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.

Related posts:

1. Dos and don’ts of the post-academic job application process
2. Former academic rock star becomes union organizer–during the recession!
3. Ways in which I messed up during my job search

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.

Related posts:

1. The résumé: To hide your academic credentials or not?
2. Dos and don’ts of the post-academic job application process
3. Podcast #1: “There are places that would walk over their own mother to hire you.”

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”).

Related posts:

1. Midnight inspiration: The part you control is preparation
2. Dos and don’ts of the post-academic job application process
3. Ways in which I messed up during my job search

Someone alerted us to Donna Messer, a networking queen who actually does have a lot of good insights into networking.

Whoa, talking about networking: for those of you on the academic job hunt, are you aware of academia.edu, which someone at the meeting described quite accurately as “Facebook for academics”?

Are you still wondering how to maximize LinkedIn in your job search? Here’s a nifty little video that will explain it all.

And then there’s the piece I wrote about my recursive networking process over at Inside Higher Ed.

And wow, why had I not yet encountered MITACS, an organization that links business, government and non-profits with universities “to develop cutting-edge tools to support the growth of our knowledge-based economy.” It actually has post-doc internship programs in industry–wow (I’m assuming, though, that this is limited to Canada–if you find out otherwise, intrepid Americans, let me know). It does seem mostly aimed at the science-y among us, but it seems there’s a wealth of info at the site for researchers of all stripes.

Moving away from networking, but totally worthy, is a little advice for those of you dreading telling your supervisor/PI that you’re planning on  leaving academia.

And if you need even more post-academic advice, I just discovered Kate Duttro’s Career Change for Academics site.

And here’s a superfabulous former music psychologist turned writer-editor-blogger, Christine Koh (and one of these days I’ll post my interview with English-PhD-turned-blogger Anna Viele who writes over at ABDPBT).

Finally, one reader sent in this link about the “quarterlife crisis” phenomenon, which included this little zinger:

An obvious choice for panicking twentysomethings with a post-undergraduate sense of displacement and for the ones that aren’t fulfilled by their jobs is grad school. James, a 28-year-old student, says “Quarterlife crises are the reason that so many universities have turned lower-level graduate programs into a cash cow.” Graduate and professional school can provide a direction and delay other choices about career and stability. And, while it’s true that higher education can “help students improve their personal and professional competency,” it can also “leave students feeling insecure about their abilities and their job prospects,” says Marc Scheer, who is a career counsellor and educational consultant, the author of No Sucker Left Behind: Avoiding the Great College Rip-Off and an advocate for considering options beyond formal education. (He also has a Ph.D.) Scheer emphasizes making an informed choice. “Whether graduate school is a wise move depends on each individual student and what they want to study. Law school can be helpful, but mostly if a student can gain acceptance to a top-tier school. Getting a Ph.D. could be dangerous for some students, especially since Ph.D. graduation rates are obscenely low these days, and few tenure-track jobs are available. So it really depends.”

And, dovetailing what I wrote earlier this week,

Women also find themselves conflicted, usually more than men, about the trajectory of their twenties as they relate to relationships. Sarah, who is 27 and works at a non-profit, wants to travel and get a master’s degree, but feels conflicted about doing either. “I want to have kids, and every day that goes by, I have this number in my head. It’s 32. It used to be 30. That’s only a few years from now. I’m thinking, if I don’t do some of this stuff now, before I have kids, am I going to be able to do it?” Women are roundly considered to be in biologically ideal form for baby-making in their twenties and early thirties, which are also prime fun-having and career-building years. For women who want all of the things promised by (theoretically) equal education, work and sex lives, the conflict of desires can be catastrophic.

Related posts:

1. Jobs, consulting and networking: A Friday roundup
2. What are you doing for your job search when you’re not online?
3. Should universities give grad students career training?

As it turned out, the post suggested activities like, “If your wireless is down, you can still search for jobs in newspaper classifieds,” and “Write letters to companies you might want to work for.” Huh? What about, um, say, talking to actual live human beings, some of whom you may already know!

Networking is not a mysterious activity; it’s also not a sleazy activity. Networking is about relationships. It’s not about begging or cringing while you ask for a job lead (in fact, asking for a job lead is probably the last thing you should be doing while you’re networking). It’s about information gathering and relationship cultivation. Probably one of the simplest, most straightforward pieces I’ve read lately validates what I often tell my clients: talk to everyone you know about the fact that you’re looking to change careers, including your hairdresser, your dog walker, the concierge of your building, and, as the article says, your grandma. Sure, you may not want a job as a hairdresser, a dogwalker, a concierge or…a grandma. But those people all know people, and following the trail of people is partly what networking is about.

But don’t forget that networking isn’t just a one-way street, of squeezing information out from people about job prospects. It’s also about finding out what other people need and want. As researchers, we’re trained to look for gaps — so start using that skill in your everyday life. Is your hairdresser him/herself looking for a dogwalker? Hook him/her up with yours. Is your concierge looking for a a hairdresser? You get the idea.

I’m going to post again about my own networking activities as of late to give you a bit of an illustration about what I mean. In the meantime, I’m going to spend a little more quality time with my computer before I head out to engage with some real, live human beings.

Related posts:

1. Leveraging your assets in your post-PhD job search
2. Job search tools that post-academics can use, too
3. Another online tool for academic leavers

In your non-academic job search, other, sometimes more elusive, criteria set the standard for your candidacy. Unlike academic achievements, which can be pointed to definitively as proof of your ability, non-academic employers are going to be looking for qualities that can’t be measured by a grades transcript or a list of publications. Sure, they’re going to need concrete qualifications like a university degree, or a knowledge of a certain software package, but they also need things like communication skills, writing skills, teamwork skills and multitasking. Fortunately, these are things the average Ph.D. has. Unfortunately, it’s up to you to demonstrate that effectively to potential employers.

One mistake that fresh-out-of-grad-school post-academics may make when entering the non-academic job market is to assume that your potential non-academic employer really gives a hoot about your Ph.D. Oh, sure, they care about your Ph.D. insofar as they care about someone who can set priorities, meet deadlines, work under pressure, exercise problem-solving skills, and so forth. But he or she may not actually know that getting a Ph.D. is actually proof of all of those abilities. So putting your degree proudly at the top of your cover letter and résumé, as though that alone were proof of your qualifications for the job, is not the way to go (for most sectors). But, I hasten to add, shamefully trying to tuck away the major accomplishment that is the Ph.D. is really no better.

