I know it’s short notice, but the next installment of the Leaving Academia meetup in Toronto will be held this Wednesday, March 3 at 6:00 pm at the Bean Cafe, 388 College at Bathurst. For anyone who hasn’t been to one of these meetings before, please flip me an email to let me know you’re attending: sabine [at] leavingacademia [dot] com.
{ 0 comments }
Just wanted to let you folks in the life sciences know about a site I learned about this week called BioJobBlog, a blog that covers alllll kinds of career-related topics for bioprofessionals. It was started by a guy named Cliff Mintz, who got in touch with me to let me know about his site. Cliff has some big plans for catering to the postacademic crowd, so watch this space for further updates. Cliff is the guy behind Bioinsights, a company dedicated to training scientists moving into the private sector. He also let me know about a social media site called BioCrowd, which looks like Facebook for scientists and bioprofessionals.
{ 0 comments }
This one is for those of you anxiously trawling the internet at midnight, Googling search terms like “useless PhD” and “job after academia” and “what can you do with a PhD in philosophy?”
I love my job. It doesn’t matter what my job is. What matters is that I love it–and that I fell into it quite by accident. I did not know that the line of work I’ve gotten into would be the one that would fulfill pretty well every professional ambition I’ve ever had (these ambitions essentially boil down making money by making a difference). What matters is that it took time, luck, perseverance, preparation and a great deal of support to end up in the role I have.
The hardest parts of any job search are the parts you don’t have any control over: the luck and the timing. Sometimes–like in my case–the constellations just have to align in such a way that the right job opens up at the right moment when you’re fully prepared for it. I actively job searched for 4 months–and I mean 4 months of intense, intense job searching–before someone at an organization saw a job ad, applied for it, got that job, and quit her current job. The job that she quit got posted, and I applied for it and got it. There was a domino effect that had to take place in order for me to get my job. I had zero control over that process. If you think about it too much, it can be frustrating and demoralizing.
But here’s the really important part, the part you DO have control over: preparation. When that job got posted, I was ready. I was ready with:
–the knowledge of what makes a strong resume
–the knowledge of the important elements (and unimportant elements) of a cover letter
–a strong sense of how to articulate the skills that I had that were relevant to that job
–the importance of learning about the organization before writing my application
I spent a week focussing on drafting, tailoring and fine-tuning my resume, and writing my cover letter. I got feedback from four different people. I read and re-read the organization’s website. I was prepared to pull together the strongest possible application I could. And because I was prepared, I did pull together the strongest possible application I could.
Learning how to do that–to create a strong application that would resonate with the potential employer and would show my skills in the best possible light–took a really long time.
So no matter where you are on the spectrum of leaving academia, one thing you can do for yourself is to start taking the time to learn about the basic elements of making a strong case for yourself, so that when the right job comes along, you will be ready to seize it.
{ 0 comments }
Dear lovely readers,
When I let you know my good news about my new job, I truly did not intend to inspire mass feelings of panic over the disappearance of this site. Okay, perhaps it wasn’t mass panic, but I did get a few anxious emails from you lovely people about the value and helpfulness of this site, and would I prettyplease not take it down?
I just want to make sure you all know that Leaving Academia isn’t going anywhere. It’s perfectly clear to you now, however, that fresh content will be provided on a totally irregular and entirely unpredictable basis. And I am still investigating the possibility of turning the site into a group-written blog (any other people interested in contributing? Email me or leave a comment below). But in the meantime, I am not taking the site down.
I also just want to relate one little tip for those of you who’ve processed your decision to leave academia and are currently job hunting. One of my colleagues (this would be someone I work with at my job doing policy analysis for a non-profit organization in the health care sector) who has conducted a lot of hires mentioned this to me just prior to the talk I gave a few weeks ago at the University of Waterloo. It’s one of those tips that sounds completely self-evident, and that you want to laugh at smugly, thinking you’d never be the fool who’d make this gaffe. But there are people out there who are making this gaffe…and really, you don’t want to be one of those people.
