I’m just on my way back from a conference where I met with two former mentees who left academia to launch successful careers outside academia. Hanging out with them (and their adorable daughter), seeing how happy and successful they are, and reflecting on my own role as their former mentor made me realize something that I think is worth a blog post. As a mentor I have the wonderful privilege to guide students and postdocs through experiments, grant applications, job talks, and career decisions. Yet there is one aspect of mentoring where I feel that many of us—myself included—have been getting it wrong. The problem is reflected in the way we talk about careers. We speak about people who “survive in academia.” We discuss who “makes it” and who “drops out.” We celebrate former trainees who become professors and often don’t mention those who move into industry, even if they are very successful. The implicit message is clear: academia is the destination, and everything else is a deviation from the intended path.

[Caveat, I realize that this may be more of a problem in the life sciences and social sciences and less so in engineering where the relationship between industry and academia is much more interwoven].

In doing so, we create a hierarchy of careers in which academia is the noble profession and industry is the consolation prize. The unspoken assumption is that people go to industry because they failed to secure an academic position. This narrative is not only wrong. It is harmful. The reality is that academic positions are limited. No matter how talented the people we train are, there will never be enough permanent academic jobs for everyone. Every year universities produce far more PhDs than there are academic jobs available. This is not a failure of the individuals involved. It is a structural feature of the system. Yet we often behave as if the professoriate were the natural destination for all our trainees. We celebrate the few who obtain faculty positions while treating everyone else as if they had somehow fallen short of the original goal.

But why should a faculty position be considered the only successful outcome? Not everyone wants the academic lifestyle. Not everyone wants to spend years moving between countries, chasing short-term contracts, navigating funding uncertainties, and building a publication record under constant pressure. Many people value stability, teamwork, clearer career progression, or opportunities to work on problems with a more immediate real-world impact. Others simply have family circumstances, health considerations, or personal priorities that make the traditional academic path unattractive or impossible. These are not signs of insufficient ambition. They are signs that people have different aspirations and values.

Industry careers can offer intellectually stimulating challenges, opportunities for innovation, leadership roles, financial security, and access to resources that many academic labs can only dream of. Many of the most important technological and medical advances of our age emerge from collaborations between academia and industry or from industry itself. Why then do we continue to talk about industry as if it were somehow second best?

The why

Part of the answer is selection bias. Professors spend their lives surrounded by other academics. We naturally see academic careers as the benchmark because they are the careers we know best. Our professional networks reinforce that perspective. Former trainees who become academics remain visible because they continue to attend conferences, become members in the same societies, publish papers, and collaborate with us. Those who move to industry often disappear from our immediate field of view. As a consequence, we systematically underestimate the success and fulfilment many of them find outside academia. I have come to realise that good mentoring requires us to challenge this bias.

Our role

Our role is not to produce miniature versions of ourselves. Our role is to help trainees identify careers in which they can flourish. That means presenting academia as one option among many rather than as the default definition of success. It also means paying attention to the language we use. When we talk about “surviving academia,” we should ask ourselves what is implied by that phrase. If surviving academia is success, what does that make everyone who leaves? Clearly not dead, defeated, or diminished. Many have gone on to build rewarding and impactful careers, often making contributions that reach far beyond the walls of any university. Academia is a wonderful profession. I chose it and I love it. I can honestly say it is very much my vocation and that I very rarely questioned my career choice. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who goes through my lab has to choose this career path per default. As mentors we naturally should be role models but that isn’t primarily defined by what job we have or what position we’ve managed to get. It is defined by how we lead, how we conduct ourselves and what kind of mentorship we provide. The real measure of successful mentoring is not how many professors we produce. It is whether the people we train find careers that match their talents, ambitions, and values. For some that will be academia, for others that will be industry.

Coming back to the start of this post, what I realized is that what made me most happy about catching up with my former mentees simply was to see what a happy and fulfilling life they built for themselves. I think that’s the measure of success we should use.