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Just starting your conservation tech career path? Our Early Career group is the best place to network, chat about your master's projects, and seek advice from your peers and those who have been down this path before! Join now to get to know community members and students from around the world!

discussion

How to kickstart a conservation tech career, when you lack a formal biology education?

Hello everyone!My name is Jacobo and I am Sustainable Tech Master's graduate, and a conservation tech enthusiast! I am currently in the lookout for an exciting opportunity to...

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Thanks for your reply! I am currently based in Spain but looking for opportunities at an international level. Primarily in a European context, but I am open to every option :) Any suggestion would be highly appreciated!

I unfortunately don't have many unique insights for Europe. I'm North America based.  We have companies out here like Aerium Analytics that seem like they'd fit your skill set. Perhaps there are some European equivalents. 

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discussion

Career Change Advice

Hi All,I’m seeking advice on a career change.  I am an early career software engineer currently working in medical device software test automation. I want to break into the...

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Hi Carly!

It's exciting to hear that you're thinking about how to apply your skills to conservation! I made a career pivot last year from an electrical engineer at the department of defense to a PhD student designing community-driven environmental sensors and its been awesome! Definitely took some work to figure out what I wanted though.

Good places to start might be joining the AI for Conservation Slack group (it has a jobs page) and potentially the Work on Climate community. In my experience people in these communities are generally very happy to give advice to someone pivoting into the field. 

If you are considering the academic route, you should think about whether you want a Master's or PhD (or something else). It might be hard to find a Master's program specifically for software + animals, but some HCI programs might have tracks that allow you to work with animals, for example with Georgia Tech's Animal-Computer Interaction Lab. If you're open to a PhD, I would recommend exploring the existing academic literature for papers that seem interesting and then looking more into the authors.

I'd be happy to talk more if there's other advice I can provide. Good luck!

Hi! Great to meet another Carly :) 

You might also want to look through the Conservation Tech Directory, which has lots of job boards & academic labs plus a huge number of organizations, companies, tools, etc. that you could peruse to help narrow down your search or strategize your career change.

Hi Carly,

I'm asking myself the same questions. I've recently contributed to MoveApps, which was a very nice entry point into conservation tech/movement ecology for me. Perhaps you find it interesting, too. There's a nice article on it here on WILDLABS. Let me know if you have any questions on this.

Cheers,

Alex

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