When I was finishing grad school in comparative literature, my advisers — all lifelong academics — had little-to-no advice on “alternative” careers should a faculty position not materialize. It didn’t, and, like many new Ph.D.s, I was left with the difficult task of rebooting my entire professional identity on my own. Suffice it to say, I’ve given lots of thought to the kind of guidance I wish I’d received before being cast into the wild.
Things turned out well for me: Since I walked away from academe in 2017, I’ve managed to establish a comfortable niche as a technical writer and manager, and now run the documentation department for a thriving midsize software company while moonlighting as an independent scholar.
Still, I would have benefited back then from some practical advice on my options. If departments are going to continue to produce Ph.D.s in numbers greater than the available faculty openings, they need to be giving better and broader career advice. In that spirit, I’ve written this dispatch to supply the ivory tower with some intel from the trenches, where more opportunities abound than faculty advisers and their grad students might expect. Based on my own work experiences and my conversations with recruiters, I’ve sketched here five viable career paths that graduate students, with their advisers, should consider on the path to a doctorate.
Technical Writing
What it involves. The nature of this work will sound familiar to academics: It’s about composing and producing technical communication — a broad term that encompasses instruction manuals, procedures, protocols, white papers, and other materials that convey scientific and specialized information. In addition to writing, the day-to-day responsibilities typically include learning about complex topics, speaking with subject-matter experts to clarify or fact-check, editing written materials, and publishing/sharing the finished document in particular formats.
Why grad students are suited for it. All graduate education — no matter the course of study — involves interpreting and assimilating complex information about specialized topics. In your graduate courses, you’ve already practiced technical writing’s two core competencies: understanding challenging material and applying/writing about it. In a similar vein, the scholarly work you’ve done in graduate school either qualifies as, or closely resembles, technical writing. Planning an experiment and recording the procedure is an excellent example. So is writing a lab report, creating a detailed lesson plan, or putting together explanatory handouts for your students. The material you’ve produced throughout grad school can likely serve as the basis for a technical-writing portfolio.
How to get started:
- In applying for these jobs, recast your academic work to emphasize your experience with technical communication. Learn to explain how your scholarly work qualifies as technical writing — and make sure you can detail the logic behind its composition. Who was its audience? What were you aiming to convey? How did you communicate it? And why did you make particular organizational and presentational choices in your writing?
- Contribute documentation on a volunteer basis: The internet is full of open-source or hobbyist projects that welcome contributors. Find one and volunteer your writing. You’ll do some good for the world, while also getting your name out there and coming away with work experience.
- Create a portfolio. You’ll need to gather your writing samples in an easy-to-access place for prospective employers to review. This can be done quickly, easily, and without spending a dime, which I’ve documented in a blog post for anyone interested.
Training and Development
What it involves. Academe is not the only space where education happens. Companies and organizations often want their employees to gain and retain crucial skills through on-the-job training, and need ways to administer lessons and evaluate progress. That’s the purview of instructional design (or “training and development” more broadly). Jobs in this field involve assessing the skills necessary for certain roles and responsibilities, identifying gaps in training, planning courses of study and lessons to bridge those gaps, creating educational material, and designing methods to gauge employee development.
Why grad students are suited for it. Teaching and evaluation are among the major skills you learn on the job in graduate school. If you’ve taught in any capacity, you already have practical experience in the key competencies of instructional design, such as analyzing learner needs and assessing their progress. This is true whether you’ve TA-ed for a professor, taught a standalone class from an established syllabus/rubric, or designed courses yourself. The course materials you’ve produced, along with the lessons gleaned from classroom experience, can form a compelling work portfolio.
How to get started:
- Cast your teaching portfolio in training terms. Familiarize yourself with the concepts and terms of instructional design so that you can explain how your own teaching methodology maps to proven practices. In particular, understand the ADDIE model (analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation), and be able to explain how you have, or could, put it into practice.
- Develop sample lesson plans. Devise hypothetical courses, lessons, and assessment methods for various skills. For example, explain how you’d evaluate technical skill in a field relevant to a prospective employer, and what kind of lessons you’d create to bring someone up to speed.
- Review some online courses and certifications. Online learning platforms like Coursera have a wealth of courses related to instructional design, which are sometimes available for free or at a deep discount. Exploring these courses can burnish your qualifications while providing a sense of how instructional-design principles might look in practice.
Project Management
What it involves. Every large-scale project needs people to coordinate and carry out its many moving parts. This is the arena of project management. The jobs involve directing the work of specialists who contribute to a project, while also handling logistical matters (such as budgeting and scheduling) and coping with unexpected obstacles that are bound to appear during any long-term endeavor.
Why grad students are suited for it. Odds are you’ve undertaken a logistically intensive task during your graduate studies, thereby giving you tangible experience in managing projects. Your dissertation is the prime example: a long, intricate, book-length endeavor that required serious effort, attention, and coordination to bring off. Similarly, if you’ve ever run an experiment, kept a lab afloat, planned a student conference, or done anything in which logistics figured heavily, your experience is relevant to this career path.
How to get started:
- Talk about your dissertation in project-management terms. It was a mammoth project that you brought to completion. You planned the research and execution, budgeted your time and money, wrangled your adviser’s and committee members’ schedules, and conquered various other logistical challenges. Surmounting such obstacles is exactly what project management involves. If you can explain your planning process, the steps you took to keep your project on time and within budget, and your strategies for dealing with unforeseen obstacles, you’ll prove you’re a prime candidate for project-management openings.
