For Ph.D.s and graduate students on the job market, winter is the season to get started on that industry job search you kept meaning to think about in more detail.
We recommend you apply for nonacademic jobs, even if a faculty career is your first choice. As experts on graduate-career counseling, we recently wrote about how to run a “tandem job search” for faculty and industry positions. We define the latter as full-time jobs in companies, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and the like. Cultivating other professional possibilities, beyond the tenure track, can give you a sense of openness, perhaps even a bit of optimism, about your future.
We have broken down the tasks into three categories: things you can do to get started, things you can do to help narrow your search, and things you can do just before applying. However, those distinctions are not firm since career exploration isn’t always linear. Sometimes you realize you have to go back to an earlier stage and learn more before you can forge ahead. Wherever you are in your nonacademic search, here are some ways to move forward.
Getting Started
If you haven’t thought much about industry careers yet, early winter can be a great time to explore your options and reflect on which ones truly interest you.
Write down your thoughts. You may not be ready to share your career goals and fears publicly. Journaling or free-writing is a low-stakes way of reflecting on your graduate-school experience thus far, and what lies ahead. Here are some questions to help you get started:
- What are your general hopes and fears about your professional future? The looming end of your doctoral training is both exciting and anxiety-inducing, and sometimes it helps to get those thoughts down on paper.
- What have you loved about graduate school? Don’t limit yourself to the content of your work (though that may be part of it). You might say, “being around other people who care about X as much as I do” or “being back on a college campus” or “my students.”
- What have you disliked about it? Be honest! No one else will see this, and it’s important to articulate what is not working for you.
- Imagine yourself in five years. Where do you want to be (literally and figuratively)? What are the important elements of your imagined life? Again, consider not only your work but also the rest of your life. Do you have geographic limitations? Do you have ambitions in your personal life? How will those affect your professional goals?
Take a self-assessment. You can find great, free tools out there for self-assessment — some of them designed specifically for graduate students:
- Imagine PhD is a free, confidential tool from the Graduate Career Consortium for graduate students (not only Ph.D.s!) in the humanities and social sciences. It contains not only self-assessments but also a wide range of career-exploration tools: sample job ads, interviews with Ph.D.s in those fields, and even job-simulation activities.
- MyIDP is a similar tool for graduate students in STEM fields.
- Stanford University’s Meaningful Work Kit is designed to help you think in detail about what matters most to you and what you need in order to thrive. The online version will walk you through both assessments and some reflective activities.
Read job ads. Read them even if you aren’t sure you’ll apply, because they will give you an idea of the range of opportunities. One of the best places to read job ads is LinkedIn, so it’s a good idea to create a profile there. You don’t have to do much with your profile at this point, but having one will allow you to peruse the job openings.
As you read each ad, resist the urge to jump straight to the qualifications to see if they fit your background. Instead, pay attention to your own reactions: What excites you about an ad? What makes you want to skip quickly to the next one? Consider the language used: How do the potential employers talk about the skills and qualifications they’re looking for in a candidate? How does that language translate to what you’ve been doing?
Make a list of your dream employers. Don’t limit yourself to the “realistic” ones that seem within reach. Brainstorm places you’d love to work. What does that mix of organizations say about your interests and skills?
This exercise is sometimes hard for doctoral students, particularly when they are focused entirely on their scholarly field. Taking five minutes a day to read the business section of The New York Times, or a similar publication, can help broaden your sense of what’s out there.
Talk to someone you trust. Talking with someone who has known you well for a long time — and who knows you outside of your academic work — can yield very different feedback from conversations with colleagues in your program.
Choose your confidantes wisely. They don’t need to be in your field, but they should be level-headed, good listeners, and reliably in your corner.
Narrowing Down the Search
Once you have a sense of the types of jobs or employers you’re interested in, you’re ready for the next step — focusing on a few distinct career paths in depth. The activities in this section will get you started.
Develop your LinkedIn profile. Time to start fleshing out a skeletal profile, since it’s very likely to start attracting visitors. People you ask for informational interviews will often glance at your LinkedIn page, as will hiring managers if you apply for internships or other opportunities. The most important elements of your profile are:
- A photo. Choose either one of you in action (say, teaching a class) or a reasonably professional headshot.
- A profile headline. There are a number of ways to do this, but please avoid using the word “student” (even if you still are one), as it will make you sound younger and less experienced than you are. “Doctoral Researcher” is one alternative. Another is a series of nouns that describe you: “Writer | Researcher | Teacher.”
- An “About” section. This is a summary of your experience for readers who might have questions about how it all connects. It’s fine to write it in the first or third person — just make sure it’s engaging and not simply a recitation of your résumé. A common mistake we see is when graduate students use this space to summarize their dissertation. It’s better to focus the “About” section on your job skills and experiences.
