As a recent Ph.D. who has found a “nonacademic” job, I know firsthand how difficult it is to transition away from the faculty career path. I don’t regret earning a doctorate. But when I started to market myself and my Ph.D. to other employers, I did not feel like a “job-ready” graduate — and in that sense I felt that my doctoral training had let me down.
Plenty of graduate faculty members know they are not adequately responding to a changing labor market. They know that most doctoral students won’t score academic jobs and must resort to the dreaded “Plan B.” And yet too many Ph.D. programs continue to prepare scholars-in-training to become professors but not much else. Which is why you hear attentive graduate advisers often raising this question — “How can we support our graduate students in finding ‘nonacademic’ jobs?” — but not answering it all that well.
My own job-search experience — after I earned a doctorate in the history of science, medicine, and technology — offers a case in point. Toward the end of my program, I decided not to apply for tenure-track jobs. Had I wanted to go on the faculty market, I would have found abundant career resources available to me (albeit not many openings). But going “alt-ac” meant that I had lots of well-wishes and encouragement from my scholarly community, with little in the way of practical employment advice. The fallout:
- First, I struggled to work out what I wanted to do beyond faculty work and, more pressingly, what I could do. A doctorate opens some doors, to be sure, but it closes others. As Ph.D.s, we don’t have clinical degrees; we don’t have M.B.A.s or J.D.s; we don’t have extensive experience in marketing or business analysis. Some of us have never worked in statistics or coding. Given all the things I couldn’t do, that left a big question: What opportunities exist out there for me, and who might want to hire me?
- Second, I struggled to rebrand myself: from “scholar” to … what? Was I an “analyst,” a “consultant,” a “project manager,” a “strategist”? All of those terms were mysterious to me when I began my job search.
- Third, I struggled to assemble the resources that I needed to apply for nonacademic jobs. I wasn’t on LinkedIn. I didn’t have a résumé, and employers did not want to see my academic CV. Most damaging of all, I didn’t have strong professional networks in the industries and companies where I wanted to work.
What is the solution to such career dilemmas? What can departments and concerned graduate faculty members do to help graduate students and new Ph.D.s like me? Of course there is a whole debate about whether doctoral programs should prepare students for nonacademic jobs. I am not attempting to weigh in on that debate, for I remain undecided about how these programs should be structurally reformed to better serve students.
What I can share, however, are a few insights for graduate advisers who might want to better support their students on nonfaculty career paths. Many of us arrive at grad school with only a vague sense of our Plan B, and no real strategy for making it a reality. If that describes any of your students, here are four messages you should be conveying early on in their Ph.D. program:
It’s hard to get nonacademic jobs, too. A harmful myth perpetuated in scholarly circles is that Ph.D.s will have no trouble getting a nonfaculty job because they are so smart — maybe even geniuses — and any company, organization, or agency would be lucky to have them. Surely having a doctorate will bump an application to the top of the pile?
L. Maren Wood, director of the Center for Graduate Career Success and founder of its career-advice platform, Beyond the Professoriate, has busted that myth. Her work has shown that Ph.D.s often struggle to find a meaningful profession outside of universities and that it can take months — and sometimes years — for them to land on their feet.
Why? Because a doctoral degree does not speak for itself. It does not immediately articulate value to a company. It is an impressive accolade, to be sure, but it does not convince an employer that an applicant is able to do a specific job. And some employers even consider doctoral students to be undesirable hires because we are a poor fit for entry-level jobs yet also lack “real world” experience for management positions. Not to mention it takes too long to onboard someone who is unfamiliar with 9-to-5 work culture.
The result is the dreaded “you’re overqualified and underqualified” rejection. That can be fairly devastating if you’ve been told repeatedly that your doctorate will open a lot of doors outside of academe.
Some of the best advice I received on thinking about nonacademic pathways: Your Plan B is someone else’s Plan A, and they are better qualified than you for the job. Practically, that means you can’t wait until you have a Ph.D. in hand to devise your Plan B. You need to start preparing early and put yourself in a competitive position to apply for jobs outside of higher ed. Because you will have to compete.