When a prospective employer asks you in a job interview why you want the job (and you can be 99% sure that this is the very first question you’ll be asked), you can say things like,
“Because I’ve always wanted to work for this organization.”
“Because I have a passion for [fill in the blank].”
“Because I’m looking for a job where I have lots of learning opportunities and a chance to maximize my [whatever] skills, and it sounds like this job offers precisely that.”
There are lots of things you can say that will demonstrate your knowledge of the job, your interest in the job, and your understanding of the aims of the organization. Lots. What should you NOT say?
“Because I want to leave academia.”
Or:
“Because I need to get out of grad school and get a job.”
Or:
“Because I can’t get a tenure-track position in a university.”
Just don’t say stuff like that, okay? Think about it this way: if you were a professional dancer and were applying for a job as an IT guy (and this is the career trajectory of someone I personally know), would you say to your prospective employer, “Oh, I want this IT job because I can’t be a professional dancer for the rest of my life. I just need to get a regular job. And since I pulled my hamstring, I just haven’t been the same.” Yeah, it’s obvious how un-smart that would be, right?
In short, your prospective employer really doesn’t care about how difficult your career change is, or why things didn’t work out for you in your previous career. Your prospective employer wants to know exactly what you’ve got that makes you a great fit for their organization. And if one of the things that you’ve got is passion, enthusiasm and an understanding of the organization, that goes a long way.
{ 1 comment }
Okay, so, now that the story of my job search has a happy ending (i.e. a fantastic job with an amazing health-based organization serving women in the province of Ontario), I can share some of my less happy moments during my job search. I write about these as cautionary tales for those of you who are anxious to make the most of the opportunities you have (in information interviews, job interviews, and so on).
First, there was the time I applied for a writer/editor position for a very interesting health-related non-profit. In my application, I made sure to emphasize as much as I could that I was detail-oriented, my editing work was meticulous, and so forth. Of course, I failed to actually exercise that meticulousness in my own application. Just as my finger was pressing the “enter” key, sending off my email to the HR manager, I realized the version of my resume that I sent actually had a small typo (something had gotten bumped down to the next line). Nooooo!
I didn’t know what to do. For about an hour, I tried my best to forget about it. But then my type-A personality went into high gear. I wrote a follow-up note to the HR director, indicating my previous resume had a typo. I reattached the cleaned up resume. The good part? I got an interview. The bad part? I made reference, at the interview, to my cover letter–but when I glanced over at the HR manager’s package of my stuff, I realized she didn’t HAVE my cover letter–only my explanatory note about the typo! I didn’t get the job (which was for the best), but I didn’t dare speculate why.
Then there was the time when I finally scored a long sought-after meeting with the executive director of a non-profit organization supporting women that was, at that point, by far my number one choice of employer. I studied the website inside and out, I made enquiries to third parties about the organization, I thought about contributions I could make. When I finally arrived at the meeting, I felt excited and prepared. But sitting down in the board room with the ED, I suddenly realized…I could smell my own nail polish. In a last dash to add some, well, polish to my look, I had slapped on a coat of quick-dry, blood red nail polish. But oooooh nooooo! The acrylic smell was radiating from me–or so I feared, in the middle of this otherwise fairly seamless conversation. (In that instance, there was no job currently on offer–the meeting was sort of a “get to know you” as a result of a mutual acquaintance passing on my resume. Still, I’ll never know if my nail polish would have lost me a job there!).
I also had a few moments in which I probably appeared to be not unlike a desparate dater out at a speed dating event. There was one particular conference that I attended for the purpose of networking–and yet I completely failed to adhere to my own advice about networking. Instead of just chatting with people, getting to know their work, and finding ways that I could help them, I actually would introduce myself to people as a job hunter. There are times when I’m convinced this is the right thing to do, but there are other times when it displays a lack of confidence. I left that event feeling like I had made few genuine contacts–the kind that actually count when you’re trying to network in an effective way.
But I do have one more anecdote that is meant to show you that, even when you do slightly inappropriate things during your job search, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doomed. I had had my eye on the organization that eventually hired me for a little while, and I was aware that they were going to be represented at a health-based trade show. I decided to get media accreditation for the trade show (thanks, blogging!) and use that as an opportunity to schmooze with the women from the organization.