A while back, I met with a client who told me that he felt as though his Ph.D. was a giant boulder he was trying to hide behind him. It was this huge liability, in his mind, that he couldn’t disguise. My response? I said that, from my point of view, there was no point in trying to hide having a Ph.D. Even if you wanted to, I can’t imagine how you would do that (short of actually lying on your résumé, which is SIN NUMBER ONE, in my books). Hiding a Ph.D. seems like a silly strategy when what you could actually do is leverage it.

My reply to this client was to tell him that we were going to take a big old pickaxe and smash it into that big boulder of a Ph.D. We’re going to break into its component pices and offer those pieces to potential employers. What are the pieces? Teaching, research, writing, to be sure, but everything else that I mentioned above, too: ability to juggle and set priorities, meet deadlines, work under pressure, and so on.

By foregrounding and offering employers the skills that they want, you are making it clear that you “get it” — you understand what they need. The Ph.D. (and all the activities you did while undertaking it) are proof of those skills. By using the Ph.D. as proof of those skills, you’re leveraging your degree — neither hiding it nor foregrounding it. Rather, you’re using it optimally to communicate your strengths as a candidate to your potential employer. And wow, it’s so much easier than hauling that big boulder around behind you.

Related posts:

1. Dos and don’ts of the post-academic job application process
2. Job search tools that post-academics can use, too
3. The résumé: To hide your academic credentials or not?

We lucky Canadians have a national holiday on Monday, so my husband and I decided to make it an extra long weekend by taking Friday off, too. That means that, when you read this, I should be sitting in the sun in an undisclosed location, enjoying a gin and tonic. Actually, given that I usually set my posts to publish in the early morning, I’ll probably be stepping on Cheerios while chasing after my kid when this hits your inbox. Regardless, I just want to wish all the Canucks a happy long weekend, and to let everyone know I’ll be back to my bloggy goodness–not to mention my email accounts–on Tuesday.

I’ve spent the last two months working with clients who are on the post-academic job hunt, and I’ve learned a few things along the way about what people find the most troubling and confusing about the process. In the best tradition of Glamour magazine, I’m going to present a do and don’t list summarizing some real golden nuggest of wisdom.

DO contact someone inside the organization if you’ve got questions. Sometimes that might be the hiring manager, sometimes in might be HR. One of my intrepid clients found someone inside the organization who would be her peer, someone who had the same job title that she was applying for. She asked a few questions about the job, and got back a really fantastic, informative, helpful reply. Not only did she glean some clues for how she should position herself in her application, not only did she demonstrate initiative to her potential employer, she got her name front and centre with someone who, it so happens, is on the hiring committee.

DON’T underestimate your past experience. I’ve had clients casually mention accomplishments in passing that hadn’t appeared on their CVs because they felt like ancient history (i.e. before the MA) and weren’t relevant to their academic work. Sometimes that stuff ends up quite fruitfully on the résumé. Any kind of volunteering, internship or leadership roles you’ve had can be useful woven into a résumé or cover letter, providing proof of the strength of your skills.

DO demonstrate enthusiasm. Employers want to bring people on board who will have energy. They want people who can get excited about the work they do and that the company/foundation/organization does. Excitement does not equal a lack of professionalism. Excitement equals commitment, drive and teamwork. Can you answer the question, “Why do you want this job?” with enthusiasm? If so, your future employer is gonna like that a lot.

DON’T be afraid to mine language and information for all different parts of your life. Clients have sent me grant applications, various cover letters, CVs, old résumés, some publications, lists of likes and dislikes–things that we wouldn’t use directly in their applications, but that give me a sense of their skills and that they can use as proof of their skills.

DO be yourself. Let your freak flag fly. If you act like someone you’re not, you’re going to be in a real pickle if you actually land the job. But more to the point, what you might perceive as a weakness or liability can actually be an asset. For some of you, you might feel like your Ph.D. is a liability. I had one client who had a hidden disability, one that she could hide very, very well. But instead of doing that, she was open about this disability, thereby demonstrating how her knowledge of and experience with disability issues actually makes her a strong candidate for the job.

DON’T confuse a CV with a résumé. They are two totally different docs. A CV is a list of all your accomplishments in one part of your life. It is read by people who have those same accomplishments, too. A résumé is an argument. It is a carefully crafted argument for why you are the best person for that job, with proof indicating why you are exactly what the employer needs. The company needs someone with  good communication skills? You’ve got good communication skills! And you can prove it, too!

What have you learned along the way about the job application process?

Related posts:

1. Leveraging your assets in your post-PhD job search
2. What not to say in your job interview
3. The résumé: To hide your academic credentials or not?

I have a client (we’re going to call her Eleanor Kaye) who is trained as a sociologist. Eleanor recently told me about an old sociological study on networking and job hunting. She offered to write a guest post about the study, knowing that it would be of interest to the readers here at Leaving Academia. Here it is–both the research and Eleanor’s own life experience illustrating the research!

We’ve all heard the cynical expression, “it’s who you know” when it comes to looking for a job. But in the 1970s, US sociologist Mark Granovetter conducted a social networking study and found that, counterintuitively, people didn’t necessarily get jobs through a close friend or family member–they got them through a contact that was more remote, a “weak tie” in soc-speak.

Granovetter’s explanation for his “strength of weak ties” argument is straightforward enough: the people we are closest to, the friends and family we consider part of our everyday social network, tend to know the same kinds of things (notice how your friends are, overall, more similar than different from one another). People we don’t know that well, those we may just call acquaintances, are more closely tied to other networks–so they know different things, have different connections. An acquaintance can be a kind of bridge to another network of unexpected information and resources.

Whether you consider someone an “acquaintance” or not, the fact is that anyone you don’t know that well is a person who is connected to other people you don’t know, who know things and other people you don’t know, and so on.

Many years ago, in sheer desperation, I worked at a call centre where my only work tools were a heavy, black, rotary-dial telephone, and a dirty phone book. I sat at a makeshift desk (a slab of plywood balanced on sawhorses) and made cold calls from the phonebook, trying to be heard over the din of the other callers. One morning, the two young men who worked on either side of me were talking past me to each other, in hushed tones, about their parole officers. I knew there was something seriously wrong with this picture.

