Forum:How To Change An Expertise In Bioinformatics

Question

[Patrick]

Hello everybody,

A lot of Job posting concerning bioinformatics are now asking for people experienced in NGS data analysis. The point is that I have a strong background in Bioinformatics but never worked on NGS data analysis even I would love too.

My question is how can we convince those people who are posting the position to accept our application, if no one give you a chance to specialize on something one could never get a job to the expertise domain he wants, am I wrong?

Pat

[Larry_Parnell]

"Change" is perhaps a poor choice of words. It is much better to add or supplement one's expertise than to change. Change brings to mind being pigeon-holed or having a narrow focus. Add! Build! Go forward!

Answer 1

[Jeremy Leipzig]

1. Download publicly available NGS data.
2. Analyze it in some novel way.
3. Blog your results.

[lh3]

+1. Good except 3. I would say "Publish your results". Blogging alone seems too cheap to me.

[Lluís R.]

Strange that because blogging is "cheap" it doesn't worth it.

[Larry_Parnell]

Right, ideally one would want to publish the results, but that may be difficult to do as an "independent" researcher, which may be the case if NGS analysis is not part of the researcher's current job description. How many single-author original research papers do you see that have a bioinformatics angle? Do or try all - blog, poster at conference, seminar (preferably invited), submit a paper.

[Brad Chapman]

Wish I could upvote this more than once. Step 2 doesn't even have to be novel. I would be delighted to get an applicant who didn't have NGS experience but spent time doing an analysis on a public data set and wrote up documentation that could be useful to others.

Answer 2

[Lythimus]

See if you can get access to some NGS data (the link is dead at the moment) (EBI and NCBI should have plenty publicly available) and just familiarize yourself with NGS tools. Make sure you understand how the technology differs from say, microarrays, and read some of the more influential papers using it.

Answer 3

[User 3869]

If you want to have some NGS data, try SRA and ENA.

There are many sub-fields in Bioinformatics. Experiences of proteomics might not be helpful for convincing interviewers. However if you are an expert of microarray analysis, there are some interesting data on GEO containing both NGS and microarray data which you can do some comparative studies.

Answer 4

[scolobs]

I just discussed with a recruiter about their NGS vacancy ad that I am interested in. The conclusion? For bioinformaticians applying for NGS positions without NGS experience, "the boat has already left". Many other applicants have lots of experience they can show through published papers (co-authorship). This eliminates, pretty much, all other contenders (including myself) without such documented experience. How to surmount this "barrier"? I submit that blogging might not cut it.