Most of the posts on this blog are aimed at jobseekers, with either job adverts or information about places to find out about jobs in science communication. This post is aimed squarely at employers and recruiters.
I’m sending a copy of the email below to various medical research charities to encourage them to share relevant job ads on the psci-com list (which I run) but anyone that employs science communicators can advertise freely on psci-com – as long as the job ad satisfies certain criteria. Just ignore the bits that talk about charities if you aren’t one 🙂
Free places to post (or find!) science communication job adverts
• ABSW – Association of British Science Writers
• BIG Stem Communicators Network – formerly the British Interactive Group
• LinkedIn – there are various groups, as well as your own charity page
• Medical Journalists’ Association (contact)
• psci-com (Jiscmail mailing list) <– the subject of my email to medical charity employers, copy below
• SciCommOps (jobs announcement newsletter)
• Science Communication Jobs (Facebook)
• Stempra – STEM PR Associations
• Twitter – add #Scicomm Jobs to the tweet to increase reach
Hello
Your charity can post science communication job adverts to psci-com, free – please email relevant job ads to psci-com-request@jiscmail.ac.uk.
I own and run psci-com, a UK-based mailing list for science communication professionals hosted on Jiscmail, each message also goes to Twitter. The list has been in existence since at least 1998 and I took it over in 2012. Currently there are 4,700+ email subscribers from all over the world (predominantly UK with a large number in London). It’s free (for anyone) to post job adverts there that are about public engagement with science or general science communication (‘scicomm’) for a non-technical audience.
If you have a job vacancy in which the post holder would be producing scientific content (written, spoken, video, infographics – anything) for a public audience then you can post it to the psci-com list at no cost. You can send jobs to me at psci-com-request@jiscmail.ac.uk and if suitable I’ll forward them for you. Jobs that involve producing scientific content aimed only at researchers or healthcare professionals are outside psci-com’s remit.
Job adverts for psci-com must
- include an explicit salary or range (actual numbers, not ‘competitive’) – psci-com supports the Show The Salary campaign
- include available / maximum budget information if the job advert is aksing freelancers to bid for work
- be clearly relevant to ‘the public’ as an audience (the job doesn’t need to be solely about public engagement, but must include it), this includes patients and patient involvement in research
- be relevant to science, medicine, technology
- include location information (during Covid where people work remotely please consider whether people can apply from outside UK, or do they need to prove eligibility to work in the UK?)
And of course all the usual things like closing date, how to apply, who to contact for informal chats and links to job descriptions / person specifications etc.
Although I now work in academia my background was as a Science Information Officer at Diabetes UK (2003-2012), a job that I found advertised on their website. It wasn’t ‘badged’ as a science communication job and I’m keen for medical research and patient charities to categorise their relevant job ads in that way, and get them under the eyes of scicomm professionals.
Also, if yourwebsite.org.uk/jobs doesn’t automatically redirect to wherever you’ve placed your vacancies page please consider asking your IT people to set that up. This can save people searching on your website for jobs, careers, opportunities, work for us, work with us, recruitment, vacancies etc.
Thank you very much, please send me your (relevant) job ads 🙂
Best wishes
Jo
(psci-com owner)
scicommjobs - science communication jobs 