One of the places I called that day was a small non-profit agency. When I asked to speak to the person in charge, in order to make my sales pitch, I was told that she was busy… conducting job interviews. I politely asked about the job and before I was caught in this inappropriate chat mode by the beady-eyed call centre bossman, I got the specifics and during my lunch break I rushed over there with my resume. I was interviewed the next day and got the job–needless to say, it was a much better job and I learned a whole new set of skills while there. This is perhaps an extreme example of the strength of weak ties, but you get the point.

This weak tie theory has practical applications for more than just job-getting.

When I first moved to Toronto in 2000, to start my PhD, the rental vacancy rate hovered close to zero and the apartments that were available were ridiculously overpriced (”no thanks, I don’t think that having the bathtub in my bedroom should be considered a ‘feature’!”). I began to panic. Would I have to cancel my acceptance and return to the coast? In desperation I began to talk to everyone I met about my situation. To my partner’s embarrassment, I literally stopped people on the street to ask them if they had any leads on a decent apartment. One morning I asked the woman who ran a nearby convenience store if she knew of anyone with an apartment for rent. She said that in fact she did. A man had come in earlier that morning to buy some milk and told her he’d just finished renovating an apartment and hadn’t yet advertised it for rent. We moved in a few days later and stayed for three years.

If you think of all the jobs you’ve had, you will probably find that quite a number of them were found this way–through the strength of weak ties. While we may be tempted to write off this research as more sociology-of-the-obvious, what we can take from it is this: talk to everyone you meet about what you are doing and what you want. Encourage them to do the same with you (this reciprocity idea is mine!). You simply do not know, and really should not assume, what someone else knows or doesn’t, and who they might know. If in fact it is a small world after all, it’s only because we talk to each other and pass along our stories and insights… or in this case, job leads.

But let’s face it–it’s not just about the strength of weak ties. It’s also about recognizing these opportunities, screwing up our courage and proceeding with chutzpa!

Related posts:

1. What are you doing for your job search when you’re not online?
2. A Thursday morning link roundup
3. Should you quit grad school during the recession?

• Have you heard about The Ladders? It’s kind of like Monster.com, but for $100,000+ jobs. I know, I know–you’re thinking there’s no point in job searching on a site like that, partly because you feel so underqualified but also because you don’t have a sleazy job in some corporation just because you’d make the big bucks (or would you? Hmm!). If you take a moment to sign up, though, you’ll find there is a lot of useful, free information aimed a professionals (and guess what? Even if you don’t feel like one, you’re going to market yourself like one). For example, I thought of you guys when I saw this article on the elusive “hidden job market.” It’s a very brief and to-the-point how-to on networking your butt into your next job.
• I know how some of you have slightly icky feelings about turning from academia to the corporate sector. You’re not sure if you can play the corporate game, and if you’re going to have expectations imposed on you that you may not be able to cope with. My friend Jamie Ridler is offering a workshop called Authentic Professionalism, which is precisely oriented for those of you who aren’t sure how to work in a private sector context but still be yourself.
• A client sent me a link to a site called Squawkfox. When you first get there, it looks slightly busy with all of those ads and the “everything but the kitchen sink” nature of it. The aim of the site, actually, is to provide information about frugal living (kitchen sink, like I said). However, there is an avalanche of really solid information about resume-writing. It’s not specifically on converting a CV to a resume, but if you start at the begining of her series, you’ll find links to tips on jop hunting, doing a skills inventory and probably one of the best top-10 lists on networking that I’ve ever read.

What online resources have you found helpful in your post-academic travels? Leave a comment and let us know!

Related posts:

1. What are you doing for your job search when you’re not online?
2. How I Got My First Post-Academic Job
3. The résumé: To hide your academic credentials or not?

The Ph.D. who asked me this question has, since graduating, worked as an adjunct/sessional teacher. Though she has an impressive CV, her decision to live near her family has limited her ability to apply for jobs far from home. As a result, she is considering leaving academia. But, she writes:

I have a pretty big obstacle standing between me and the Outside World: I have a hidden physical disability that makes going into a workplace five days a week impossible. College teaching, on its every-other-day class schedule, allowed me to excel at my job without becoming ill or having to say “no” to employers’ expectations.

I had tried other professions before grad school, and despite good health care and a stabilized condition, I couldn’t work within the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday parameters. Are there job placement offices or career advisors for a situation like this, and how do I find them?

I told the reader I knew of no particular career resources for people with disabilities. All I could suggest was the obvious, which she had already looked into (you know, the campus career centre, the office for persons with disabilities). So the first question to you, the readers, is whether anyone knows of job offices or career advisors who specialize in persons with disabilities.

Our email conversation then moved on to trying to identify forms of work that don’t involve the 9 to 5 life. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), a movement towards flexible labour (read: part-time, contract, home-based, etc.) is the way the job market appears to be going these days. Isn’t that what Time Magazine just said?

The help-seeker said she had tried consulting and entrepreneurial enterprises when she was younger, but her health and the trials of job searching has made it difficult to cobble together the work that being self-employed requires. Moreover, she likes working with and for people. She also said:

I just wish I could simply show up at a stable, humane place and  “serve.” You know what I mean?

Reading this, my suggestion was for her to

Pinpoint some organizations that are in need of people showing up and serving, and see if you’d be interested in working for them. If you made some cold calls (gulp!) and did some information interviews, you could find out from people what kind of flexibility those organizations offer (like telecommuting). If you found work with a place that let you work part of the time at home, perhaps that would be a way for you to manage your disability.

When she replied, she said she’d like to first know more about what kinds of industries have flexible scheduling and hire Ph.D.s. These are, of course, two different questions. Here’s my take on the first.

Some job ads will actually specify that some of the work is done virtually, aka, no need to come into the office; you interface with co-workers and/or clients from home via the web. I actually just helped a client write a resume and cover letter for a job in Washington that stated that much of the work was done virtually. So it’s a good idea to keep an eye open for language like that (”flex-time available,” “virtual work environment,” stuff like that) when you’re scanning job ads.

But in some cases, that kind of working arrangement is negotiated between an employer and employee. Sometimes this negotiation will happen once you’re already working for a company or organization. When my crack I.T. team was still working for the big I.T. company, he had orchestrated a routine work-from-home arrangement. A friend of mine who’s a former academic works in an office in the recruitment sector, and she has been able to make occasional arrangements to work from home; she also gets Friday afternoons off in the summer time.

