Editor’s Note: Previously in the Career Talk series, our experts on doctoral-career counseling have offered advice on managing a faculty-job search, looking for industry positions, and other career-planning topics.
So you’ve been handed the chore of organizing your department’s career seminar for doctoral students. Maybe you’ve been vocally supportive of graduate students; maybe you just weren’t at the faculty meeting where it was decided who would teach this year’s seminar. In any case, it’s your baby now, and you have to figure out what to do with it.
These professional-development seminars can be a turning point in a graduate student’s career — or a waste of everyone’s time. As graduate-career experts, we have advice on how to make this course meaningful, intellectually substantive, and perhaps even fun for both professors and students.
Of course the seminar won’t be any of those things if people don’t attend. So first and foremost, it’s important to convey that you take this type of training seriously, and that you expect your department’s graduate students to take it seriously, too. Students avoid professional development for any number of reasons: They don’t have time, they get anxious thinking about career planning, and/or they think it is “unserious” (i.e., only for those thinking about industry jobs, not for those who know they want an academic job).
It is your task to convey why they need to think about their professional development now and throughout their doctoral program — not just when they’re about to graduate and go on the job market.
Perhaps you are thinking: But why? I didn’t think about professional development at all in graduate school, and I’m fine. We all know times have changed, and rapidly. Getting an academic job is very difficult, but so is getting a good (read: meaningful and reasonably well compensated) job outside of higher education. Graduate students who leave career planning to the moment when they actually begin job hunting may find themselves with fewer options.
The purpose of professional development for doctoral students is to take back as much agency as possible from a system that often seems designed to make them feel helpless. To build a fulfilling career, they need to know themselves and the ecosystem(s) they’re operating in so that they can make deliberate, informed choices.
Many of your department’s Ph.D. students will list a tenure-track job as their top choice, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But the attitude of even the most determined academic job seeker should not be “tenure track or bust.” It should be “tenure track or an equally compelling alternate field.” Still other students may not be interested in academic jobs at all. Your department — and thus the seminar you organize — must aim to support all of their ambitions, however different from the ones you had in graduate school.
Should I set learning goals and assignments? Definitely. Just as you would for any other course, think about what you want graduate students to know or be able to do at the end of the seminar. Start by making a list of possible learning goals:
- Have drafts of their CV, résumé, teaching statement, LinkedIn profile, or professional website ready to go.
- Know what an informational interview is and how to request one. Practice conducting this type of exploratory interview.
- Increase awareness of what they can do with their graduate degree.
- Understand their own skills, values, and interests.
- Develop a list of two to three career paths to explore.
Some of what you do in the seminar will be dictated by the stage your students are at in their training. Those in the first two years of a doctoral program will need more self-reflection and exploration than students in their final semesters, who will probably want to focus on preparing job documents and finding jobs to apply for. If your seminar’s students are a highly mixed bunch, consider breaking them into groups and giving each slightly different assignments and discussion topics.
Speaking of assignments, here are some connected to the learning goals above:
- Do the career-related assessments at ImaginePhD (for humanists and social scientists), myIDP (for natural and biological sciences), and/or the Stanford Meaningful Work Kit (all disciplines) and discuss the results.
- Ask students to write short essays reflecting on graduate school. What do they enjoy most, and least, about their work? What are their goals for the next five or more years, professionally and personally?
- Ask everyone to bring in a job advertisement to share and discuss.
- Have them conduct at least two informational interviews (see below) and share what they learned.
- Ask students to do research on organizations or companies they might be interested in working for. What is the employer’s mission? What sorts of positions does it regularly post? How and where can students imagine themselves fitting in at such a place?
- Have them peer review one another’s résumés, CVs, teaching statements, LinkedIn profiles, and professional websites.
- Conduct mock job interviews.
Don’t go it alone. You are not a career counselor, but your institution almost certainly employs people who are. Leverage their expertise. If you haven’t met them, now is a great time to reach out and introduce yourself and ask if you can take them to coffee to get their input on the course. They will have resources and advice to recommend and may even (time permitting) offer to attend one or two class sessions. If you don’t know much about application materials for jobs beyond the professoriate, career counselors can probably point you in the direction of excellent on-campus resources.
You also don’t need to know every single career pathway that someone with an advanced degree in your field might pursue. This is where alumni can be extremely helpful. If your department has contact information for its graduates, reach out and ask if they would be willing to chat about their careers with current students. If you don’t know how to reach alumni, ask students in the course to help you track them down via LinkedIn. Students can then invite alumni to engage with the department in a variety of ways, including serving as a guest speaker for the seminar.
