For example, creating position-specific resumes takes much more time than using a generic resume to apply for all jobs. However, data clearly demonstrates that a position-specific resume is far superior to a generic resume in advancing to the interview stage. Once in a while, we find that clients underestimate the commitment required to find their dream job, or even their next job, and that can lead to drop-off.