Athina Zampara – Part 2 – Leveraging Your Skills in Project Management

In part 2 of this week's interview, Athina Zampara tells her story of investing in learning as an adult and of building her CV to eventually find a position in the European Commission, where she now oversees projects offering support to PhDs and researchers around the globe.Athina Zampara comes from Greece and has lived and worked in Brussels, Belgium, for 10 years. Athina has an interdisciplinary educational background having studied Physics, History and Philosophy of Science, Italian language and Education. She has worked as Project Manager and now holds a position as Project Officer in the European Public Administration.Note: The views expressed in this interview are purely those of my guest and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission. Join the Papa PhD Postgraduate Career Exploration Group! What you’ll learn about in this episode: What the Marie Slodowka-Curie Actions does and what role Athina plays within the organizationThe difference between the roles of a project manager and a project officerThe fulfillment Athina gets from being able to see the results of the programs she works on and the impact this has on the individual researchersThe paths to a job in the European Commission for people with advanced degreesHow leveraging information that is online can help you map your skills against jobs that interest youThe general structure of the hiring process for the European Commission and how to prepareThis episode’s pearls of wisdom:“When I go to the projects and I discuss with the young researchers, I tell them "Look, what are the skills that you are going to have from this? It's not only the research, the specific scientific knowledge that you are going to learn, but it is: you learn how to work in a collaborative environment, you learn networking, you learn negotiation, you learn project management. So you learn many, many things that you can say to an employer in the future in order to make them understand that woul will be a good employee.”“There are many resources on the internet where people can look and map themselves on these skills. And they can understand better, also for themselves, what they can do. And then, if they understand, they can explain it to the employers.”Athina's links: LinkedIn – LinkedIn.com/in/Athina-Zampara; Twitter – @LifeOfaPOinEU; Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions, European Commission – ec.europa.eu/research/mariecurieactions/node_en. Leave a review on Podchaser ! Support the show on Patreon ! You might also like the following episodes: Adriana Bankston – Science Policy: PapaPhD.com/12Jonathan Weitzman – Professorship and Industry: PapaPhD.com/46Rob Hutcheson – Health Economics: PapaPhD.com/4Simon Moore – Postdoc to Industry: PapaPhD.com/18 Launching your podcast? If you're preparing to launch your podcast, you may be asking yourself what hosting platform to use. I launched Papa PhD on Bluebrry because I wanted a professional service that would interface with my WordPress website, that would robustly broadcast Papa PhD to all platforms, and that would allow me to grow my podcast in years to come. And these are the reasons why I'm recommending the Blubrry podcast hosting and syndication platform. Click on the button below or use the promo code PapaPhDBlue on the Blubrry website to unlock a one month free trial: Try one free month with Blubrry ! If you are starting a serious podcast project, do consider one of the first podcasting hosts out there, offering state of the art services, including IAB certified statistics, based on years of experience in the podcasting space. Happy podcasting!