I’ve just come across a few more resources I wanted to share with everyone. This first one is something that Canadian job searchers may already know about is new to me. It’s a job search engine called Eluta (or I suppose it’s eluta, without the capitalization, but c’mon, people, isn’t that kind of ’90s?). From my brief poke around the site, it looks like a very smart way of organizing job search information; best of all, you can search for jobs offered by Canada’s top employers, the best employers for diversity, the greenest employers, etc. So it looks like a really nifty way implementing your values into the job search. Coolio, eh?
The other thing I’ve been meaning to share with you is this article at The Ladders (you may have to become a free member to access the piece) called “12 Daily Habits to Boost Your Hire-Ability.” The article, by Scott Ginsberg, has such sensible, practical advice that really applies to post-academic job searchers. Among his suggestions? “Be radically honest” (i.e. make sure everyone in your life, from your hair dresser to your dissertation supervisor, knows that you’re job hunting. Okay, maybe not your supervisor. But you know what I mean), start a blog, get up an hour earlier, etc.
What kind of daily practice have you instituted for your post-academic job search? Anything that you think might help others?
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
First off, thanks a lot for your great blog! Regarding job search sites, I realized that it seems very hard to get any interesting jobs in the search results. The problem is that it is hard to define any good search terms. For example, searching on “phd” gives a lot of jobs in the medical area, and very few in IT (which would be the interesting ones for me), which makes me assume that most jobs are not advertising that they would appreciate PhDs applying.
Another related issue is that coming from research with 8 years of experience there, it is hard to come up with search terms: terms that are in my expertise are in general not in job descriptions. And then again, jobs where I “could” fit, like “project manager” or “technical writer” are returning a huge amount of results such that it becomes hard to distinguish good from bad.
In general, I seem to get a lot of results back from the medical/pharmaceutical area, even though I never enter any search terms that directly relate to that (nor do i have any expertise there actually
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all the best!
Hi Stijn. Thanks for your comment. You raise a good point: in order to know what your search terms are, you already need to have done some amount of research into the jobs that you might be interested in and suitable for. That research will teach you a bit about keywords that would point to jobs that would fit you well.
I would never suggest putting in “PhD” as a search term. Sometimes job ads do call for “advanced degrees.” But what will make you qualified for a job will not be your PhD credential. What will make you qualified for a job is your skill set.
Having said that, wading through job ads can be a very time-consuming and tedious process. That’s why networking and information interviews can be so much more effective, over the long term, than scanning ads. Also, if you have a strong sense of the sector you want to work in, you can go to the career pages of particular companies or organizations that you’d like to work for.
thanks a lot for the tips!
We’re really glad that you enjoy our job search engine, Eluta.ca, which recently celebrated its 3rd birthday.
We also have special tool for recent graduates to find employers that are looking for people with their particular academic qualifications. It’s called our New Grads tool and it lets job-seekers match their academic qualifications, including master- and doctoral-level degrees, with employers that are interested in their field.
More than 300 degree and diploma programs are included and the data set is drawn from a guide called The Career Directory, which our sister company has been publishing in Canada for over 15 years.
It’s a great tool for job-hunters with great educational qualifications, but not so much non-academic work experience.
Hope this helps — keep up the great work on your blog!