Why an industry career move is a taboo topic in academia

• NATURE CAREERS PODCAST

• 26 February 2026

Why an industry career move is a taboo topic in academia

Adam Levy investigates why researchers are sometimes reluctant to disclose their plans to colleagues.

Adam Levy

Adam Levy

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Is moving to industry a taboo topic in academia? Adam Levy investigates.

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In his role as research director at NielsenIQ, a consumer intelligence company based in London, Josh Balsters helps global brands drive product innovation.

Balsters relies on expertise he gained in psychology and neuroscience, both during his PhD and as an assistant professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

But when he made the decision to quit full-time academia in 2020, Balsters struggled to tell his colleagues because he worried that he had let them down.

“There’s a feeling … that you’ve taken up a space, taken an opportunity away from somebody else who would have wanted it more,” he says. “I felt much more comfortable talking to people who had done it, who had already left.”

Ashley Ruba took a different tack. After completing her PhD in psychology at the University of Washington, Seattle, she spent three years as a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, before doubling her salary in an industry role.

After sharing her story on social media, Ruba was bombarded with messages from early career researchers who felt they couldn’t share their misgivings about remaining in academia with colleagues.

“It seems like there’s a lot of shame, a lot of fear,” she tells Adam Levy in the final episode of Off Limits, an eight-part podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the workplace.

Previous episodes have covered religious faith, alcohol dependency, bereavement, fertility challenges, and coming out as a transgender scientist.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00158-y

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Transcript

Is moving to industry a taboo topic in academia? Adam Levy investigates.

Adam Levy 00:04

Hello. I’m Adam Levy, and this is Off Limits: Academia’s Taboos, a podcast from Nature Careers.

In this episode: leaving academia.

It’s no secret, making it in academia can be incredibly challenging. The opportunities for job security have shrunk hugely over the years and decades.

And many researchers complain about intense pressure to publish, and an inability to balance one’s work and one’s life. Or even separate them at all.

And so, of course, many make the decision to transition away from academia.

Despite this decision being commonplace, the possibility can be overlooked from within research and discussing it can be, well, it can be taboo.

Today, I’m talking with two researchers about their decisions to leave.

The first is Josh Balsters, neuroscience director at NielsenIQ in the United Kingdom.

His goal is helping the company understand how their products impact consumers.

Josh Balsters 01:10

What I try to do is help use what we’ve learned from decades of psychology and neuroscience to dig a little bit deeper.

Adam Levy 01:18

And that’s Josh’s academic background: neuroscience.

And we started out by discussing his early academic career.

I asked, “Was your goal back then, to build an academic career, to be permanently in academia?”

Josh Balsters 01:32

Yeah, it definitely was. After my PhD had finished, I knew that I wanted to change direction a little bit. Actually, I knew at that point I wanted to do something that was maybe more applied than the work I’d done.

I loved my PhD, and I loved the work that I had done for my PhD.

So my first postdoctoral fellowship was in combination with GlaxoSmithKline.

So I started to tap into some of that, that pharma world, and some of that.

But it was still very academically rooted, what I was doing there,

Adam Levy 02:02

And as your career progressed, did that feeling of, you know, “I want to build an academic career, but with a practical angle?”

Did that evolve?

Josh Balsters 02:12

It did. It wasn’t really until towards the end that I actually thought about leaving academia altogether.

But for a long time it was just, I guess, trying new ideas and bouncing in different directions.

And I saw it as fine-tuning.

But I always saw myself as an academic. I always thought I was going to have an academic career.

I think, I didn’t really see any other option, to be honest. Until it wasn’t really, until towards the end, where I started to see some of my friends leaving academia, and I thought, oh, that was a bit of an awakening to me, where I thought, “Oh, I didn’t know you could do that.”

And I think as well, the industry had changed a little bit over the years as well, from when I started to when I left.

Adam Levy 02:55

Over those years, did you feel like your career was building, that you were getting more stability within academia?

Josh Balsters 03:03

I think so. I felt stable in terms of my career. And I felt like I understood the system. There were parts of it I didn’t like. And I think every academic will say the same things.

I think at some point for me, I just kind of realized that all these different little things that I didn’t like and wasn’t enjoying, they added up into something much bigger.

Adam Levy 03:25

Could you give a sense of at least some of those little things that you felt like you were having to put up with?

Josh Balsters 03:32

I don’t want to be kind of naive and think that a job has to be perfect.

I think all jobs, even the one I’m in right now, I think everybody has good days and bad days.

But just more of these little things started adding up, like to do with, yeah, funding, to do with, I guess, the kind of publication system.

I think sometimes it helps when you break outside the academic bubble.

Because I remember explaining once to my in-laws (who aren’t in academia) about publishing, and explaining to them that well, you write something, and then you send it off to a journal.

And then other people, your friends, will review it for free.

And then once you’ve had it accepted, you pay money to get it published. And then you then basically pay money to get it back again.

Just trying to explain that to my in-laws, they just said, “I don’t understand. If you’re writing it and you’re doing all the editing, why are you paying to get it out there, and paying to get it back?”

And I think there were little things like that that sometimes you get an outside perspective and you go, “Ah, that’s, I guess it’s a point.”

Adam Levy 04:37

So I guess those little things start to accumulate. But was there, I suppose, a moment that you felt able to come to that decision?

Josh Balsters 04:47

I think there was. I guess, probably the biggest moment for me as well, for a lot of academics. We stay in academia because we love the work.

[...]

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