Job prospects for many graduate students and post docs seem daunting in the current academic market. We are constantly told how there are fewer and fewer tenure track positions while the number of PhDs continually rises. Much of our training is focused on the presumption that we will stay in the academy in a primary research or teaching position, leaving us to seek out non-academic job search skills on our own.

Luckily, Cornell University held a workshop on this very subject on June 15 of this year titled ‘Expanding Your Job Search Skills.’ More than 50 graduate students and post docs from social and life sciences attended the workshop hoping to gain insight and confidence in their options to leave academia. Speakers from career services, the office of postdoctoral studies, and alumni who have left academia spoke on some of the major concerns about leaving academia and tools to help us do so.  

To begin, Rebecca Sparrow from Cornell Career Services gave an introduction and overview for the workshop. The presentations were split under three main headings: Understand Yourself, Explore Options, and Take Action. I will start with this post covering the Understand Yourself component of the workshop and move on to the latter two topics in subsequent posts.  

The first major presentation titled “Why Choose a Career Outside of Academia?” was given by Anne Poduska, a career adviser in the Graduate School at Cornell. I loved that she started with the pointed question she did, as it is something that comes up so often when you are first mentioning that you might consider a career alternative to a tenure track professor. Anne’s first challenge is to the concept that anything outside of a tenure track professor is ‘alternative’. As I have talked to colleagues about my desire to leave academia, the most common question I get is “so…..what else is there?” In the hard sciences the first thing that comes to mind is working as a researcher in an industry lab, but those are really the only two options we are presented with - working in/running a lab in academia, or in industry.  

So how do you start your search for a non-academic position? Poduska suggests that you view this career exploration as a research project. As we have been trained to design an experiment, collect data, and synthesize results in the lab and library, we can use these skills to our advantage to reduce the stress of career exploration. The simple steps are as follows: 1. Conduct background research to identify topics of interest. 2. Develop a hypothesis or question. 3. Gather information to test your hypothesis or answer you question. 4. Evaluate your findings. 5. Articulate your results and publicize. We can expand these general steps with a few examples to help clarify their meaning. First, you must conduct background research to identify topics of interest. Just like proposal writing, you must decide WHAT you are going to invest your time into. In this case, the most important factor in the job search is identifying your own skills and what is most important to you in your career. Look back at your experiences so far in school and your career and determine the activities, skill sets, or settings that made you the happiest. Recall those times when you felt most accomplished or enjoyed yourself the most, and try to distill what it was that you or those around you were doing that made that experience so positive. Generate a list of these skills or work-life balance attributes that you care about the most. This will be your guide for the rest of the process. Next, you will develop a hypothesis or question to spend your time answering. In this case, it can be a hypothesis such as “I would like to spend most of my time writing” or “I would like to synthesize technical information and present it to a non-technical audience”. Questions such as “Is science writing/career advising/consulting/etc. a good match for my skills and interests?” are great starting points as well if you already have some career options in mind. These hypotheses and questions are directly derived from the skills and qualities you identified in the first step, so take time and care to conduct that background research well. The next step is to gather information to test your hypothesis or answer your question. At this stage, other people are going to be your main source of information. Locate individuals who are in positions you are interested in, read blog posts from people who are in your desired fields, talk with career counselors at your institution if they are available, and learn about careers in which you can use certain skills and fulfill your priorities. Now you can evaluate your findings and either prove your hypothesis or answer your question by processing the information you found. Are there any careers that are a good match for your skills, interests, and values? The final step is to articulate your results and publicize. In this case, that means to go out, find jobs that meet your criteria, and apply!  

The biggest challenge in this whole process is redefining yourself from an academic to a person with highly sought after job skills. For instance, if you were to meet someone at an academic conference, you would most likely introduce yourself with your student status and field of research. “I am a PhD student in Plant Biology.” You might give a quick “elevator talk” of your research, but that is usually the extent of it. When you start writing your resume and cover letter, that brief description of your research does not adequately convey all of the skills you have gained as a graduate student in a clear manner. You are relying on the person reading your application materials to read between the lines, and with hundreds of applicants for a position, this simply will not happen. It is also extremely helpful for you to understand that all of those tasks you complete in the lab and office are building a skill set that is highly desirable in many different markets. For instance, you can redefine your “I am a PhD student in Plant Biology” statement to “I am skilled at writing, researching a wide variety of topics, reading and synthesizing large amounts of information and working independently in high-pressure environments.” All of these statements are true of the average graduate student, and open the doors to opportunities that you had not considered before. Now instead of the limited options of a tenure track professor or industry researcher, with the skills outlined above you could easily be a competitive applicant for a position as a journalist, grant officer, editor, patent reviewer, foreign service officer, etc.  

The next step is to focus on identifying your own transferable skills. Sheri Mahoney (Manager of Career Education and Advising at Cornell) defined three broad groups of skills: functional skills, knowledge-based skills, and personal qualities. Functional skills are actions we use to perform a task, and include words like ‘organize’, ‘promote’, ‘analyze’, and ‘write’. Knowledge-based skills encompass a specific area of knowledge needed to perform a task, procedure, or process. These are acquired through education, training, and on-the-job experience, and are exemplified in personnel administration, contract management, accounting, and any field with a well defined framework in which you must work. Finally, personal qualities are those characteristics that contribute to performing work activities and are developed through life experiences. These are the skills that set you apart as a person, and contain words like ‘patient’, ‘diplomatic’, ‘results-oriented’, and ‘independent’. It can feel a bit odd at first when describing yourself in terms like these - I know that I feel like I’m being boastful when I’m thinking about these skills! It’s a necessary part of the process though. A potential employer will only know what you tell them about yourself, so make sure it is 1) true, and 2) demonstrates your abilities to their best!  

After writing down your own list of transferable skills, Sheri highly recommends finding a job posting which you could see yourself applying to and looking for these key words and skills that you have listed about yourself. You will be surprised at how many of the required/desired skills in the posting you already have! At this point you can also focus on which of your skills you are ABLE to do, and which skills you ENJOY using. This can be a big help when evaluating job postings in the future and determining which you want to apply to. At this stage you are also learning how to better organize your resume (taking the highly specific nature of a research project and distilling it into the skills used to perform it), writing a customized cover letter (if the posting lists many skills that you enjoy using, tell them about it! Everyone wants an enthusiastic employee!), and preparing for a job interview.