Open thread: Career talk
I’ll continue my interview series on academics who have transitioned to industry in the coming weeks. My guests will include:
Ginger Lockhart, a former psychology professor who started her own business, Quantfish, a statistics training platform for researchers
Joe Stubenrauch, a history professor turned UX researcher and career coach
Matteo Tardelli, author of Beyond Academia: Stories and Strategies for PhDs Making the Leap into Industry
Lauren McClain, a former sociology professor who co-founded Grantibly, a team of natural and social scientists who offer support with program evaluation and grant writing
What are some questions you would like me to ask my guests?
So far, Joe Stubenrauch is the only professional with a humanities background that I’ve been able to find. My own career coach, Jennifer Askey, was once a German professor. But the literature on post-academic careers is heavily slanted toward PhDs from the sciences and social sciences. Can you suggest other guests with PhDs in the arts or humanities who have successfully transitioned into industry roles?
Gabrielle Filip-Crawford made an excellent point in our Tuesday interview when she recommended asking professionals during informational interviews about other job titles related to the one you’re considering. For instance, I have been exploring positions in project management, a field I was completely unaware existed until about a month ago. Content strategy is another track that I would not have known to explore without my career coach’s advice. Communications specialist is a fairly obvious path for people with writing backgrounds. What are some other job titles in industry that might be unknown to many PhDs?
I have been an open book since I launched this series, and so I’m going to try something that I always did with my students. I always felt like I’d be a fraud if I taught creative writing classes without sharing some of my own works in progress during our weekly workshops. So I’d write something new and add it anonymously to the stack when we randomly chose drafts to review.
Since I am actively applying for industry jobs now, I’m going to share some of my documents with you, in hopes that they demystify the process somewhat and also as an invitation to give me suggestions. I really do think of us as a community, and I could use your help. So I’m going to share access to this Google folder where I’ve uploaded the resume and cover letter that I crafted for a Content Project Manager position at EBSCO. I’ve also included a recent version of my academic CV for comparison. I’ll be discussing these documents with Jennifer, my career coach, but I’d welcome your input if I’m making obvious mistakes. And if you find yourself in the early stages of translating your academic background into industry terms, maybe there will be something helpful for you here.
Finally, because my time demands are shifting, I need to ask how valuable you find the podcast. The time required to edit audio (and the technical challenges that Zoom often creates with sound quality) is significantly greater than cleaning up a transcribed interview. If I continued to reserve one or two transcribed interviews per month for just paying subscribers, how much would everyone miss the podcast? Please let me know in the poll below.
Take care, and have a great weekend!
Thanks for your transparency about the industry job searching. (Note: your résumé has some personal info that you’d redacted on your CV!) I’ve struggled to craft cover letters, turn a 30-pg CV into a 1.5-pg resume and a 5-pg brief CV. As I’ve worked on this though, I’ve developed an extended list of ‘what I did’ --> ‘what the doing required’ --> ‘what the doing IS in industry terms. Useful, if nothing else, as a salve for the frequent days when I feel deep worthlessness and devaluation in academia.
I want to say that I think academics sell ourselves very short. Clarity about ‘what else besides academia?’ might usefully be found in an initial examination of personal values, electricity (what lights me up when I discuss it or when others see me discussing it?), and flow states? Exhaustive clarity about these things can make pathways to non-academic work clearer. We don’t just need to look for the same sort of environs we ideally wanted in our academic pursuits.
Example: my values...and my middle-age = I want autonomy, I am not striving or ambitious now, and I value a job that stays ‘at work.’ I don’t necessarily need a job that uses my academic skills as much as I’d like a job where I’m not micro-managed, a job with explicit stop and start times. So my options may be broader now that I’ve figured out what matters at this point in my life. (It’s also helping me to find better sanity whilst still in academia.)
A career changing humanities Ph.D. for you.
https://christophercaterine.com/additional-resources/
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691200194/leaving-academia
Also, I see the EBSCO position in the secondary list mentions Spanish speaking, and I don't think you mention that anywhere.