Editor’s Note: Previously in this Career Talk series, our experts on doctoral-career counseling have offered advice on running a tandem job search, writing and tailoring cover letters, interviewing, building a CV, and other topics.
More Ph.D.s than ever are going into industry, 48 percent of them to be precise, as documented by the most recent annual Survey of Earned Doctorates. That long-term trend — true across fields, and for many reasons — is undeniable. What it means for graduate students and Ph.D.s on the job market is that, in addition to having a CV ready to go for faculty positions, you should also prepare at least one version of a résumé for industry openings.
As we noted in an earlier column on jump-starting your nonacademic job search, “industry” is defined broadly in this context. It encompasses positions in companies, nonprofits, government, and even campus administration.
You can find a lot of information on the internet on how to “turn your CV into a résumé.” However, we think the first step to producing a good résumé is not to base it on your CV. Just about the only thing a résumé and a CV have in common is that you’re going to use them to apply for jobs. Everything else — length, structure, content, audience — is very, very different.
To begin with, unlike CVs, résumés are highly curated documents. You are not expected to list everything you’ve ever done, but rather, to focus on the most relevant experience you have in a fairly small amount of space –– no more than two pages. Usually. The exception may be a hybrid document for jobs that are academic-adjacent (more on that format below).
You also have a lot more flexibility in designing a résumé, which means it involves more decisions and more tailoring for each job application than is the case for your CV. That isn’t as daunting as it may seem initially. We recommend drafting a résumé for each broad category of position you’re applying for, and then making small changes based on the details of the job ad.
What if you’re not sure which types of jobs you might apply for? Try creating a much longer “master résumé,” from which you can easily pull sections to assemble a one- to two-page document for a particular employer.
This level of tailoring means that a résumé carries with it the expectation that you will make it as easy as possible for a hiring manager to connect the dots between your experience and the job you are seeking. That is especially important for Ph.D.s, given that (a) only 2 percent of the U.S. population has a doctorate and (b) most of the industry job postings you apply for won’t list a doctorate as a job requirement. (Among the exceptions: Research-focused jobs in some industries may require candidates to have a Ph.D., particularly in STEM fields.)
Indeed, the biggest challenge for those with advanced degrees who are applying for industry jobs is that what it means to have a Ph.D. is going to need some explanation. You are going to need to break down — in clear, jargon-free phrasing — exactly what a hiring manager needs to understand about your degree and training.
In drafting your résumé, try to take the perspective of the employer reading it. Imagine what might matter to them about your academic background — which, crucially, will probably not be what matters to you. For example, you may be proud of the academic articles you’ve published, but the hiring manager at, say, an international investment firm would be far more interested in your fluency in multiple languages. If you highlight your scholarly publications on the first page of your résumé, and bury your language skills on the second, the hiring manager may never see them at all.
With that perspective in mind, we’ll start at the top of the résumé and work our way down.
Contact information and social media. Provide one email address and one phone number. If you want to show that you live locally, you can also provide a physical address, but these days, many people do not. If you have a LinkedIn profile that’s up to date and in good shape, you can also include that URL, as well as ones for a professional website, portfolio, or any other professional social media you have.
The key word there is “professional.” Memorably, one of us once followed a link on a job candidate’s résumé and was taken aback when it turned out to be a personal blog featuring not-safe-for-work content. You can’t always control what someone finds out about you via Google, but you can control where you point people from your résumé.
Summary of qualifications (optional but encouraged). This is a bullet-pointed section at the very top of your résumé where you can summarize your relevant experience in aggregate. For example:
- Six years of experience teaching, managing, and mentoring young adults.
- Four years of experience as lab manager, including daily management of grant budgets totaling $4.3 million.
- Fluent in Spanish and Mandarin.
A summary of qualifications is not required. However, it is easy to change it for each job, and it is a great way to make reviewing your résumé easier on the hiring manager, who is probably reviewing a lot of applications all at once. Telling them right upfront why you are a good candidate for their position makes it more likely that they will read further.
Core skills (optional but encouraged). This is where you can list skills that you want to emphasize. It’s OK to include a mix of hard skills (such as coding languages, lab skills, spoken languages, or software programs) and soft skills (such as communication, relationship building, or collaboration), but don’t get carried away here — limit this section to no more than 10 of your most relevant skills (perhaps formatted neatly in a table to avoid wasting space).
This section, too, is easy to adapt for each position, and we recommend mirroring the language of the job ad when you can. Recruiting teams often use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to take a first look at résumés, even if staff members will review them as well. ATS technology usually ranks résumés based on their correlation with the job description (among other things). These systems (Greenhouse and IBM’s Orchestrate are examples) have pros and cons, and recruiters know that, but for this reason (among many others), it’s important that your résumé reflects the job description.
