In faculty circles, plenty of skepticism surrounds the new career-coaching industry that has sprung up to aid Ph.D.s amid a sluggish tenure-track job market. But as a former tenured professor, I’ve come to see paid coaches who specialize in helping academics transition to industry as filling a dire need. They are akin to Charon, the ferryman of Greek mythology — only in reverse, carrying scholars back across the rivers they had once traversed to separate themselves from the rest of the working world.
Many Ph.D.s have voluntarily chosen to leave faculty life in recent years, but sweeping cuts — like those at West Virginia University in 2023 and more recently at St. Cloud State University — have intensified calls for graduate students and professors in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to begin planning their exits before they are forced out. Even academics in science fields are not immune: According to the National Science Foundation, the number of life scientists leaving higher ed for industry has reached historic levels.
Despite persistent budget woes and looming demographic cliffs, graduate programs continue to credential doctoral recipients as academic specialists. Those fortunate enough to earn tenure-track positions only paint themselves further into this professional corner with time. Consequently, the path from higher ed to industry is paved with both practical and emotional challenges that have spiked the demand for private career coaching.
Larry McGrath, a senior user-experience researcher for Amazon who coaches Ph.D.s on the side, acknowledged in an interview that his side gig benefits from a weak tenure-track market. But he sees wage stagnation and limited geographic mobility as equal contributors to the rising demand for his career-consulting services. “Poor compensation and few choices of where to live — more so than just limited college and university openings — drives academics to translate their research profile into skill sets for the business world,” McGrath told me. “In fact, half of my clients are tenured or on the tenure track.”
I’m not one of his clients, but I could have been. A key factor in my decision to quit my tenured post after 16 years in higher ed was “geographical distance from family members,” as I wrote in a 2022 essay, “The Big Quit.” Today, besides being a writer and editor, I am also a book coach for clients. So I understand the impetus for this new cottage industry. As I see it, the exploding demand for career coaching raises several urgent questions for higher ed:
- Why does it remain so difficult for academics to translate their skills into industry terms when market realities dictate that they must?
- What might graduate programs do to incorporate more of the services that career coaches offer into the standard credentialing for a Ph.D.?
- And what red flags or bona fides might graduate students or midcareer faculty members identify as they review potential coaching services?
The Translation Problem
If academe seems to outsiders like the land of impenetrable jargon, industry poses the same challenge to Ph.D.s. Indeed, a key obstacle for transitioning academics is that their training has prepared them for a single role — professor — and all of their professional development is focused on carving out a niche within the narrow parameters of that job title. By contrast, positions in industry and nonprofits are legion, and many of those titles are unknown in academe. More and more Ph.D.s are paying a career consultant because they can’t get the translation help they need for industry jobs from their graduate programs, advisers, or colleagues.
Ashley Ruba, who holds a doctorate in developmental psychology, helps her graduate-student and faculty clients frame their research experience in industry terms such as “stakeholders,” “deliverables,” or “cross-functional teams.” But just as learning a new language requires openness to its culture, so a career pivot requires rethinking old binaries.
“There is little appreciation in academia for how industry roles can be just as intellectually challenging as an academic career,” Ruba said. “Longstanding myths about industry careers as ‘soulless’ and ‘boring’ further add to the idea that leaving academia is a ‘failure.’”
Jennifer Polk, a coach with a history Ph.D., asks her clients to focus on their personal priorities and purpose before ever looking at a job board. “Get right in your own mind about what you’re doing and why,” she says. “What do you want? Who even are you? What are your values?” There will be no translating skills without knowing thyself.
The Training Gap
Many career coaches say that graduate training continues to reinforce an unnecessary disconnect between discovery (pure research) and application (industry). The binary is captured well in an episode of The West Wing where Sam Seaborn, a White House staffer, tries to get Dalton Millgate, a physicist, to explain the return on investment of a billion-dollar superconducting supercollider. Millgate gives a lecture on how there is no way of knowing which innovations will yield practical results, when Seaborn interrupts him. “Discovery,” he says. “That’s what this is used for.”