Devote some time to informational interviews. This type of interview is when you reach out to a professional contact for a short conversation about their work and career path. Many folks out there are willing to share their experiences, especially with students, who can gain valuable insights about a particular position or industry. (An added bonus: Informational interviews can be a low-effort, high-impact way for a department to maintain relationships with alumni.)
Requesting an informational interview isn’t difficult. But it’s a good topic for a professional-development seminar to make sure your Ph.D. students are striking the right tone in their inquiries. We both receive a fair number of requests from graduate students interested in talking with us about our careers. Based on that experience, we can say that they don’t always know how to communicate professionally in a way that is neither overly deferential nor presumptuous.
Show your students how to write a short email seeking an informational interview. It is important that the request does not sound like a chore or a box-checking exercise, particularly when students are reaching out because of an assignment. They should aim to convey respect, enthusiasm, and curiosity, and not apologize for making the request. The email should include:
- How the student found the contact (LinkedIn, direct referral, etc.).
- Why the student is interested in talking to the subject (if, for example, the contact graduated from the same doctoral program or works at an organization of interest to the student).
- What the student is currently doing in the doctoral program.
- What the student is asking for (a Zoom meeting, a meet-up for coffee)
Remind students that — like much of the job-search process — these requests are a numbers game. They won’t hear back from everyone they asked for an informational interview, but they will likely hear back from a few.
Similarly, students often need help formulating questions, so spend some time on that during the seminar. An informational interview is not about looking clever or asking provocative questions; it’s about soliciting information that students really need to learn more about viable career paths and industry hiring practices. There are many lists of informational-interview questions out there (here’s one from The Forage and another one from Indeed). Share links to those lists with your students and spend some time discussing the most useful questions.
Use the seminar to encourage attendance at other career programming. We have both organized a lot of career-related workshops and events over the years. They can be extremely helpful and informative for doctoral students, but only if they show up. And a lot of them don’t.
Attendance is a challenge at even the most compelling and carefully crafted of these gatherings. As has long been the case, some students still fear that attending career events will send the wrong message to their faculty adviser (i.e., that they aren’t focused on scholarship). Plus, graduate students are busy, and it’s hard for them to prioritize career development when there are so many other ways to spend their time that seem more immediately useful.
It is highly probable that the staff on your campus or in your department who organize similar events have the same attendance problem. So why not help them and your seminar students?
Make a list of all the professional-development events being offered this semester by your campus career-services center, graduate division, or department, and ask students to attend a certain number of them and report back. By encouraging students to attend, you send the right message: That it’s important to think about career planning from the beginning of a doctoral program.
Open the floor to debates within the profession and the discipline. Many structural issues in higher education affect the lives and professional choices of Ph.D. students. Whether it’s the so-called “two-body problem,” the perils of being a permanent postdoc or adjunct, or the need for financial and personal stability, graduate students often tell us that they rarely hear such problems discussed openly in their department.
Why not use your seminar to air those debates? Help students understand that most of the problems are not new, and admit when a particular problem (like, say, a lack of tenure-track openings in your field) has worsened.
Even more important, students need to understand what they can — and can’t — control. To that end, the goal of such seminar discussions is not to solve higher ed’s major structural problems, but rather to develop a substantive understanding of them in order to make better-informed career decisions. Students sometimes come to graduate programs with idealized notions about what it means to be a professor in the modern university. It is important that they understand the forces that affect institutions, departments, and disciplines, and therefore affect their own lives. That understanding is important both for Ph.D.s who wish to stay within the faculty system and for those who choose to apply their knowledge and skills elsewhere.
If you don’t know something, say so. Ask the students to help you figure it out. As a faculty member, you are probably accustomed to being the expert in your classroom. It can be uncomfortable to teach a topic you don’t know much about — such as industry career paths. But it is very likely that your students already respect you as an expert in your field; you don’t need to worry that they will lose that respect if you admit that you are not necessarily an expert in all things career development. If they ask a question and you don’t know the answer, simply say that you don’t know but you’ll find out. Or, alternatively, ask them to do research on the question and bring what they find to the next class meeting.
For too long, departments ignored the shifting fortunes of Ph.D.s on the tenure-track market. That’s been changing, and this seminar is your opportunity to make sure that your department’s graduates are best positioned for successful careers in or out of academe. Seeing what Ph.D.s can do, and are doing, is, we believe, cause for optimism in a moment when the future feels uncertain.