So I did just that. I got my media credentials, I went to the trade show, I found the booth where this organization was stationed. Then I walked up to them and…started talking nonsense. I had not prepared in advance what I was going to say, or how I should introduce myself, or how I should actually leverage that opportunity. Instead, I just blundered in with my big ol’ personality, and left feel a little sheepish.
As it turned out, of course, it was handy to be able to mention in my cover letter, which I wrote a week or two later, that I had met the hiring manager at the trade show. Moreover, my big ol’ personality was not something that detracted from my candidacy, but actually strengthened it.
{ 0 comments }
Torontonians, in case you aren’t on my email list, we’re meeting tonight at 6:00 pm at The Bean, 388 College (at Bathurst). See you there!
{ 0 comments }
Back in 2006, when I was just a few weeks away from defending my dissertation, I applied for a job working as a closed-captioning editor at one of Canada’s television broadcasters. It was a job that I was well-qualified for: it required top-notch English language skills, plus some computer literacy and organizational abilities. Best of all, the job was pretty mindless; it required absolutely no analytical skills whatsoever, and I got paid to watch TV for a living. For someone who was stumbling out of a Ph.D. program feeling battered and bruised, the job was ideal.
How did I get this job? Networking.
In my case, the old adage about “who you know” held true. But the person who helped me get my foot in the door wasn’t some old windbag I met at a greasy-palmed meet n’ greet. It was a woman my age I’d met at a rock show. She was an acquaintance of my husband’s, someone he’d known in the indie rock community for several years. The first time we met was probably about a year before I finished my degree. We hit it off, and it turned out we were both grad students at the same university, and we had a lot in common (other than musician-type boyfriends).
She told me about her job, and the fact that she did this work on the side must have stuck with me, because when I ran into her on campus some months later, I asked her about it. I told her that I was going to need a job after defending my dissertation, and was looking at non-academic labour. She told me more details about the nature of the work, its ups and downs and how I could apply.
In the interests of public service, I’ve sorted through the dusty rabbit warrens of my computer and retrieved the actual cover letter I used to get that first non-academic job. And more than anything, with three years of hindsight, it actually reads like a prime example of what not to do when you’re trying to secure that first position.
To wit: just look at the length of that cover letter! That’s terrible!
Sure, we all know I tend to be a little long-winded, but come on! An entire page to list my many great accomplishments? What’s actually really terrible about this cover letter is that, although I claim to be some super-literate mistress of the universe, it’s clear that I wrote the damn thing in the most white-knuckled way. Don’t try to enlarge this letter and think that you’ll get some tips on how to write a solid cover letter from it. You won’t. You will be tortured by my incredibly inelegant turns of phrase like, “I have a high degree of literacy,” and “I am a highly educated person.” Oh, god, give me purchase!
You know that I am only sharing deeply embarrassing phrases such as these with you so that you will save yourself from sounding like such a knob. Seriously, if I read a cover letter from a near-PhD that used those kinds of expressions, I would toss it in the recycling bin simply because that kind of language only affirms stereotypes about PhDs. So academics beware! Try your damndest to talk like a normal person when you’re carving your cover letters!
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know my well-established views about networking: it doesn’t have to be sleazy. It’s actually happening all the time, all around you. Whether you’re chatting with an acquaintance at a party, a worker at the health food store or a colleague at a conference, you’re networking. Networking doesn’t mean you’re trying to get something from someone. It just means you’re exchanging information and that you’re open to the opportunities that that exchange might hold.
And I feel compelled to risk the broken record rep and say it again: you do actually know people outside of academia. Sometimes academics feel as though they’re insulated from the “outside world.” You’re not–you’re right in the thick of it. Even if most of your closest friends are academics, there are plenty of people you interact with every day who might know about job opportunities in their field. And if they don’t, they know people who do.
