Career prospects

Careers in the public sector are numerous and varied. Along with central government departments there are also governmental bodies and institutions that are publicly-funded but cover more specialist areas of interest.

Public sector roles suitable for our life sciences graduates include:

• Biomedical Scientist for Public Health England - This can involve working in specialist labs focusing on areas ranging from water quality, environmental research, or rare pathogens. After several years in the lab and completion of a Masters degree graduates often move up to senior levels, with greater responsibility and oversight of labs and research. Biomedical and Biochemistry graduates also make excellent candidates for Research Scientist roles at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
• Science Communication at Royal Botanical Gardens Kew - Science communication is a great field for who want to combine their passion for sciences with public awareness campaigns and outreach. In roles like these you work to inform stakeholders and the public on project and research outcomes through channels such as social media, website content, and printed publications.
• Marine Advisor with Natural England – The British Isles are home to dozens of complex and rich marine ecosystems that needs to be protected and conserved for future generations. Working for a body such as Natural England will involve projects on conservation and/or recovery of marine environments, often working in partnership with local industries. Such work is varied, involving regular travel to sites to review and research project activities, outcomes and impacts. Similar roles can also be found in the Marine Management Organisation.

For some career paths progression may need you to carry out further education at postgraduate level, such as a Masters degree or a PhD. Postgraduate degrees can be an essential requirement for more senior and specialist roles as they require more specific demonstrable expertise in your field of interest. Senior roles can include:

• Portfolio management in a research council - Senior Portfolio Managers support innovation in fields such as life sciences research by allocating budgets for research and development. This can include overview of funding rounds, budget management of on-going projects, and assessing impact to ensure value for public money. It requires significant in-depth understanding of the research process, and the potential impacts of investment in areas of future development.
• Senior Specialist – These roles and similar ones can be found in bodies such as Natural England and Defra. As a Senior Specialist your role will involve providing expert advice on your area of specialisation, such as fisheries or freshwater. You may not need a postgraduate degree, but you will need to demonstrate extensive experience of working in the particular field you’re applying for.
• Programme or project manager – These roles can differ greatly between departments in terms of responsibility and pay. You may find you are dealing with a smaller or short-term project, or managing a large team of policy makers to ensure deadlines are reached. You can find roles like this with departments such as Defra, the Medical Research Council, the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), or the Food Standards Agency.

Civil Service Fast Stream

The Fast Stream is the UK Civil Service graduate development scheme. There are seventeen different streams available to graduates at varying levels, for example the Digital stream only requires an undergraduate degree, while the Science and Engineering stream requires a high undergraduate qualification as well as a postgraduate degree in one of the sciences.

Successful candidates will start on an annual salary around £31,000 a year. On completing your chosen scheme you’ll be eligible for roles with starting salaries of £45,000 to £55,000 a year. 

There are a host of private sector organisations that welcome employees who have a life sciences degree. While pharmaceutical companies may seem like the obvious choice, employment can also be found with publishers, aquariums, water companies, and food provision organisations. Roles include:

• Clinical Trial Assistant – Medical research is dependent on clinical trials to test the effectiveness and safety of a new drug or treatment. These roles will involve working with staff and trial participants to arrange appointments, maintain databases, and ensure that documents relating to trials are maintained accurately and stored securely.
• Editor – Large publishing companies have divisions or teams that focus on specific genres. This can include non-fiction science books, such as textbooks for students, or collections of academic papers. This type of specialised editing needs someone with a scientific background who can understand the research and easily identify errors. You may find some publishers look for life sciences graduates, while others may require a specific degree such as biomedical science.
• Marine Ecologist – Private and public organisations often turn to consultancy companies to carry out specific projects. As a marine ecologist in a consultancy organisation you could work on projects relating to the impact of offshore windfarms on local marine life, or report on the effect a new housing estate will have on nearby marine and freshwater ecosystems. These roles can also involve international travel to support teams in other countries.