Both the summary and the skills sections can be difficult to get right. It is worth running both of these past someone in your campus career-services office to get a second opinion.
Education. You will probably list this at the top of your résumé for your first job out of your degree program. After you secure a first job, you will want to shift it to the very end of the document. You might also move this section lower if the job you’re applying for is very different from your educational background.
The education section on most résumés is brief, just the institution, the type of degree, and the subject in which you got your degree. If you have received any prestigious and well-known fellowships, such as a Fulbright, Marshall, or Rhodes, you can include those. Generally speaking, you do not need to list your year of graduation (especially if it’s been a while), your dissertation/thesis title, or your GPA (unless it’s requested; in specific careers, like consulting, including it is the norm).
Definitely do not include a summary of your dissertation. If your research is relevant to the job you’re applying for, there are other ways to include it on your résumé, such as in your experience section.
Experience. This is usually the hardest section of the résumé to organize. The traditional method is reverse chronological order, starting with your most recent job. You can also do what is called a skills-based résumé, but a strictly skills-based résumé can make hiring managers suspect you might be hiding something — like a conspicuous gap in employment.
We recommend you use reverse chronological order but with an emphasis on skills and accomplishments, rather than job duties. If you have two or three clear “buckets” of experience — such as administration and teaching — you can break your Experience section into two. For each bucket, list your positions in reverse chronological order.
Each job entry should consist of your title, the institution or company, and the location, as well as a series of bullet points describing the work. Start every bullet point with an active verb. Some popular ones include: build, collaborate, conduct, coordinate, create, decrease, design, develop, direct, evaluate, expand, facilitate, implement, improve, increase, integrate, lead, manage, maintain, organize, provide, spearhead, teach, train.
The work you did may not be at all obvious from your title, so take time when deciding what to include and how to describe it. Here are some general guidelines:
- Focus on what you achieved in each position. Did you build a new program? Persuade a certain number of students to major in your discipline? Create a partnership with a local stakeholder or campus program?
- Provide statistics wherever possible: the number of students or courses you taught, the number of people you supervised in a lab, the amount of grant money you won or managed, a percentage increase in productivity. Quantitative metrics give your résumé more weight.
- Add relevant links. Résumés are almost always submitted as PDFs these days, so your reader can easily follow any that you include.
- You can include feedback that isn’t quantitative. If you received particularly glowing praise on an event, for example, or on your teaching, say so: “Regularly praised by students for clear explanations of complicated concepts.”
- If you won an award for teaching or research, mention it under the relevant job entry.
- If you’ve had several part-time jobs doing similar things (such as a few student-coordinator positions), group them together to save space.
- Most of the time, you do not need to go back more than 10 years on your résumé. However, if you have relevant work experience from before you went to grad school, you should definitely include it. Grad school in some ways “resets” your résumé, since you’re likely to be applying to very different jobs now, but management experience, for example, carries over.
Hybrid documents. When you’re applying for a job that is not a faculty position but is adjacent to academe — for example, at an independent research center, or a staff role that includes both administrative duties and some teaching or research work — you might want to develop a version of your résumé that includes some elements of a CV. We call these hybrid documents.
In drafting this hybrid, first and foremost, follow the directions of the job posting. If it asks for a CV, you should submit a CV, although you might include more résumé-style information about your service or administrative work than you would for a strictly academic job posting.
If the job posting calls for a résumé or doesn’t specify, consider submitting a version of your résumé that includes a brief one-page appendix — for a total document of no more than three pages — highlighting the academic achievements that are relevant to the job opening. These might include selected publications or presentations and courses taught, depending on the posting.
Instead of an appendix, you could collect that same information under Experience, organized into two sections for your “Research” or “Teaching.” Be sure to include information not only about what you produced as a doctoral student but how you produced it, since that will help the hiring manager connect your skills to the ones they are looking for: Was the research qualitative or quantitative? What programs and methods did you use? Do you use communicative methods for teaching? Did you deliver any lectures that would convey your public-speaking skills? Thinking through questions like this can help you articulate your fit for the position.
These documents are going to be highly tailored, so you want to think carefully about what you want the hiring manager to know about you. Indeed, that is true for every résumé — and it gets at the crux of the difference between a résumé and a CV:
- A CV is all about you, although you may tailor it lightly for a particular job or institution.
- A résumé is about the job you’re applying for, and it is likely to look quite different depending on that job.
That shift in mind-set is crucial for putting together a successful industry job application.