In the case of my first post-academic job, networking helped me skip past HR. Because I had the name and contact details of the power who actually had the power to hire me, I avoided the HR folks who might have tried to screen me out. This was useful for a former academic like me who might have beeb seen by HR as too over-qualified or under-qualified (or that paradoxical mix of the two). Now, I did still have an interview with HR, but it happened after the interview with the head of the department, and I got the distinct impression that it was merely a formality.
When I got that job, I converted my seven-page CV into a one-page résumé. As you may well be aware, there are scads and scads of books out there will all kinds of up-to-date information on how to write a résumé. But some of the best advice I can give you is to not do this:
Hoo, boy. Now, this is not the actual resume I used to go out on the job market, but it does look something like it (the real thing is just sooo embarassing–plus I don’t want to have ALL of my info hanging out on the internets).
Where to begin?
1. It was total news to me when I finished school, but apparently the rest of the world does not exclusively use a Times New Roman 12 point font for absolutely EVERYTHING they do. When you leave academia, the world of fonts opens up to you…somewhat. You still want a crisp, tidy font that conveys professionalism, but you can sex things up a little bit by breaking away from the essay-style look.
2. Consider how you can collapse all of your teaching experience into one line. While it is relevant to you and your academic colleagues that you taught three different sections of Intro to Sociology over the course of three years, do not put “Intro to Sociology” three different times on your résumé. Just don’t. If you taught that course from September to April, you will not be lying if you cut out the months and collapse it into one line:
2000-2003 Course director, Introduction to Sociology, U of Hellride
Really, no one will assume that you’re trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes by not specifying the months.
3. All of those dinky little research assistantships, graduate assistantships and marker/grader positions you’ve had? Mush those up into one line, too. Again, the distinctions matter to you, but probably not to anyone outside of academia.
4. Spare yourself the teeth gnashing about how obvious to be about your education. If you think it’s relevant to the position, put it at the top. If it’s not that relevant, put it beneath your work experience since this is (apparently) the convention, these days. Either way, the potential employer is going to see you are ABD or a Ph.D., and that will be only one factor upon which they base their decision to interview. Oh, and don’t waste a bunch of space by separating out your degrees (the way it is above, there). That’s just stupid.
5. Proofread like you’re scrutinizing your most-hated student’s paper. I’m sure the eagle-eyed among you have already noticed this, but see how the dashes between the dates for the education are all inconsistent? Don’t do that. For god’s sake, just don’t. If you’re not an “attention to detail” person, get a handful of people who are to look at your résumé. Ask them to specifically check for stuff like that.
6. You will need to consult a résumé book, a career coach or a job-search service for the best advice on this, but gone are the days when the little blurb about what you did at your job was supposed to read like a job description. Now the fashion is all about framing your accomplishments. Instead of saying, “Marked and graded assignments, helped students with writing skills,” you’re supposed to say things like, “Increased class average by 20% through individualized coaching during office hours.” You know–stuff that really demonstrates how heroic you were in your job (don’t let my cynicism about this rub off on you–just consult someone about how to do this best).
7. Finally, don’t damn yourself with faint praise. You see the “Computer skills” section and how very, very empty it is? It’s better not to say anything at all rather than draw attention to the fact that, oh, gee, you know how to use Word, just like 98% of the rest of the population. And don’t say vague shit like, “My typing speed is well over 80 WPM.” Be specific (but stop short of “My flaming fingers can produce at the rate of 110 WPM, which is how I got my dissertation done”).
{ 4 comments }
Things have been pretty quiet around these parts since the holidays. I’ve got a good reason for that, though. Remember back in November when I revealed that I was throwing in the freelance towel and had decided to look for a job? Well, I’ve got good news. After four solid months of actively job searching, I landed myself a shiny new full-time job…and I love it.
I started last week as a policy analyst at a women’s health-based, not-for-profit organization, and I could not be more thrilled. This is EXACTLY the type of job that I’ve been looking for: one that perfectly marries my skills with my values.