The private sector also contains many senior roles that are suitable for candidates with a Masters or research degree. In some cases, a postgraduate degree will be an essential requirement for the role. These jobs can include:

• Senior Medical Writer – In this role you’ll work on scientific content on a range of medical issues, such as breakthroughs in cancer treatments or the development of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria. You’ll need to be able to work independently and oversee the work of staff in your team.
• Insights and Strategy – Large companies need to think ahead to stay competitive. This role can involve horizon-scanning to identify potential future issues in life sciences fields and to begin scoping responses and solutions. A postgraduate degree is essential as you will need an in-depth understanding of your field.
• Associate Scientist – Roles such as this are based in laboratories within private research companies. Here, you will oversee a team working on specific areas such as cancer biology or antibiotic development. You’ll design and oversee research processes, manage the data collected, and write up results and present them to colleagues and academics. These roles often require a PhD due to the advanced research you need to carry out.

The Third sector is a term used for organisations and bodies that fall outside the scope of public sector and private sector, such as NGOs, charities, and community initiatives.

The broad scope of the Third sector means that there are many interesting and varied roles available to those who have completed a life sciences degree. You may find that you can apply your knowledge of marine ecosystems to fundraising campaigns for environmental charities, or that your experiences with biomedical science make you ideally placed to manage projects for charities researching medical issues.

Some examples of roles you can find in the Third Sector are:

• Events or Outreach Co-ordinator – Organisations such as the Royal Society of Biology or the Biochemical Society will hold a series of events throughout the year to promote their activities and encourage networking among their members. This could involve prestigious annual lectures or conferences, a collection of workshops around a specific theme, or talks for the public to raise awareness of issues. Co-ordinators will help build a calendar of events, identify and invite speakers, and attend on the day to ensure everything runs smoothly.
• Communications Officer – Many charities, such as those focused on medical and conservation issues, will have a communications team whose job is to raise their profile through the media. As a life sciences graduate you will have the knowledge to be able to translate complex scientific ideas and issues into press releases for journalists or for public awareness campaigns.
• Research Officer – Large charities, particularly medical ones, often maintain research budgets to fund work into their area of interest, such as cancer or diabetes. Research Officers manage the administrative side of this. Depending on the role you may be identifying areas where funding could be improved, managing award grants to ensure that the charity’s aims are being met, or recruiting researchers for specific projects. Life sciences degrees are often an essential requirement for these roles as you must understand the nature of the medical condition and know how research into it is carried out.

For some biomedical science graduates their undergraduate study can open the door to a medical degree. Your biomedical degree gives you a grounding in human physiology, immunology, and virology that can help with your application and show your commitment to this field.

Our School supports your pursuit of a medical career through practice interviews, advice on how to apply, and how to tailor your degree to help give you the experience to progress into medicine. Our graduates have progressed to study medicine at institutions including King’s College London, and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry.

The future of life sciences depends on children gaining an excellent grounding in the subject through their GCSEs and A-Levels. If you like the idea of educating future generations about the life sciences then a career in teaching may be suitable for you.

Bursaries of up to £26,000 are available for those who want to train to teach biology at secondary school level. The amount offered for bursaries can change each year and you may need a specific degree classification (such as a 1st or a 2:1) to qualify.

Throughout your degree you will develop a set of specialist skills that will be essential to a career in your chosen field. These skills can include:

• Quantitative research skills – You will gain a thorough understanding of the quantitative research skills that are essential for all life sciences fields, including designing experiments, handling and analysing data, and interpreting and displaying results.
• Data analysis – Your experiments will generate data, sometimes huge amounts of it. You will learn how to judge the quality of the data generated, how to analyse it to draw out conclusions, and gain an understanding in the limitations as well as the opportunities that data science can bring to the life sciences.
• Equipment and software – As part of your studies you will become familiar with the scientific equipment and software used in your field. This can include laboratory equipment such as spectrophotometers and flow cytometers, or using R for data analysis work.
• Scientific techniques – You will learn a collection of scientific techniques that are essential for many careers in your area of interest. These could include practical DNA manipulation, bioinformatics, bioimaging and microscopy, and field skills for marine biologists such as species identification.

Along with technical and scientific skills, your career will require a collection of transferable skills that will be applicable in any career path.

