Protein/Structural bioinformatics PhD graduate wanting advice

I’ll try not to make this a long, doom-and-gloom post about not being able to get a job like you so commonly get on these bioinformatics groups on here (and I’m defo not looking for a pity party), but I would greatly appreciate any advice, perspectives or other constructive comments which may aid me in considering what next steps to take in moving my career forward. And I know (at least here in the UK) that a huge number of other PhD graduates regardless of their discipline are unemployed right now too.

The research of my PhD took place between late 2018 and mid 2023 when structural bioinformatics was experiencing the big shift to deep-learning methods (e.g., AlphaFold2) and to big-data automation/application of these etc. Here I was combining/analysing bioinformatics data plus protein structure prediction analyses to suggest molecular functions of a set of uncharacterised proteins, but I wasn’t doing software development or big-data management as most bioinformatics people do. Previous to my PhD I have a degree in biochemistry and a master’s in bioinformatics. As I explain shortly, I’m in an awkward niche with my knowledge, skills and experience.

I graduated from my PhD around 2 years ago now and launched straight away into applying for relevant jobs (including also some in other countries), of which at the time there were plenty (following the post Alphafold boom in the field and including comp protein design). These were jobs mostly in NGO research institutes and industry though I did apply for a handful of postdoc and RA positions at universities. This turned into a vicious ongoing cycle where as well as applying for jobs, I got invited to quite a number of job interviews, but I still was/am having to work part time in a menial low-paying job just to keep myself alive etc. With putting so much effort, time and preparation into job applications and the interviews, I’ve never had any remaining time to advance any of my skills or learn new ones, or participate in further research. Besides being placed on one waiting list which never amounted to anything, I was never successful from these job interviews. Thus I essentially have this big gap of a couple of years on my CV which is surely an increasing stain on job applications.

I am now in my mid-30s and live in the UK. Previous to my PhD in my 20s after my degree and master’s, I had a brief stint on a scheme as a junior web developer for a few weeks and worked in a secondary school science department for a few years, but essentially otherwise I’ve only had menial (minimum wage) jobs which amounts to little viable skills/experience in anything. I’m now also trying to consider the near-future career landscape with Agentic AI already here (e.g., Biomni) and general AI (AGI) on the horizon. Also, software engineering and coding isn’t really my thing which the aforementioned will seemingly remove the need for workers in this area anyhow. It would appear that jobs in other bioinformatics areas such as genomics and gene expression etc are over-saturated with applicants and that I’ve specialised away from those now so they wouldn’t take me on anyway.

I’m still greatly interested and motivated to work in research, data/info curation or similar involving computational side of biomolecules, but it seems like with the declining context of jobs/work I can’t specialise further right now for risk of excluding something else hypothetically if that makes sense. I’ll end my yarn here (and I really can’t start to further discuss other things in the mix here), but essentially I would like to hear from anybody as to what I should do now.