I just found out about a faaabulous career source that is sooo relevant to the kind of career transition stuff you may be mulling over right now. Prepare yourself for many hours of trawling.
The site is called ICould, and, as their tagline says, “It just shows what you could do.” It features videos of different people talking about their jobs and their career trajectories. What’s really great for the post-academic community is that there is s a search engine where you can actually search for people’s stories by degree attained. As of today, the search engine turned up 118 hits for people with postgraduate or professional qualification.
And as if to verify my own ardent belief that your career trajectory is in no way limited by your area of study, the first vid (okay, the only vid) I watched was with Helen Toland, who has a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering and now works as a radio producer for the BBC — a job that she loves (and yes, she sweated it out in a coffee shop for a year before she wormed her way into the BBC).
So check out ICould and let me know if there are any stories that really get your pulse racing. I found this link, incidentally, from a blog authored by Evelyne Jardin called Docteurs & Co. It’s a French language blog that’s associated with the Association Bernard Gregory, a magazine published in France that’s oriented at Ph.D.s transitioning into the private sector. Although the blog is only in French, the magazine has an English language edition. It is chock full of really juicy information. Evelyne and I have been communicating by email for over a year now (and keep missing each other by phone, where I shall inflict my terrible French on her). Yesterday, Evelyne gave us a shoutout, and that’s where I found out about ICould.
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I’m excited about this resource! At first glance, kind of reminds me of a modern-day Studs Terkel study, like what he conducts in his fascinating book Working: People Talk about What They Do all Day and How They Feel about What They Do.
Keep ‘em coming! I’m realizing that the research skills I’ve gained in grad school are seriously helping the job search along. In some ways, it’s totally delicious discovering all these interesting job resources – esp the ones that offer an inside look at postacademic jobs.
Yeah, figuring out what you want to do with your life is kind of like a whole new research project! And when I first encountered Studs Terkel, I kind of wanted to weep, feeling that mix of awe/jealousy/resentment that I hadn’t done that project first!
This site looks great – much better than normal text based career sites. Am also a HUGE fan of http://www.careerplayer.com which is similar but seems more focussed to me. Bring on the career research!