Some of the transferable skills that you will learn throughout your degree include:

• Ethics and social responsibility – The work that is carried out in life sciences fields inevitably comes with issues around ethics and social responsibilities, whether you are discussing cloning or genetically modified crops, or looking at climate change and the impacts of pollution. We have created specialist final year modules for each degree that will look at these issues and the concerns around them, and how as a life scientist you will need to be mindful of them throughout your career.
• Communication – Whatever your career path, you will be expected to demonstrate written and oral communication skills. Developing these skills is embedded in our modules, from writing scientific reports and essays, to creating and delivering presentations on your work.
• Organisation and time management – Time management and organisational skills are essential for your career as they help you plan out your time so you can meet deadlines and achieve your goals. These skills are embedded in our courses through deadlines for reports and lab work, so you will learn how to plan effectively and how to apply this to your job.
• Teamwork – While you will need to carry out your own tasks and projects in your future jobs, you will also be part of a wider team. Throughout your degree you will take part in team projects that will help you develop skills in co-operative working, such as leadership, taking everyone’s skills onboard, and successfully producing collaborative pieces of work. 

Our range of degrees means that our graduates can have very different directions for their careers. As a result, we have created unique employability modules for our degrees, which give you tailored information relating to your future career plans.

Whatever your specialism, these employability modules will help you plan out your next steps. The modules will help you identify your skills and how to articulate them in job applications. We invite guest speakers and alumni to talk about types of careers, or provide guidance on some of the organisations and environments that you can work in.

These modules are designed to not only support you in finding your first job after graduation, but help you understand how to successfully find employment in specialist fields.

The skills and experience you develop during your degree can help you gain roles in specialist career paths. But identifying suitable roles and companies can be difficult for students, especially those who are the first in their family to attend university.

Our School organises a range of careers events throughout the academic year that help students identify career paths and potential employers. These events range from small workshops with guest speakers, to one day career fairs and employability days with talks from alumni and representatives from multiple organisations. 

Throughout your degree there will be opportunities to work closely with our academics in their fields of expertise. Some of these are organised through university-based schemes, while others may be funded opportunities through organisations such as the Genetics Society.

Our academic staff carry out funded research projects utilising facilities in our School. Assistance is often needed to help set up experiments, collect data, cultivate samples, and process results.

Taking part in this work helps you develop your skills in a research setting and gives you an insight into the process of academic research. It can also give you experience that you can refer to in job applications and interviews.

In your first year you will work on a project devised by one of our partner organisations. This project will be relevant to your degree (e.g., biomedical science, biochemistry, marine biology etc) and will involve working in groups with your peers.

These projects are designed to give you a head start in understanding how life sciences organisations work and the projects you could carry out in a future career. It helps develop your scientific skills, lets you experience teamwork in a professional capacity, and gives you connections that can be useful in your future work.

We have several options for students who want to use work placements to enhance their CV and gain experience before graduation.

Placement year

Many of our degrees offer a placement year. After successfully completing your second year you will spend the following academic year work in a relevant organisation, before returning to the university for your final year of studies.

The School and the Careers team will support you in identifying and applying for placements. This includes help with tailoring your CV or practicing for interviews.

NHS placement

Our BSc Applied Biomedical Science includes a year with the NHS working in a laboratory approved by the Institute of Biomedical Sciences. Many of our biomedical science graduates move into NHS careers after graduation, and this year in placement will give you experience of working within the organisation and help you gain an understanding of career paths within the healthcare sector.

Your work in this placement will give you a portfolio of assessed work that will count towards your HCPC registration after graduation.

Essex Interns

The Essex Interns scheme helps students and recent graduates find paid internships with companies that do not have their own work experience schemes.

These internships can be carried out part-time to fit around your timetable or full-time during the holidays.

Many of our degrees offer an opportunity to spend a year living and studying abroad at a partner institution.

A year abroad is a great way for you to broaden your horizons, experience life in a different culture, and practice your language skills. But if you’re not fluent in a second language you can still find partnerships in English-speaking countries such as Canada and New Zealand. 

If you don’t want to spend a whole year abroad then there are also opportunities to spend the summer abroad through volunteering with summer schools or with international charities and organisations, such as those focusing on marine conservation.

If you know that your career path will require a postgraduate qualification, then our integrated MSc courses may be a suitable option.

The Integrated Masters degrees are a four-year degree. After successfully completing your undergraduate studies, you will automatically progress into a final year at Postgraduate Taught level, without needing to reapply to the School or seek academic references.

Continuing your Masters degree with our School means that you can continue to study in a familiar environment, with the same expert staff who you have already been working with at undergraduate level.