transferable skills

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.”

Tagged as: transferable skills

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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?

Tagged as: transferable skills

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Administrivia note: I’m off to Ottawa today to attend Congress 2009. That’s the big-ass annual clusterfuck involving thousands upon thousands of Canadian academics converging on the same university all at once. I’m going this year to promote Leaving Academia, do some interviews and talk to people about what’s on their minds regarding non-academic career choices. As a result, my daily posts might go up a little bit later in the day than usual and no podcast will be posted on Thursday. But stay tuned tomorrow for some liveblogging action from the Career Corner, where I’m going to cover three different talks covering non-academic jobs. Are you going to be at Congress? Look for me–I’ll be the one with the big headphones and even bigger microphone. And now, back to our regularly scheduled post.

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.

Tagged as: transferable skills

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