Best Jobs For Former Research Assistants [2023]

It’s tough to be a research assistant nowadays, and more and more of them are losing confidence in their own profession.

While the amount of people majoring in courses preparing people for a job as a research assistant isn’t necessarily dropping, fewer and fewer people are applying to become research assistants in the first place and the workforce itself is looking grim.

With so many research assistants no longer sticking around, this begs the question:

What are they all doing now?

We were curious, so we looked through the resumes of former research assistants to see what kind of jobs they were moving into after leaving the field. There were thousands of answers, so we made the cutoff at the top 100 jobs.

But given that there are some very surprising and interesting items on this list, we’ve decided to highlight a few of those instead.

Best Jobs For Former RESEARCH ASSISTANTS

Some of these items are admittedly more attractive than one another as far as actually working the job goes, but one way or another, you’ve got to admit they’re eye-catching.

The full list of those jobs can be found below.

Detailed Ranking of the Most Common Jobs of Former RESEARCH ASSISTANTS

Rank	Job Title	%
1	Teaching Assistant	2.97%
2	Internship	2.94%
3	Graduate Research Assistant	2.51%
4	Research Associate	1.85%
5	Volunteer	0.97%
6	Research Scientist	0.93%
7	Fellow	0.91%
8	Scientist	0.86%
9	Research Fellow	0.78%
10	Senior Scientist	0.67%
11	Graduate Assistant	0.65%
12	Consultant	0.6%
13	Project Manager	0.6%
14	Graduate Teaching Assistant	0.6%
15	Administrative Assistant	0.57%
16	Laboratory Technician	0.56%
17	Software Engineer	0.56%
18	Sales Associate	0.51%
19	Research Internship	0.49%
20	Researcher	0.49%
21	Associate	0.47%
22	Instructor	0.44%
23	Postdoctoral Research Associate	0.43%
24	Data Analyst	0.42%
25	Research Technician	0.42%
26	Process Engineer	0.41%
27	Engineer	0.4%
28	Tutor	0.39%
29	Teacher	0.39%
30	Research Analyst	0.37%
31	Mechanical Engineer	0.37%
32	Associate Scientist	0.37%
33	Engineering Internship	0.36%
34	Law Clerk	0.36%
35	Server	0.35%
36	Analyst	0.35%
37	Registered Nurse	0.34%
38	Adjunct Professor	0.31%
39	Manager	0.3%
40	Postdoctoral Research Assistant	0.3%
41	Research And Development Internship	0.28%
42	Substitute Teacher	0.28%
43	Laboratory Assistant	0.27%
44	Chemist	0.27%
45	Project Engineer	0.27%
46	Clinical Research Coordinator	0.27%
47	Assistant Professor	0.27%
48	Program Manager	0.26%
49	Teacher Assistant	0.26%
50	Post Doctoral Researcher	0.26%
51	Software Developer	0.26%
52	Graduate Researcher	0.25%
53	Graduate Student Assistant	0.25%
54	Customer Service Representative	0.25%
55	Attorney	0.24%
56	Adjunct Faculty	0.24%
57	Assistant Manager	0.24%
58	Systems Engineer	0.24%
59	Design Engineer	0.23%
60	Research Engineer	0.23%
61	Team Leader	0.23%
62	Student Research Assistant	0.23%
63	Business Analyst	0.22%
64	Research And Development Engineer	0.22%
65	Program Coordinator	0.21%
66	Office Assistant	0.21%
67	Assistant	0.21%
68	Specialist	0.2%
69	Project Coordinator	0.2%
70	Research Specialist	0.2%
71	Laboratory Manager	0.2%
72	Senior Software Engineer	0.2%
73	Postdoctoral Associate	0.2%
74	Marketing Internship	0.2%
75	Research Coordinator	0.2%
76	Legal Extern	0.19%
77	President	0.19%
78	Pharmacist Technician	0.19%
79	Student Assistant	0.18%
80	Staff Scientist	0.18%
81	Electrical Engineer	0.18%
82	Software Engineering Internship	0.18%
83	Senior Engineer	0.18%
84	Manufacturing Engineer	0.17%
85	Supervisor	0.17%
86	Data Scientist	0.17%
87	Associate Attorney	0.17%
88	Office Manager	0.17%
89	Senior Research Associate	0.16%
90	Technician	0.16%
91	Case Manager	0.16%
92	Quality Engineer	0.16%
93	Cashier	0.16%
94	Physician Assistant	0.16%
95	Coordinator	0.15%
96	Speech Language Pathologist	0.15%
97	Vice President	0.15%
98	Operations Manager	0.15%
99	Environmental Scientist	0.15%
100	Adjunct Instructor	0.14%

Most Common Jobs For Former RESEARCH ASSISTANTS

These are all good jobs, all of them either utilizing some skill that a research assistant would have or being a stepping stone to a different career.

Here’s the thing about these jobs though — they’re pretty much exactly what you’d expect a lot of former research assistants to do.

How We Determined the Best Jobs of Former RESEARCH ASSISTANTS

Using resume information from our database of over 7 million resumes, we looked at all resumes that listed research assistant under their work history. Then we looked at which jobs showed up on their work histories following their stints as a research assistant, sorting them by their most frequent.

That’s how we made the initial ranked list.

To make our list of most interesting jobs, we looked through the ranked list to see if any positions:

Showed up in fewer than 1% of all new jobs
And, were not part of the 100 most common jobs in our database

Author

Chris Kolmar

Chris Kolmar is a co-founder of Zippia and the editor-in-chief of the Zippia career advice blog. He has hired over 50 people in his career, been hired five times, and wants to help you land your next job. His research has been featured on the New York Times, Thrillist, VOX, The Atlantic, and a host of local news. More recently, he's been quoted on USA Today, BusinessInsider, and CNBC.

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