Although I won’t be discussing the job itself until I really get my feet wet, I can tell you a little bit about the process of getting it. I make no bones about the fact that I worked my butt off to get a job of this calibre. It was a hard slog. The unemployment rate in Toronto right now is around 10%, and there were some days when I despaired I’d never get a job (sound familiar?). But I also put my heart and soul into my search. Here are my stats:
Number of jobs applied for between August 24th and Dec 24th: 24
Number of job interviews: 2
Number of meetings with employers as a direct result of networking: 1
Number of formal networking events attended: 1
Number of conferences attended to meet potential employers: 3
Number of recruiters registered with: 1
Number of information interviews conducted: 19
Number of information interviewees who became friends: 1
Number of friends who helped with my job search: 18
Number of family members: 3
Number of social media platforms leveraged: 4
Number of job boards I routinely checked: 5
Number of different versions of my resume I now have: countless
Some people have asked me what would happen to Leaving Academia once I got a full-time job, and I can tell you that I haven’t decided 100%. One thing I know for sure is that I’m shuttering the consulting side of the project. The Toronto-based meetups will continue, I’m sure, with or without me (and there’s a fresh on this Tuesday at 6:00 pm! Details to follow!). And I am still writing my Leaving Academia column for Inside Higher Ed.
But the blog? I don’t know. I won’t be taking it down, because I know it’s still serving as a great resource for hundreds of people every day. But for me, it has served its purpose (as I’ve taken to saying, it was in no small part a “teacher, teach thyself” kind of project). It’s a project I am readying to move along and away from.
So perhaps it’s time to turn it over to you, the readers. Maybe I can turn it into a group blog, written and edited by a handful of you who are also interested in sharing this kind of information. Or perhaps I can find other ways of inserting user-generated content, like guest posts. Have any ideas? Would you be interested in helping keep the site alive? Leave a comment or flip me an email.
Finally, I just want to say to all of you academic leavers and possible academic leavers out there: don’t give up. I finished my PhD three and a half years ago, and though the time between now and then has been important and significant (I, um, had a baby and all!), it’s only now that I know I’m on the professional path that I really, really want to be on. This pattern is not unusual. So in your dark moments of total fear and uncertainty, please do know that, like I always say, if you were smart enough to get into a PhD program, you’re smart enough to get out.
{ 2 comments }
It is a fact that, although I am very proud of my PhD, there are certain times when I do and don’t reveal that this is a designation I carry. When I’m applying for jobs, for example, I do NOT put “Sabine Hikel, PhD” at the top of my resume. To me, that would be like putting, “Sabine Hikel, Ponce” way up there (I do, however, note my PhD on the second page, under “Education”). But when I want to get a meeting with someone, for example, and I think they’d be more likely to meet with me if they knew my credentials, I’ll pop a “Dr.” in front of my name in my email signature file. Another example: when I had to order new cheques after I defended my dissertation, I made a point of changing the way my name appeared on my cheques to read “Dr. Sabine Hikel.”
One instance when I never, ever, EVER make reference to my credential is when I fly. There is absolutely no way I ever want to be on a plane when a flight attendant approaches me with an urgent medical emergency, and I have to ask if the person needs a political scientist to tend to them. When I book travel, it’s “Ms.” all the way.
Thus, I was thrilled to find this t-shirt over at ThinkGeek, courtesy of Anna over at ABDPBT (herself a former-academic-turned-blogger).
Don’t you have a smartypants in your life for whom this would be perfect?
Regardless of what kind of holidays you celebrate (or the clever gifts you give and receive), I want to wish all of my readers a happy and healthy holiday season (and tomorrow, I’ll be posting about the early Christmas present I got this year). Remember, if any of you are going to the MLA this year, I’ll be at the Inside Higher Ed booth on the 28th and 29th, answering any questions you have about the post-academic life.
Happy holidays, everyone!
{ 2 comments }
We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming due to the extreme shitshow going on in Copenhagen right now. Canadian readers–hell, American readers, pitch in, too!–if you care at all about Canada’s sullied reputation in the climate talks, and the fact that Prime Minister Harper is selling out the world’s interests for those of Alberta oil, please go sign the petition over at Avaaz. The number of hours left in talks are dwindling, and I just can’t believe what’s happening right now.
{ 0 comments }
University Affairs: Careers Inside Higher Ed News Chronicle of Higher Education: On Hiring