- A professional-highlights section. You don’t need to list every single part-time job you’ve had as a doctoral student. Do list the ones you would like prospective employers to know about.
Identify people you’d like to chat with about their career paths. That’s the main point of an informational interview, and LinkedIn can be a great place to find prospective interviewees. Peruse the employees of organizations you’re interested in, check out where Ph.D. alumni of your institution have landed, and see what your own connections are up to. We don’t recommend sending out any requests for informational interviews in late December, but plan to contact people once they are back at work, in early January.
Think ahead to the summer and beyond. How do you plan to use your remaining time in graduate school? Make a list of professional-development activities and opportunities you want to take advantage of. Some will require significant planning. Summer internships, for example, often have application deadlines in February or March.
As you plan, consider which skills or experiences will be most valuable to you in your job search, based on the fields you have chosen to explore. You want to give yourself the opportunity to try new things, but you will need to be selective — and realistic — about what is possible, as you also need to continue making progress on your doctorate.
Draft a résumé. A résumé takes time, and many drafts, to get right. Give yourself permission for it to look and feel pretty rough at first. Start by listing all your most recent jobs and what you did in them. Focus on accomplishments, not duties. Then make an appointment with someone in your career-services center after classes start to go over it and get some feedback. It might seem early to do that, but, as with your LinkedIn profile, it is better to lay the groundwork now than have to throw something together hastily if an opportunity comes along.
Plan your calendar for the coming semester. Check your campus career center’s spring schedule of job fairs, workshops, employer-information sessions, and other events. They might be listed on the career center’s website or in a tool like Handshake (which you should learn to use if your campus has it). Put relevant events in your personal calendar, and plan to attend. We’d like to put in a particular plug for employer-information sessions — they are a great way to learn about hiring practices, timelines, and available positions.
Preparing to Apply
If you have started applying for tenure-track openings, you may be waiting to hear about first-round interviews or campus visits. All that uncertainty and stress can cast a shadow, but using these months to get your ducks in a row for an industry search can help mitigate the anxiety. Prepare the applications you will send out for nonacademic positions, starting in January or February. Anything you can do now will make your life easier down the line.
List the specific types of jobs you plan to seek. Identify one or two job fields in which you are especially interested, and two to three types of positions in those fields. You probably already know which fields you’re interested in, and you may have talked to people in different roles within those fields. Make sure you have a sense of the types of positions you want and what those jobs tend to be called. Read some recent job ads, and set up some LinkedIn alerts to receive job postings, if you haven’t already.
Revise your résumé(s) and cover letter(s). If you’re at this stage of the process, you should already have rough drafts of your résumé and a generic cover letter. Revisit those documents now, and give them a thorough review. If you’re applying for roles in different fields — or for very different roles within the same field — you will need to have more than one version of your résumé, to emphasize different aspects of your experience for particular types of nonfaculty jobs.
Consider adding “Summary of Qualifications” and “Core Skills” sections to the top of your résumé. Those are easily changed, depending on the job, and you can adjust the wording to reflect the language of the job ad without having to rewrite everything.
Again, if you haven’t talked to anyone in your university’s career-services center lately, make an appointment for January or February to have someone glance at your application materials. Even if you think they’re perfect, it’s good to have a second set of eyes on them.
Draft some emails. In the new semester, you’ll have to find time to email people for informational interviews about their careers or to reach out to your alumni networks and LinkedIn contacts. Your email drafts should let people know that you’ll be looking for a job in the new year. It’s time-consuming, but we do recommend that you contact those folks individually, rather than en masse, for a more personal touch. The more you can say about what kind of work you’re looking for, the more able your network will be to help you. You might also ask select contacts if they are willing to have coffee and glance at your résumé.
Consider drafting a post for LinkedIn that announces the nonfaculty arm of your job search. We realize that some graduate students and new Ph.D.s are nervous about advertising that they are looking for industry jobs. But at this point, and in a competitive tenure-track market, a tandem search should be considered the norm, not the exception. Job hunting in a vacuum is much harder than job hunting in the open. Give your network a chance to help.
And speaking of LinkedIn. …
Clean up your online presence. Fine-tune your LinkedIn profile so that it is up to date and reflective of both who you are and who you want to be professionally. Lock down any social-media profiles you don’t want prospective employers to see. Finally, turn on your browser’s incognito mode and Google yourself. You may be surprised by what comes up. It’s better to know now what prospective employers will see.
Job hunting is very stressful for most people. Try to do even a few things now to help yourself get a head start on your industry job hunt. Your future self will thank you.