Millgate would have been a lousy mentor to any graduate student pursuing an industry job, because his view of science is unnecessarily absolute. Similarly, many principle investigators limit the development of graduate students by confining them to the parameters of a particular research problem rather than preparing them for a range of possible applications. We’ve heard lip service for years about the need to rethink doctoral training. Yet there are steps, short of a complete curricular overhaul, that departments could take to help their graduate students better convey the value of this credential to a broad array of employers.
Ali Divan, who helps Ph.D.s find biotech jobs, explains that mentors could instead teach graduate students the spectrum of analytical techniques necessary to fully understand a protein. That way, Divan says, “you’re marketable. Now you can show up and a company will say, ‘Hey, We have this protein. We need it purified. Can you tell us about all the different types of chromatography you’ve done?’ And if your answer is ‘I’ve only done affinity chromatography,’ you’re not marketable. If your answer is, ‘Oh, I’ve done affinity chromatography, size exclusion, hydrophobicity, and I’ve also done [high-performance liquid chromatography]’ — then it’s like, ‘OK, you can solve any of our protein problems. You’re our protein person now.’”
Other strategies for graduate programs:
- Bring in alumni speakers who have developed successful industry careers and could help graduate students bridge the training and translation gaps.
- Strengthen industry partnerships and create internship programs to help students develop work experience with relevance beyond the ivory tower. In the sciences, Divan noted, internships are much more common for M.A. students but are mysteriously rare for Ph.D. students, even though the same principle investigator often supervises both.
But if the internal logic of most doctoral programs — keep pumping out professors — remains unchanged, the unspoken message persists that successful careers follow the tenure track and any other path is a disappointment or failure.
How to Tell the Good Coaches From the Charlatans
The most significant thing that graduate programs could do to prepare their Ph.D.s for a diversified job market would be to partner with some of these career coaches, who presently fill a void left by departments. If, as the Higher Education Policy Institute reported in 2020, fewer than 30 percent of graduate students will find careers in academe, then broader professional development is fast becoming — or already should be — an ethical imperative.
Tenured professors are often the least qualified to mentor graduate students on how to apply their training beyond academe. Partnering with private-sector coaches — most of them Ph.D.s who have successfully pivoted out of academe — would also ease the financial burden on those graduate students who have been working for poverty wages and can’t afford to pay for personal career consulting. This is guidance that institutions should be providing their Ph.D.s, and thus, should finance.
But the exploding pool of career coaches, and the low barriers to entry into that field, makes it difficult to know which services are legitimate and which are predatory. Perhaps the highest-profile case of the latter is of the “Cheeky Scientist,” which recently settled a class-action lawsuit by agreeing to pay $775,000 back to former clients.
Pressurized sales tactics, money-back guarantees, and promises that sound too good to be true are all warning signs that a coach or career service is untrustworthy. But it’s also important to find coaches who have already landed the roles that they help others pursue.
Angela Priest is a business executive who also coaches Ph.D.s at Alma.Me, a career-advice company for academics moving into industry. It’s hard to give good advice about job searching if you’ve never served on a hiring team, she told me, adding: “There’s so much nuance that goes into hiring decisions that I often see advice given that seems logical on the surface, but it’s not what happens in practice.” She recommends investigating a coach’s LinkedIn profile to see where they’ve worked, in what capacity, and whether they’ve actually done what they are trying to help others do.
Other strategies to find a reliable coach:
- Sample the free resources that a coach offers before joining a paid program. Free webinars, LinkedIn posts, and YouTube videos often offer substantive advice while showing proof of concept for premium services.
- Take the time to read and/or watch public reviews and testimonials.
- Reach out to a coach’s previous clients for a second opinion, the way many prospective graduate students already ask around before selecting a Ph.D. adviser.
Those are good rules to follow for job candidates, and also for Ph.D. programs that need to identify career coaches who could help prepare their students for more opportunities than shrinking faculty roles.
Indeed, graduate schools that don’t actively invest in their students’ success beyond academe might be unnecessarily forfeiting potential support. Universities, said Divan, the biotech career coach, “don’t realize that if they put $30,000 into a cohort today, that might come back as $80,000 in donations 10 years from now. Why? Because you helped them. Because unlike every other university that says, ‘No, my responsibility is to give you a degree. I don’t care if you get a job,’ you said, ‘My responsibility is to set you up for success in your life. So one day you can have a house. One day you can have a family. One day you can go home and irrespective of your research program, not worry about paying your bills.’”