But in other cases, it can happen prior to even starting the job. I have a friend, for example, who negotiated a 4-day work week with her previous two employers. She did this simply because she hates the 5-day work week; she is a more efficient and happy worker at 4 days. The negotiation occurred when the job offer was in hand and they had gotten down to salary negotiations. With the first job, she ended up actually working the equivalent of a 5-day week because of the time she put in on the weekends. With her current position, though, her 4-day week is actually a 4-day week.

So to answer the first question (who offers flexible arrangements?), my take is: potentially anyone, if you ask them at the right time and in the right way (by “the right way,” I mean, “by spinning it to their advantage,” in terms of lower costs, increased efficiency, etc.). On this, I’m going to quote from that Time magazine article:

More and more, companies are searching for creative ways to save – by experimenting with reduced hours or unpaid furloughs or asking employees to move laterally.

At Deloitte, each employee’s lattice is nailed together during twice-a-year evaluations focused not just on career targets but also on larger life goals. An employee can request to do more or less travel or client service, say, or to move laterally into a new role – changes that may or may not come with a pay cut. Deloitte’s data from 2008 suggest that about 10% of employees choose to “dial up” or “dial down” at any given time. Deloitte’s Mass Career Customization (MCC) program began as a way to keep talented women in the workforce, but it has quickly become clear that women are not the only ones seeking flexibility. Responding to millennials demanding better work-life balance, young parents needing time to share child-care duties and boomers looking to ease gradually toward retirement, Deloitte is scheduled to roll out MCC to all 42,000 U.S. employees by May 2010. Deloitte executives are in talks with more than 80 companies working on similar programs.

…The recession provides an incentive for companies to design more lattice-oriented careers. Studies show telecommuting, for instance, can help businesses cut real estate costs 20% and payroll 10%.

To me, the task of finding work that interests you and uses your skills is about seeking out (or, the case of entrepreneurship, creating) that work specifically. While you are at the research stage, it is useful to know who hires Ph.D.s (and you can start with this list here). But the fact of the matter is that there are ABDs and Ph.D.s everywhere, in every sector, at every pay scale. Thousands of people earn Ph.D.s and don’t get tenure track positions. They scatter to places that interest them. So that’s why I urge people to do the same: look for work in fields that interest you. Then find out (through applying, networking, information interviews, studying the web site, etc.) whether or not particular organizations can cater to your needs (physical, emotional, mental, geographical), etc.

What kind of requirements do you have of a post-academic job? What steps have you taken to ensure those needs are met? And what companies have you found hire Ph.D.s?

Related posts:

1. Do you know about McKinsey?
2. PhD research translated into private sector work
3. Longing to leave academia and be an agent of social change?

Believe it or not, conveying your skills on a résumé actually takes some skill. Chances are, though, you’re equipped with that skill.

Way back when I was a teenager, a résumé was a summary of work you’d done, with (at most) a little job description of what you did at which position. These days, the trend in résumés is to speak about your accomplishments at your job. It’s not enough to just describe what you did–you’re supposed to talk about what you achieved. Yeah. I admit, it’s a little barf-worthy for academics to undertake this kind of exercise. But hey, if it gets you a job, it’s worth it, right?

Let’s take your teaching background as an example. You’re going to list it on your résumé, and it’s only going to take up one line. Not one physical line, necessarily, but unlike your scholarly CV, you’re not going to list every single course you ever taught. You’re going to gather them all together into one listing on your résumé, something along the lines of:

2003 – 2009  Course director, Hellfire University (Introduction to Mental Gymnastics 101, Theories on Wankery 205, Shallow Scholarship 303)

Then, underneath that, in about 4 to 6 bullet points, you are going to use the skills-based language that you’ve been working on, but framed in terms of accomplishments [insert any necessary gagging here].

You’re NOT writing a job description (“Taught three years of intro to poli sci”) and you’re not just writing out the skills you used (“Used Power Point in classes”). You’re writing out what you accomplished in that position in language that is very specific, illustrative and, perhaps most important of all, speaks to the skills called for in the job for which you’re applying.

For example, if you’re applying for a job that specifically calls for someone with strong written and verbal communication skills, you can illustrate that you’ve got those skills in your teaching section by saying stuff like:

“Responded to students’ coursework with extensive written and oral feedback that was timely, relevant and emphasized course curriculum.”

“Planned and executed lively, engaging one-hour lectures on a weekly basis to groups of 150 first-year [that’s Canadian-ese for “freshman”] students, including a 10-minute segment when students could ask questions.”

NB: Résumés, apparently, loved numbers, and the more of them that you can sprinkle in, the better.

Got other résumé questions? Not sure how to slash and burn your CV in order to come up with a résumé? Email me or leave a comment and I’ll compile your queries into a future post on résumé-writing. Or you could be quick and greedy and hire me to help you out with your résumé. You choose.

Related posts:

1. The résumé: To hide your academic credentials or not?
2. Dos and don’ts of the post-academic job application process
3. Tackling transferable skills, part three

By this penultimate post (see, even when you’ve left academia, you still get to pull out the $10 words once in a while!) in this series, you’ve gone through the trouble of assessing your transferable skills (with help from part one, two and three in this series). So now what? Once you’ve done that exercise and built up your ego a bit, there are a few different things you can do.

The first is to spend a bit of time with yourself getting a sense of which skills you have that you actually want to use in your professional life. It might seem obvious, but the skills that you enjoy using may provide clues to where your career can (or should!) go. And just because you’ve used certain skills in the past and are even good at them doesn’t mean you will want to use them again in your future career. You might be one hell of a lecturer, but you might shudder at the thought of ever having to stand in front of a hall of students even again. Go over the skills you have and look for patterns (are there a lot of communication or organizational skills?). Listen to your own feelings as you scan them. Are there certain areas or tasks you did that you feel especially proud of or excited by? Are there things you’d jump at the chance to do again?

After doing a skills analysis, you can start casually (or earnestly, depending on where you’re at) exploring the job market to see what’s out there and what interests you. It’s great to do this after coming off doing a transferable skills analysis because you can feel confident that when an ad calls for someone with skills X, Y and Z, you know you’ve got them.

You can also start networking, because you have a stronger sense of what you’re about and what you’ve got to offer (and I’ll do a separate post on that for those who fear that networking = sleazy). You can start cold-calling/emailing people and asking for information interviews because you have a sense of your skills and how they can be applied on post-academic work. You can also start going into job interviews because you can speak confidently about what you can do and what grad school prepared you for.

