What are your opinions on that? If you want to stay in acamedia, is it a good idea? Or are your options more limited than if you would stay within the wet-lab?

Bump

Options are limited whatever route you choose...

Are you prepared to move nationally and internationally for a job?

Nationally I would. Internationally I wouldnt.
Thank you for answering.
I am just worried that its easier to transmitt from different experimental field to other but if I do computational PhD (even though I have plenty of experience from a placement year and summer studentships) i wouldnt be considered.

It's actually quite difficult to move between experimental fields unless the techniques involved overlap significantly. A background in bioinformatics or big data analysis is probably easier to use for many different projects.

having had left industry to start a PhD which is half an half wet lab and bioinformatics, I can say to you that EVERYBODY in the Pharma world is looking for a PhD grad with computational bio background.

That is, pardon, bullshit or at least extremely exaggerated ;) For sure the chances to land an industry job are higher than for, let's say taxonomists or marine biologists, but most major universities nowadays have full bioinformatics degrees and therefore produce a shitload of people with computational biology background. I have friends who specialized in bioinformatics and they have a hard time finding jobs as well. There might be a certain lack of people with an absolutely unique skillset in pharmaceutical companies but that applies to some "computational biologists".

Overall, I think that the chances to land a position in academia are higher with a computational biology PhD but very low nonetheless.

What are those unique skills do you reckon?

To my opinion (PhD- Computational Chemistry 2011) currently any degree on "computational x, y, z" has a shelf life of max 5-10 years awaiting for so-called quantum computers to become main stream, then PhD-people become irrelevant as machine learning on quantum computers means the work you do for your PhD in 3~6 years can be produced by the computer itself in the blink of an eye!... There was this article in BBC couple of months ago about which jobs will more likely be gone as a result of advancing computers and I think the irony was that the software related jobs were the ones that most likely be gone ....

If you have a PhD in Computational Chemistry then you will know that computers (whether quantum or not) will always need to be told which problem to solve and to have their results interpreted. In both cases that can only ever be done by a human being. The job of the Computational Chemist for example is to identify a problem in chemistry, make the calculation and then interpret the result in terms of the chemistry involved in the system. For most computational chemistry jobs the software is simply a tool used as a black box. Quantum computers won't change that. In fact it will make more problems solvable which currently are out of reach.

Scientists and engineers have been talking about replacing humans from the workplace since the beginnning of robotics and yet here we are with record employment and a massive increase in the types and complexities of work available. Jobs may change but plentiful, intelligent work will always be available. I believe there is absolutely zero chance of routinely available, affordable functioning quantum computers arriving within the next 5-10 years and absolutely zero chance of the type of AI required to remove jobs altogether being available any time within the next 40 or 50 years in my opinion.
Synthetic Chemistry jobs will go first and computers are a real threat to that.