It’s essential to build a professional network beyond academe. Having such contacts is helpful at every stage of the job-application journey. How do you start building that network?
First, talk with real people in real jobs (as opposed to relying on word of mouth) to understand how Ph.D.s fit into the bigger employment picture. Ask people where they work. Ask them which companies and agencies are most likely to hire Ph.D.s, and in which specific kinds of roles.
Ask if you can interview people about their jobs. That’s called an “informational interview” and I conducted dozens of them (from 20 to 90 minutes long) with professionals working in jobs that interested me. These conversations helped me learn to communicate with people in diverse careers. They also helped me get better at responding (clearly and briefly!) to three questions that these interview subjects always asked me:
- What’s your research about?
- How did you get interested in that very niche and obscure topic?
- Why do you want to work in my profession?
Employers will ask you the same questions, so it’s useful to practice your answers.
When my informational interviews got more targeted — e.g., when I was talking only with people in a specific industry — I started to learn how prospective colleagues and employers saw me. “Oh, you’re an education-policy guy,” one consultant said to me, even though I had never studied education policy in my life. “Oh, you’re a research guy,” said another. Such labels helped me understand how to describe myself and my background to employers in ways that made sense to them.
Second, a strong network is how you get noticed in the pile. Yes, like it or not, it’s who you know, not just what you know. As Ph.D.s, we are nontraditional job applicants and it’s hard to get recognized within crowds of smart undergraduates and M.B.A.s who are better connected than we are. We need allies on the inside who have talked with us, who know what we can do, and who are willing to vouch for our potential.
You need a convincing transition story. “Why are you leaving academe?” That is another question I got asked a lot. I came up with a straightforward and truthful answer: “I want to work on a team, I prefer short-term and collaborative research projects, I want to work in business, my dissertation project is now complete and it’s time for a new chapter.” Even when I didn’t get asked that question, it crept into every conversation: “Why do you want to work in this field?” may as well be a question of “What changed your mind about a faculty career?”
This question is harder to answer for Ph.D.s who don’t really want to leave faculty life. Just saying “there are no jobs in academe” won’t cut it and will make you sound like you’re settling for an alternative career. Companies and agencies don’t want to be anyone’s second choice.
Articulate the value of your training to employers; don’t expect them to see it. “I’ve talked to lots of Ph.D.s. Is there something about your Ph.D. — your program — that makes you different?” That was the best and most fun question I was asked in the hiring process, but it was of course the hardest to answer. Sure I can write well, think creatively, analyze data, interrogate assumptions, and create new knowledge. But I knew that none of those answers would set me apart from other Ph.D.s in, say, biology, computer science, math, or linguistics.
I ended up playing to my strengths: I have a Ph.D. in history, and so I spoke about the historian’s ability to understand and explain social, cultural, and institutional change over time — something historians do better than anyone else. I am sure that there are many good answers to this question, but it was the first that came to my mind.
A broader version of that question would be: “I have M.B.A.s and J.D.s and B.A.s and B.S.s applying to this job. Why should I employ a Ph.D.?” Here is when the candidate must articulate the value of the doctoral degree as a general qualification. For example, make the case that Ph.D.s are better positioned than other degree holders to conduct in-depth research for a company, to design complex investigations, to manage multiyear projects, and to write clearly and persuasively. I will conclude by listing four things that Ph.D.s don’t need to be successful on nonacademic job markets:
- More research experience (the doctorate is enough).
- More publications (only academic jobs require this).
- More coursework (nonacademics think Ph.D. programs are already too long).
- More degrees (nonacademics already think we’re too credentialed).
Professors should also be aware that what sounds like a “Plan B” to them might actually be “Plan A” for their student. Calling it a “backup option” and even calling it a “nonacademic” job can create the impression that students should still be aiming for tenure-track postings, and that a nonacademic job is somehow less valuable than a faculty position, which is unequivocally untrue everywhere but in academe.
As doctoral programs continue to grapple with questions about if, and how, they should prepare students for nonacademic careers, faculty advisers and mentors need to be having frank conversations with their students about their Plan B. And those conversations need to be happening early.