A note about information interviews: I contact a lot of people to do information interviews, both for my own personal interests, but also in connection with Leaving Academia. Rarely do I get turned down, even though the people I’m interviewing receive no direct benefit from talking to me (though they may see it as part of their own smart networking practice). Here’s a big secret about people: they love to talk about themselves, their work and their interests–especially if they’ve got an enthusiastic, tuned-in listener. Some people really love sharing, knowing that they’re helping someone. Asking for an info interview is hard, but doing them is great fun. I’ll write more about info interviews later because they’re really not nearly as scary as you may think.

Let’s just re-cap what the whole point of doing a transferable skills analysis is for, so that you don’t do one and then end up shooting yourself in the foot anyway:

In a cover letter, résumé or job interview, do not assume that your prospective employer will immediately understand anything that was involved in teaching your course or conducting your research. You need to spell your skills out for them loud and clear, because on their own, your academic accomplishments won’t do much talking for you.

Practice speaking about your skills fluently. Instead of talking about your research in an academic way (which is to address the topic of your research), talk about the skills you use: “When I wrote my 300-page thesis, I analyzed and compared two different cultures, so I had to develop a system where I could store and retrieve information quickly and easily.” This will be much more meaningful to the average non-academic because you’re giving pieces of information that they can understand: wrote, 300-page, analyzed, compared, develop, system, store, retrieve, information, quickly and easily are all words that potential employers get (and in some cases, might like to hear).

The other thing that’s important to keep in mind is that doing this transferable skills stuff is, in fact, a never-ended process. As you build up your skills, you need to take the time to recognize them and incorporate them into your identity and sense of self.

This leads me to a final thought I have on transferable skills (until I do my final post on the issue on Tuesday, when I talk about plugging your skills into your résumé). As important as this transferable skills exercise is, I am a firm believer that careers are half planned and half stumbled into. If you spend too much time reading career websites, you start getting a little squirrely and you start to lose perspective. Some career resources imply that all you need to do to have a successful career is to plan and research. And that’s just really not the case. As Penelope Trunk says, sometimes it’s better to just get out there and start meeting people than it is to worry about that verb you’re using on the third line of your résumé.

But still, you’re going to read a lot of stuff in career books that suggests that career planning occurs in a linear fashion, when we all know damn well that’s not how the mind works. It’s much more cyclical:

You think of a job you’d love to pursue.

You think you’re too overqualified/underqualified/old for that job.

So you read all the career books and write out all the plans and all the shiny action verbs for your résumé. This keeps you busy, too busy to start talking to people who actually do that job.

At a party, you meet someone who knows someone who knows someone.

But you’re too shy to call and follow up.

You kinda hate yourself for not following up.

You watch Oprah; you grind up the courage to follow up.

You call. They don’t call back.

So you patch together some work that pays the bills. You throw out your stupid career books.

One day, in a fit of delusion, you apply for a totally different job that you thought you were too underqualified/overqualified/old for. You even make a phone call to the hiring manager, who happens to be someone who knows someone who knows someone you know. They’ve heard of you. They like you.

The door to possibility opens.

I’ve talked to former academics who fell into the work they did not by planning and goal-setting but by luck and following their sense of fun. What recent escapees from academia need is time: time to decompress, time to become yourself again, time to heal. And after that, you need openness and a willingness to take risks. As another consultant I was speaking with recently said, “To increase your success rate, you need to double your failure rate.”

Related posts:

1. Tackling transferable skills, part two
2. Tackling transferable skills, part three
3. Transferable skills, part five: Putting your skills on your résumé

In part two of my transferable skills series, I talked about doing an initial round of brainstorming related to the different tasks that you did before and after grad school (and if you want to see part one, my video overview of my whole method, go here). This post is going to offer you some more language, and some more resources to find the language, that you can use to help identify and articulate your skills.

You can uncover language for the skills you used in academe by going straight to the horse’s mouth. You can use documents produced by universities and research councils to help you articulate what exactly academics do. For example, The Ontario Council of Graduate Studies has a very short report called “Report of the Working Group on Graduate Degree Expectations.” You can download it here. Although it’s written in extremely dry academic language, it might spark some ideas around just what the hell you’ve been doing in grad school all these years.

For example, this report says people who have Ph.D.s have demonstrated:

a.  The ability to conceptualize, design, and implement research for the generation of new knowledge, applications, or understanding at the forefront of the discipline, and to adjust the research design or methodology in the light of unforeseen problems;
b.  The ability to make informed judgments on complex issues in specialist fields, sometimes requiring new methods; and
c.  The ability to produce original research, or other advanced scholarship, of a quality to satisfy peer review, and to merit publication.

Well, this is how I would put this in normal people language:

a. The ability to conduct research; to be able to think up ideas and execute them; to identify gaps in knowledge; to be adaptable and flexible, and able to make changes to a plan, even while in mid-stream

b. To be able to make an informed decision; to be able to make decisions based on analyzing large volumes of information; to be good at troubleshooting

c. To be able to write and conduct research that meets team standards

The document is only a couple of pages long, but it might serve as a good resource to clarify just what skills you actually used in grad school. After all, these are not things just everybody in the labour market can do.

Are there documents your own department or university has prepared with big promises of what its students learn or where its students end up? Are there grants or scholarships or awards you’ve won, stating criteria about the proposal you’ve written? Why not borrow from that? A lot of the language won’t be labour market-ready (i.e. it’s not stuff you would necessarily put on a résumé) and a lot of it will make your eyes glaze over (particularly if you don’t want a job doing research anymore). But at this point, you’re still just trying to get a handle on what those transferable skills are (we’ll get to conveying those skills on a résumé in Tuesday’s post of next week).

One of my favourite articles on transferable skills–I suppose because it’s been around for a while, and I used this myself way back in 2006–is written by Pat Cryer. She emphasizes how poorly most Ph.D.s value their own skills, and emphasizes how important it is to be able to articulate your skills. She lists several skills all Ph.D.s have (some of this is written in her language):

The ability to see a prolonged task through to completion, the ability to plan, to allocate time and money, to troubleshoot, to keep up with a particular subject, to be flexible, to change direction, to think laterally and creative, to develop alternative approaches, to sift through large quantities of information, to take on board other points of view, to challenge premises, to question procedures and interpret meaning, to make presentations, to deal with criticism.

