Question: I graduate in two years. I am planning to apply for academic jobs as becoming an assistant professor is what I really want to do. However, a number of people from my doctoral program have been unsuccessful on the academic job market, so I think I need to have a back-up plan. What can I do to create my Plan B, just in case?
Question: I will receive my Ph.D. in two years. Although I really enjoy teaching—and seem to be pretty good at it, judging by the evaluations I get—I’m just not that excited about my research. Maybe that will change once I start writing it up, but I know how important research is for a faculty job and think I need to consider career options outside academe.
Julie: We hear from many students in many fields who are thinking about alternative careers well before they encounter the academic job market. Those students tend to look a good deal like our two questioners above: They’ve either seen enough of academe to know it’s not for them, or they want to try their best to find a tenure-track position while still having a sustainable alternative to adjuncting if they are unable to find one.
Jenny: It’s smart to be thinking about your career options well before you earn your Ph.D. For the most part, the doctoral experience intentionally prepares you for one career, that of a scholar. However, it unintentionally prepares you for many other careers as well.
- Careers in Academe
In this issue, you’ll find practical guidance on managing your digital identity as an academic, getting published, becoming an effective dean, and more.
We’ve written before about how to make the transition to a nonacademic career, including such articles as “What Faculty Members Can Do to Help.” Nowadays, your institution and department may be actively thinking about how to use the doctorate to prepare you for alternative careers, as detailed in the Modern Language Association’s recent report on doctoral study and demonstrated by the National Institutes of Health’s Broadening Experience in Scientific Training awards. Institutions and departments are also seeking ways to provide doctoral students with a broader range of experiences, for example the Graduate Student Internships for Career Exploration program at the University of California at San Francisco, or the Public Humanities Fellows program run by the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Julie: It’s important to keep in mind that in many fields it takes more than one year on the job market to get a tenure-track job. In the sciences, working in a postdoc, which average about four years in length, makes your time in career limbo even longer. And for a Ph.D. whose partner is another academic, it can take three to five years of adjunct work or fellowships before both of you find a location where tenure-track positions are available to one or both of you—and sometimes even longer and sometimes never. If a tenure-track position is your goal, go after it with your eyes open while also developing a backup plan and laying the groundwork for that plan.
Jenny: Here, we are going to explain some steps that doctoral students can take in the final two years of their programs to prepare for a wide range of career opportunities. While much of your energy will be focused on “making good progress toward your degree"—institution-speak for finishing your dissertation—plan to carve out some time dedicated to your own professional development.
That is easier in some fields than in others. Lab-based scientists, for example, may have trouble getting out of the lab. But you don’t necessarily need 20 hours a week for this. If you’re just getting started on creating some professional next steps for yourself, you may need to set aside only a couple of hours a week.
Julie: Doctoral students have some skills that translate more readily than others to the outside world. And you can work on those skills as part of being a successful graduate student. They include:
- Applying for external grants.
- Learning to teach and present information clearly.
- Being able to synthesize complex information quickly.
- Developing a high level of comfort with (big) data.
- Building strong writing and/or technical skills.
Jenny: Many fellowship opportunities have long deadlines, so you need to become aware of them early on. Going through the process of understanding what the grant agency or organization wants to support and tailoring your application is excellent experience. In addition to understanding eligibility requirements, it’s a good idea to find out who has won the grant in the previous year or two.
Being awarded a grant or fellowship outside your university or department shows both that you know how to contextualize your research vis-à-vis the mission of the grantor and that your project is compelling. Grant-writing experience is valued by employers, especially at nonprofit organizations. In addition, receiving money, particularly in today’s competitive environment, can be translated into the language of accomplishment that is valued by for-profit employers. It makes you look like someone who knows how to take initiative.
Julie: Let’s talk about teaching and presenting, skills often undervalued by graduate students (and their advisers). Graduate students are required to teach so they often forget that many, if not most, people fear public speaking. It is worthwhile to learn to teach and present with ease and engagement—not just to fulfill a requirement but to learn the skills that go into presenting and to work actively to improve your performance.
Hand-in-hand with that goes learning to explain confidently your research or your field to audiences who know little to nothing about it. (For hints on how to present to folks outside of your field, check out the Prezi Top 100 list of “online resources every presenter should see.”) Employers in a range of fields will look for candidates with strong presentation skills who can speak with polish to audiences that might range from school-age children to corporate clients. Being able to communicate clearly on complex matters is increasingly important in today’s world.
