Career Perspectives

Discover the exciting and diverse career opportunities awaiting students completing the STP program. Our program equips the leaders of tomorrow with the skills required to bring effective policy change in industries where science meets policy.

Graduates with a Master’s degree in Science, Technology, and Policy will be highly qualified to pursue a professional career in the fields of:

In academia, graduates promote an interdisciplinary approach to research and education, and their research will aim at integrated socio-technical solutions to global issues.

Please note that we do not offer a PhD programme at ISTP. If you are interested in pursuing a PhD, you have to apply for an open position at ISTP or check for open positions at ETH in general.

In industry and government, graduates apply innovative insights and approaches to problem-solving in the real world.

In consulting, graduates contribute to feasible and effective solutions to real-world problems based on innovative new methods at the interface of science, technology and policy.

Given their interdisciplinary backgrounds and leadership skills, MSc STP graduates are attractive employees for international organisations.

To hear more about what alumni do after they graduate, please refer to the Testimonials section.

Please find below links to job platforms relevant to science, technology and policy. If you have an announcement that you would like to share with the community, please contact the , and we will happily add it for you.

Skill Areas

The specific knowledge and skills that MSc STP Master’s students will acquire are divided into three types: domain-specific knowledge, technical skills, and communication skills.

Graduates with a Master’s degree in Science, Technology and Policy have knowledge of the phenomena of strategic decision-making in a complex institutional environment.

In addition to core competencies from their studies in natural sciences or engineering, they have mastered skills in public policy, which merges economics, political science, law, decision theory, social psychology, and ethics with skills in empirical data analysis, cultural studies, and communication.

Graduates with an MSc STP degree have developed the following analytical and policy design skills:

Analytical Skills

Ability to analyse the interests of stakeholders, their competing definitions of public problems, and the range of options that are possible, given institutional, budgetary, and physical constraints.
Ability to model the effects of public policies, including the associated laws and regulatory changes, which are of interest to stakeholders and have an impact on economic welfare and other indicators of quality of life.
Ability to evaluate the effects of past policies based on solid empirical methods.
Application of sound scientific methods in environments of ill-defined problems and competing interests.

Policy Design Skills

Ability to design effective policy proposals from the perspective of their organisation or employer based on an appreciation of public decision-making institutions, organisations, and processes.
Skills in integrated problem solving, innovative and systems-based thinking, and professional communication and knowledge-management.
Non-sectorial integrated thinking combining environmental, economic and technical skills.

Graduates also acquire personal and social skills:

Leadership and consensus-building skills that allow them to work in challenging institutional environments, appreciating and working with competing goals, priorities, and preferences.
Ability to actively listen and learn from a wide variety of stakeholders.
Ability to communicate personal knowledge and insights in a manner that is respectful and strategic.
Ability to communicate and interact in multiple languages.
Ability to understand how their own values, beliefs, and moral judgments fit within the patterns to be observed in society, linking these to different preferences for public policies and their implementation strategies.