Cryer says:

Adaptability is highly valued by employers who need people to anticipate and lead change in a fast-moving world, yet resist it where it is only for its own sake…

The skills of coping with isolation are transferable and can be valued highly by employers. They include self-direction; self-discipline; self-motivation; resilience; tenacity and the abilities to prioritise and juggle a number of tasks at once. Students working on group projects should be able to claim advance team-working skills….
Think about advanced computer literacy, facility with the Internet, and the ability to teach effectively. Negotiation skills in accessing resources can be highly sought after. And doctoral students used to networking with others, using project management techniques, and finding their way round specialist libraries or archives.

Doesn’t that make you feel good? Especially the part about isolation–all that suffering pays off in being able to make your case about how independent and self-reliant you are!

It turns out that Pat Cryer actually has even more information on all of this skills stuff over here. And there’s this presentation here from UPenn on transferable skills for Ph.D.s., too.

That should be enough to get your started and feeling a little bit more confident about what you have to offer. What other skills do you think you have? Are there other generalist skills that make you an “all-rounder” that employers like to see? What kinds of specialist skills have you built up along the way?

Related posts:

1. Tackling transferable skills, part two
2. Transferable skills, part five: Putting your skills on your résumé
3. Tackling transferable skills, part four: Now what?

I officially started off my 5-part transferable skills series on Friday with a quick video overview of my take on how academics could most usefully go about doing the whole transferable skills thingy.

What I didn’t say in the video is that identifying and articulating your transferable skills can be really irritating, frustrating and demoralizing process. But once you get the hang of it, it can be really gratifying, pleasantly surprising, and a real ego boost.

Doing this kind of an exercise–whether you do it according to a career-building guide (you guys saw my 2006 copy of What Colour is Your Parachute!) or just as a personal exercise on your own–is not only critical to your success (IMHO), but it’s also a great place to start when you’re ready to formulate your plan to leave academia.

When you’re searching to get a handle on what your career options are, when you’re trying to sort out what you can offer the world, when you’re struggling to identify which step to take next, doing a transferable skills analysis can begin to clarify those questions for you. Plus it really combats those, “Oh, my god, I’m so useless,” feelings that you may have when quitting/exiting grad school.

Like I suggested in the video, a good place to start is to consider all of the different tasks that you did while in grad school (or in the case of adjuncts or faculty, what you’ve done up to this particular point in your academic career). Write down all of the different kinds of work you did. Your list may look something like this:

•    Teaching
•    My own research
•    Research assistant for Professor Grinch
•    Sat on Blowing Hot Air committee
•    Organized Pedants R Us conference
•    Edited Journal of Self-Importance
•    Rallied the troops on union executive

Once you’ve done that, go through each of the tasks that you executed (whether you did them poorly or well, whether you finished or not, whether you hated or loved them). Figure out what skills you used to do that task. Write them down. And don’t worry at this point about whether or not those skills are useful, unique or lead in the direction you secretly want your life to go. What you’re doing at this point is simply taking an inventory and making your skills visible to yourself.

In the video, I talked about some of the skills involved in teaching, so I’ll use a different example here. Let’s take research, where you used a wealth of skills (yes, I’m talking to the humanities and social science scholars among you, too). You developed an original research question or hypothesis, which itself required critically analyzing existing texts, looking for gaps in research, evaluating existing research for strengths and weaknesses. Guess what? Not everyone can do that. You developed a system for amassing, organizing and using large amounts of data (whether it was qualitative or quantitative). You used various methods, software, note-taking strategies to handle your research information. You used trial and error over and over again to pin down the best way to conduct and organize your research. You demonstrated persistence in getting to where you are now, but you also showed flexibility in being open to where your research took you. You made an argument and you supported it. And so on.

These are skills that ALL doctoral students have—and that not a lot of other people do. These skills are not phrased in fancy language or résumé-speak (that comes later). Some might argue that what I’ve written here include aptitudes and not skills. Whatever. That is not important. What I’m trying to do is give you a sense that while you were in grad school, you were silently cultivating a huge array of transferable skills, and you didn’t even know it. They aren’t obvious to you because they come naturally to you. So it’s a good idea to sit down and try to make them visible to yourself now.

If it’s a given that there are dozens of skills involved in teaching and conducting research, you might wonder what skill is involved in sitting on the department’s Hot Air Committee, or something similarly dull or seemingly insignificant. That’s the kind of stuff that demonstrates you’ve got some pretty basic skills, like time management, time-keeping or taking minutes. Write that stuff down, even if it fills you with horror (“Oh, my god! I can take minutes! Does this mean I’m destined for a life of being a professional minute-taker? This is too demeaning to handle!”). All you’re doing at this point is just taking an inventory, not writing out your life plan.

Once you’ve taken the time to just brainstorm your heart out about all of the skills that were involved in the many tasks you conducted while in grad school, do the same thing for the stuff you did outside of grad school and before grad school. Did you manage to maintain a hobby? Did you volunteer, serve on a board, attend meetings? Stretch your mind out to the different stages and corners of your life and jot down what you did and how you did it.

By the end of this exercise, I guarantee you will have a long and pretty comprehensive list of all the things that you’re good at. That’s got you one step closer to the academic exit door.

If you’re still struggling to do this exercise, I’ve got some resources that will help you. One of the best resources I’ve found for academics doing this kind of thing is at a UK website called Vitae. They have a skills audit page that you can conduct yourself covering seven different areas that academics typically have a range of skills in, like research skills, communication skills, and so forth. They suggest that you rank yourself on a scale for each skill covered. Some of them are a bit wanky, but some of them are quite interesting and useful (“I manage projects effectively through the setting of research goals, intermediate milestones and prioritisation of activities”).

Use their skills audit if you need a bit of extra guidance, but don’t forget to do your skills audit in areas other than just your academic life.

(While you’re at the Vitae site, check out their report on “What Employers Look For.” You may be pleasantly surprised that, according to this study of 236 organizations, employers are looking for people with precisely the skills doctoral students have (e.g. problem solving, leadership, oral communication, etc.). There is also a “Personal and Career Audit” page that you might come in handy, depending on just how far out the academic door you are.)

Once you’ve identified your transferable skills, you need to find a clear way to articulate them to yourself and to your future employer. The Vitae site is one good resource for doing that, but I’ll be exploring this issue further in tomorrow’s post.

