How does commercial work differ from academia?

The biggest difference between being an academic and being in an industry, is that the goals that you have are set by other people and the work that you're doing is trying to drive business goals, not trying to do research for the sake of doing research. And that's a mindset that's a really big shift from academia because you're not just kind of running after ends that might lead to nothing, everything you do has to have an outcome and you have to get really good at figuring out the highest impact outcome from your work. And you don't learn that in academia. And it's this business sense that people talk about, is that was the biggest challenge in the first part of kind of getting a job outside of academia.

Otherwise, there's habits, things like how to run a meeting. Those are things that you kind of pick up over time, but learning about things like what's a KPI? What's retention and growth and how do we define these things in a business? And who do you talk to if you have a problem. Yeah, the biggest things were definitely around business goals and tying business goals to your work.