Jenny: It’s a cliche to say that the world is awash in data. But it is, and Ph.D.’s are well suited to help manage the flood, both in being able to digest large amounts of written information and to interpret quantitative data. Ph.D.’s hone those skills in the dissertation process, and they are crucial in many lines of work. Convincing employers that you possess those skills is often just a matter of translating them clearly on your résumé. And even if you’re not planning a career in big data, you as a Ph.D. have a level of comfort with developing metrics to assess any given program or project.
Julie: Moreover, many doctoral students have the technical skills to analyze data and produce representations via software programs such as the R Project for Statistical Computing or SPSS Statistics. That is know-how that many employers value.
While you’re a student, take advantage of being at a university to develop your technical skills and learn new programs and software in your field. Many universities have centers that offer noncredit, short-term courses to students, faculty, and staff on programming, teaching technology, data analysis, and graphics. All of those could be helpful in the job search as they would indicate a high level of comfort with technology and an ability and willingness to learn new skills.
Jenny: Graduate students write all the time and take that skill for granted. They underestimate how interested employers are in good, succinct writing. Notice that I said “succinct.” While your adviser may expect you to write in detail about your research topic, a nonacademic employer will want to see clear, interesting, and to-the-point writing. Practice writing short, accessible prose about your work. Doing so will also help you learn to present information to nonspecialist audiences—a skill that will help you both in academe and in the outside world.
Julie: These are skills that you can, and often must, develop in a doctoral program. Of course we are not suggesting that these skills alone will get you into a new field. Ultimately, you will need to sell your skills to employers—i.e., to translate their value from the context of academe to the context of the industry you are planning to target.
Jenny: There are some things that Ph.D.’s don’t do so well, or don’t do a very good job of communicating that they can do. Nonacademic employers often perceive Ph.D.’s as being weak in these areas:
- Working as part of a team (particularly one made up of people with different training and perspectives).
- Supervising people.
- Overseeing complex projects.
- Managing a budget.
Julie: There is a perception that “the life of the mind” involves working alone and being hostile to teamwork. Moreover, there is the general perception among employers that Ph.D.’s will consider themselves above doing certain tasks (greeting clients at a reception, for example). In a nonacademic job search, you will need to demonstrate to employers that you can work well with others in any context. You will also need to show that you are willing to do what it takes to get a job done, even if the task is not always high-level or intellectually challenging. That is particularly true if you’re trying to break into a new career field that is quite different from your academic discipline.
Jenny: Most Ph.D.’s know how time-consuming and challenging it can be to manage people. Ph.D.’s have, after all, taught undergraduates. But doctoral students don’t always do a great job of translating their skills in this area onto a résumé.
Teaching students over the course of a semester isn’t exactly like managing people in a professional setting. So you must strike a balance between selling the experience you do have in supervising people and being able to talk about how you might manage people in a different context. If you’re offered the opportunity to manage anyone while you’re still in your Ph.D. program, take it.
The same holds true for managing a budget. I am sometimes surprised at how little doctoral students know about how budgets works at universities (even though they are usually planning careers in academe), but I was the exact same way when I was in graduate school. Volunteering to write a budget for a project, doing an informational interview with someone who runs a research center, or planning a conference can go a long way toward increasing your financial literacy and building your résumé.
Julie: Some employers think of a Ph.D. as someone who is only able to think deeply on one topic and has trouble meeting deadlines, while they need people able to knowledgeably run several projects at once and stick to deadlines. Your narrative needs to incorporate how you were able to work as a teaching assistant, conduct research, serve on the graduate-student council, and coordinate your department’s speaker series—all at the same time. You’ve probably done many or all of those things; your trouble comes in being able to translate that to a résumé.
Jenny: In thinking about your career options, you need to develop a plan that will fit your narrative thus far. Don’t make a potential employer think that you are seeking a job in a nonacademic field purely as a backup.
I recently spoke with a student in the social sciences who had had a nonacademic job interview. The second question he was asked: “Are you sure about leaving academia?” If you are exploring alternative careers, make sure you pursue ones that you feel passionate enough about to answer this question convincingly and honestly. Practice answering this question over and over, until your response becomes natural and confident.
Julie: Start exploring your career options as early as you can in graduate school. That can mean a passive activity such as reading So What Are You Going to Do With That?: A Guide for M.A.’s and Ph.D’s Seeking Careers Outside the Academy or some of the “quit lit” that’s out there. Read about different careers and talk to people in different career paths about their work. In short, take advantage of your student status to use all the resources available to you on the campus—and network, network, network.
Julie Miller Vick retired as senior associate director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania and now works part time as a senior career adviser at Penn, and Jennifer S. Furlong is director of the office of career planning and professional development at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. They are the authors of The Academic Job Search Handbook (University of Pennsylvania Press).