Related posts:

1. Tackling transferable skills, part one
2. Tackling transferable skills, part three
3. Tackling transferable skills, part four: Now what?

Tackling transferable skills for academics, part one from Sabine Hikel on Vimeo.

Update: this series got extended into the following two weeks (part two on May 26, parts three, four and five area appearing June 4, 5 and 9th), so you can find the subsequent posts in the series by clicking on “transferable skills” in the tag cloud.

Related posts:

1. A total, shameless plug
2. Information interviewing: The worst they’ll say is no
3. Tackling transferable skills, part two

To me, the answer is, “Whenever it’s best for you.” How’s that for precision? But seriously, the answer is going to be completely up to you. The major considerations are many: financial (what will you do for an income if you leave at this stage?), career (what field will you switch to?), family (do you need to support family members? Are you all living together?), geographic (will you need/want to move when you quit?), and so forth.

But deciding on the timing of your departure also has to do with the delicate matter of cutting your losses. Calculating losses, though, is an imprecise science because there are so many unknown factors. For example, if you quit after, say, completing your comprehensive exams, are you cutting your losses by sparing yourself years of the gruelling dissertation-writing process (which can be totalled up in dollars, tears, therapists’ bills, damaged relationships, etc.)? Or are you incurring a new loss by not finishing a project you’ve started (an emotional toll) and having to work to explain what you did during those years on a résumé (a potential financial toll)?

Well, the answer is both, isn’t it? When you leave academia–regardless of when you do–you carry around a balance sheet of losses and gains. Gains: a deep relief, a feeling of freedom, a sense that you’ve narrowly escaped something that temporarily had control of your soul. Losses: debt, regret, the struggle to find a new career and life path.

Sometimes, the dividends blur and the gains start to look like losses; the feeling of freedom, for example, can quickly turn into a terrifying landscape of possibility with no clear direction of where to turn. Sometimes the losses look like gains: struggling to find a new life and career path reminds you of how many wonderful interests you have and all of the fun ways you can pursue them.

This is where the matter of the timing of your departure comes in. The dividends of leaving are going to be felt more and less sharply depending on when you jump ship. The longer you stay in your Ph.D. program, your debt load goes up, but so do your credentials. But do those credentials even mean anything to you if you’re depressed, disillusioned and miserable?

For those of you who are thinking of leaving mid-degree, and are tortured by the thought that you’ve wasted your time and money: here’s a timely link to a post Seth Godin wrote earlier this week. I think it’s brilliant, and although he’s not even thinking about grad students when he’s writing this post, it applies perfectly. The post is called “Ignore Sunk Costs.” Among other golden advice, Seth says:

When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the future, not which investments you’ve made in the past. The past investments are over, lost, gone forever. They are irrelevant to the future.

Here’s a breakdown of the balance sheet referring to different stages of leaving. I’d love to hear more thoughts on your analysis of the gains and losses in the comments section. If you…

1. Leave after the M.A. You’ve got yourself a valuable degree with great income-earning potential. But maybe you feel skeptical about your academic prospects, you don’t think you’d enjoy teaching and although you enjoy your research, you don’t feel crazy about doing 5-10 more years of it. So you quit.

Gains: High. You may have some student loans, but this recent report from StatsCan shows there is a 33% wage gap between someone with a B.A. and someone with a Master’s, but someone with a doctorate only earns 8% more than someone with a Master’s.

Costs: Low. Unlike a Ph.D., a master’s makes you feel good about your capabilities.

2. Leave after the first year of your Ph.D. You’ve had a taste of the program, the university, your colleagues and your potential supervisors. Maybe it’s not a good fit, and when you look at the faculty, you’re turned off by the constant search for external funding, the “publish or perish” mentality, and the lack of value placed on family time (like, uh, making one at all). So you quit.

Gains: Medium-high. You’re sparing yourself the time and emotional aggravation and expense of staying in grad school. You can be honest on a resume about what you did with your year.

Costs: Low. Some debt, maybe, and maybe a little bit of “What if…?”

3. Leave around the comps process (before, during or after). When I speak with former academics, this time of intense stress (comprehensive exams are now also called qualifying exams at some schools) can really bring one’s feelings about academia to the forefront. Maybe it’s taking you years to finish your comps, you’re riddled with insecurity, you feel like a total fraud, and you’re on the precipice of clinical depression. So you quit.

Gains: medium-high. Getting out before you lose any more of your precious time, precious money, precious brain cells and spend any more on prescription drugs is really smart. Living in a world where you don’t have to prove yourself through comps fuckin’ rulz.

Costs: medium. Suffering through the comps and STILL leaving without parchment in hand is gonna sting. You will have to explain to employers what it means to be ABD with respect to your transferable skills, which is kinda annoying.

4. Leave during the dissertation stage. Whether you’re struggling to get your proposal done, churn out that first chapter, or finally kick the final chapter to the curb, the dissertation process is a long, emotionally intense, wearing process that can tear down the mental health of the most balanced grad student. Maybe you loathe your topic. Maybe you’re burnt out. Maybe you’re making yourself miserable trying to keep up with the demands to teach, publish, present papers and produce a brilliant 300 page document all at the same time. Maybe you just don’t have it in you anymore. So you quit.

Gains: high. Though departments notoriously do not keep track of their attrition rates, I’ve read research (which I will cite for you in a follow-up post) indicating 50% of social science and humanities doctorates drop out of their programs before finishing. That means you’re in pretty good company among people who decided that life was too short to wait for a satisfying career, to move out of poverty, to save their mental health, or to just figure out that the academic life was not meant for them.

Costs: high. The niggly feelings of “what if?…” or “if only…” might linger for a long, long time. Feeling like a failure–or being worried that other people will see you as a failure–may be very intense. Your possible debt load may amplify feelings of anger, resentment, shame and bitterness. Feeling lost and unsure of how to orient your life is a strong possibility. Struggling with the concept of waste–a waste of your time, money, energy and potential–may stay with you.

5. You leave once you’ve finished the Ph.D. You’re done! Yahoo! But you got what you came for and you are outta there.

Gains: high. Freedom, sweet freedom. Sweet, quaking-at-the-knees, dripping-with-relief freedom.

Costs: medium-high. Severely compromised mental health, a significant debt, relationships that needed some nurturing after long periods of neglect. There is some belief (which I believe is a myth) that having a Ph.D. makes you unemployable.