- Create sample project plans. Imagine a hypothetical project relevant to a prospective employer, such as a major software release or production deadline. How would you break it down into concrete benchmarks? How would you budget the time, money, and other resources for it? How would you keep the project moving along, and what could some potential roadblocks be? Demonstrating that you can think through and overcome such problems shows you can handle the job. (Of course, if you’ve done this already for your own academic projects, use those as your sample instead. The real often beats the hypothetical.)
- Consider getting certified. If you want to pursue professional certification in project management, two reputable credentials are Google’s project-management certificate and the Project Management Institute’s professional certification. While not strictly necessary — and not free — they can be useful for showing that you’re serious about switching to a nonacademic career track.
Marketing
What it involves. Plenty of Ph.D.s and grad students have a deep aversion to the very idea of marketing and sales. Much of that aversion, however, is really disdain for certain things being marketed, like junk food, fast fashion, or oversized pickup trucks. Yet books, nonprofit groups, and social causes all benefit from marketing, too. In that vein, it helps to think of marketing as another form of storytelling aimed at (a) spurring interest in a particular product, service, or organization and (b) informing people about its existence, purpose, and benefits. The work entails both high-level tasks such as developing and executing marketing campaigns and hands-on work like creating advertising copy or interacting with customers to generate sales.
Why grad students are suited for it. Marketing involves crafting compelling stories about something — illustrating why it exists, how it can be helpful, why anyone would want it. (Or, in business lingo, establishing what’s called a “value proposition.”) In many respects, Ph.D.s are accustomed to telling such stories. You did it for yourself when applying to a doctoral program. You did it when you taught gen-ed courses to unenthusiastic undergraduates. You did it for your research, both in your dissertation or any articles you may have written. If you’ve ever made the case for caring about, say, supervenience or nanostructured polymer synthesis, you already have the requisite skills and mindset for this career path.
How to get started:
- Capture the story behind your teaching or research. Think back to what you found interesting or important about the work. Learn how to articulate that as a value proposition — in short, be able to “sell” the core idea behind your academic focus. That will help you demonstrate the narrative and persuasive skills essential to marketing positions. (It will also supply interesting discussion material during job interviews.)
- In the absence of a marketing portfolio, try assessing the market positioning of existing products (especially ones relevant to the sector that a prospective employer occupies). Being able to reverse-engineer and cogently discuss other marketing efforts shows you have the chops for strategic marketing.
- Create sample materials. Imagine a hypothetical product for a prospective employer’s sector, then draft a narrative and a market-positioning strategy for it. A few runs of this exercise can give you the foundations of a marketing portfolio, and familiarize you with the kinds of thought processes that you might be tested on during job interviews.
Publishing
What it involves. Publishing is a big umbrella encompassing all the components of bringing books, magazines, and journal articles to fruition. It includes roles like editing, acquisitions, production, and editorial strategy. The day-to-day work depends upon the position, but jobs in publishing tend to involve interacting with project stakeholders (writers, editors, production staff members), coordinating resources, and reviewing material (proposals, manuscripts, ad copy, internal communication, and the like) for formatting and quality.
Why grad students are suited for it. By virtue of all the books and articles you’ve read to keep abreast of current research, you’re more familiar with the publishing landscape and its practicalities than most potential job applicants. Further, this has given you some understanding of the finer details of manuscript preparation, such as publishing conventions, house style guides, and the like. Your own research specialty makes you a subject-matter expert in your field, which is valuable for fact-checking and editorial roles. You also benefit from understanding what it’s like to sit on the other side of the publishing wall, especially if you’re exploring jobs in academic publishing. Having a solid grasp of (and sympathy for) the pressures and motivations that drive authors and professional societies is useful in situations where you may need to serve as a liaison or other point of contact. Most skills discussed under “project management” apply to publishing as well — shepherding books or articles along from initial submission to publication is, at bottom, a different flavor of project management.
How to get started:
- Emphasize your people skills. Most publishing positions involve a lot of conversation and collaboration. Your experiences with teaching, advising undergraduates, doing committee work, and collaborating with colleagues all provide evidence that you possess this all-important skill. Have these examples ready for interviews, and be able to discuss your strategies for resolving conflicts and confusion and for dealing with people in general.
- Become proficient in office and productivity software. If you’ve used a course-management system like Blackboard or Moodle, worked with spreadsheets and databases on Excel, or formatted pamphlets with InDesign, highlight those experiences. (Using your nicely formatted dissertation to show that you’re a Word power user can also help in a pinch.) Even if a potential employer doesn’t use the exact tools in which you’re proficient, providing evidence of your tech skill shows that you grasp the logic and workflow behind such tools and could easily learn new ones.
- Communicate your editing experience. Fortunately, you already have a lot of it — editing your own or your peers’ writing, formatting your dissertation, preparing articles in accordance with style and submission guidelines. Be able to articulate your editing process and your strategies for ensuring style compliance.
After spending all those years in graduate school, it can feel as if the university is all there is, and as if leaving it represents an unthinkable choice. But the combination of an oversupply of Ph.D.s and a shortage of tenure-track posts means that leaving higher ed is inevitable for many, if not most. The world contains plenty of opportunities to put your hard-earned education to use in a lucrative, fulfilling career. In graduate school, you have cultivated valuable skills that — cast in ways that employers can understand — will make you a strong candidate. Trust in yourself, and trust in your abilities. You’ll do fine out here.