(NB: Perhaps I’m biased here (since this was the path I chose and I’ve had three years to gain distance from the experience) by seeing the costs as “medium-high” and not “high.” To me, though, the gains far outstripped the costs, in terms of the feeling of freedom, the wild array of life choices I knew I could make, the ability to do the teaching and research and writing that I wanted that wasn’t limited by the classroom, and yes, the satisfaction of having the degree in hand.)

6. Once you’ve done contract/adjunt teaching, done your post-doc or gotten a tenure-track position. It might seem weird to lump these three types of academics into one category, but I’ll explain why below. Even if it’s news to some grad students, people do actually leave secure, tenured positions (Rebecca Stienitz is one of them–here’s her story–and so is Kenny Mostern of “On Being Postacademic” fame–which you can read here. NB: I’ll be interviewing Dr. Mostern and Dr. Stienitz for the podcast series in the next few weeks).

Gains: high. Once you’ve got your Ph.D., you can go anywhere and do anything with confidence. Contract faculty have a lot to gain by landing in a job that actually pays a living wage, and they, along with tenure-track faculty, gain by being able to move to the city of their choice, actually have free time, start a family, make more money, etc.

Costs: low-to-medium. I haven’t been there, and so far I haven’t done any interviews (yet) with people who’ve made this jump. So I am only speculating here. But making a career change at this point just makes a lot of sense to me in the same way that any other career change makes sense. I know someone who used to be an award-winning, professional Irish dancer and is now an IT guy at an art college. I know someone who used to be a professional chef and is now a naturopath. I know someone who used to make giga-bucks at Goldman Sachs and is now a freelance writer living in the English countryside with her young children. I admire people who make crazy career leaps because although there are potential costs (like failing), the gains (like actually being happy and/or satisfied) seem to be so much greater.

What do you think? If you’re going to quit academia, when is the best time to do it? What other factors are there that contribute to your decision? (You can also read a post-doc’s far more brief take on the matter here at Damn Dinosaurs).

Related posts:

1. 11 things you need to know about leaving academia
2. Former academic rock star becomes union organizer–during the recession!
3. “I think it’s time to give up the old image of myself as a scholar.”

“How do I handle the question ‘Why are you leaving and can we contact your present supervisor?’”

So, readers, how would you handle this question? Here’s the answer I sent back:

First, I think these are two different questions that you’d be met with in your next job interview. The interviewer may not actually ask “Why are you leaving academia?” but rather, “Why do you want to work at organization X?” Either way, though, I think the smartest way to answer this is to say exactly what you’ve said to me–the fit between you and academia (or your department) is just not a good one.

There’s no need to then elaborate by saying, you know, “My colleagues were assholes and the pay sucked.” You can follow up the “it’s not a good fit” line by emphasizing what kind of work you DO want to do–”I found the fit between me and Hell University didn’t work as well as I wanted because I’m really interested in doing more hands-on work,” or “I want to cultivate my X skills, and my old job just didn’t afford that,” or “I’ve always been interested in working with X, which was my favourite part of my old job, even though the other parts of the job just didn’t mesh well with me.”

The question of contacting your present supervisor falls under that whole tricky matter of references that worries a lot of people. References aren’t an insurmountable problem, but it does require a bit of finessing. There are a few different approaches. One would be to ask a colleague with whom you have a good relationship to serve as a reference. It doesn’t actually need to be a department chair or grad program director or dean or any kind of a senior position (though, obviously, if you can think of someone suitable, that would be great). But if you’ve worked closely with any of your colleagues on a project or journal or research or anything, that person can serve as a reference for you because they can testify to the things that matter when it comes to references (is the person professional? Prompt? Meet the minimum standards or give a little bit extra?).

And for the record, here’s what Brazen Careerist Penelope Trunk says about references. But what do you think, readers? What’s the best way of addressing these questions?

(As an aside, I’m forming a list of questions from scholars that actually would be best posed to employers, and this question is on that list. I’d love to know what fields and sectors you’re interested in hearing from, i.e. what types of employers would you like me to interview? And what other questions might you have for what industry?)

Related posts:

1. The résumé: To hide your academic credentials or not?
2. Looking for a flexible work schedule? You can find it–or create it.
3. WRK4US PSA

In the interviews I’ve conducted with leavers, the answer is yes and no. It actually completely depends on the job you’re applying for. When Shane McCleary first hit the non-academic job market as an ABD from Johns Hopkins, she was told by someone at an advertising agency, “You have no transferable skills.” This caused her to entirely re-work her résumé, scrapping any and all references to conferences, publications and scholarships. Instead, she focused on the skills she knew she had—time management, multi-tasking, communications—and landed in film and television sales.

Krista Scott-Dixon’s first post-academic job was for a health-based research institute. She saw the position advertised at CharityVillage (a site she was checking because of its focus on the non-profit sector), and didn’t have an inside scoop on what the organization was looking for. But because the job was that of a researcher, Krista let her freaky academic flag fly. The employer was likely only expecting someone with an M.A., so her Ph.D. was actually an asset because it demonstrated her impeccable research skills.

In other cases, it may be more difficult to gauge just how much you should trumpet your academic accomplishments and how much you should massage them into a message your potential employer wants to hear. It’s really just a matter of seeing how much overlap there is between the kind of work you did as a scholar and what the advertised job requires. Does the job involve filling out grant proposals, conducting surveys, moderating seminars, creating reports, meeting with stakeholders? If so, you probably don’t need to feel too anxious about your academic background since all of these things have their ivory tower analog: scholarship applications, research, teaching, writing and committee work. But if the job has a very different context than academic life (if the work takes place outside, if the work involves constantly interacting with lots of people, if it has a physical dimension), you might have to massage things a bit more.

Regardless of whether or not you boldly state your education experience at the top of the résumé or not, it will still be up to you to spell out exactly to potential employers what exactly your transferable skills are. Starting next week, I’ll be posting a 5-part series about how you can best go about identifying those transferable skills. You’ve got all the skills you need to land a non-academic job; it’s just a matter of discovering how best to convey them.

What would be your ideal post-academic job? Is it the kind of work that dovetails with what you’ve done as a scholar?

Related posts:

1. Transferable skills, part five: Putting your skills on your résumé
2. Podcast #3: “There is no provision in academia to care for or nurture the physical self.”
3. Podcast #1: “There are places that would walk over their own mother to hire you.”