Career & Tools
Interested in a career beyond the academy, and want to learn more about the essentials of crafting it? Read on for a message from the Beyond the Professoriate team about a new free assessment tool designed to help PhDs find a successful career outside of academia!
Read on for a message from the Beyond the Professoriate team about a new free assessment tool designed to help PhDs find a successful career outside of academia!
Beyond the Professoriate's research has shown that one of the biggest obstacles to a career is moving through career exploration and job searching in a haphazard way. Think about it. Not following a process when job searching is like throwing spaghetti at the wall. And while we can talk about resume mistakes, transferable skills, and all the other tactics all day long - the first and most critical step in your job search is knowing what the actual structure of a successful job search is. It's not unlike any kind of academic work we do - there's a structure and a process to everything. We can be creative inside the boundaries of our experiment, or our journal article, or our manuscript, but there is an underlying structure that enables this all to make sense and move forward. So, what IS the structure of a successful job search?
The Beyond the Professoriate team has conducted hundreds of hours of research on how PhDs make career transitions and has identified 4 stages PhDs move through when leaving academia.
Stage 1: Discovery
In this stage the goal is to recognize your optimal career pathway. An optimal career pathway is not one job you'll do for the rest of your life. Rather, your optimal career pathway is a list of criteria-a metric-by which you will evaluate which jobs are best for YOU. This list is your guiding North Star and critical to effective job searching.
Stage 2: Research
In this stage, there are two goals: the first is to learn proven job search strategies, like networking, getting active on LinkedIn, and translating your academic work experience into the language of employers.
The second is to use these strategies to gather information and evaluate possible career pathways that align with your skills, interests, and values. Which opportunity will align with your optimal career pathway?
Stage 3: Implement
In the implement stage, your goal is to execute a successful search and use proven strategies to land a job.
Stage 4: Build
Beyond the Professoriate's research shows that at the builder stage PhDs re-visit their career opportunities and seek further advancement and growth. Many are quickly promoted in their current roles, and many change jobs or even career fields within their first 1-3 years. This is why it's okay to not know with 100% certainly if what you're doing will be THE career. It probably won't be - and that's really quite exciting.
These stages provide a structure to what can seem like a chaotic process. Knowing where you're at in the process can help you set realistic goals and manage your expectations.
The Beyond the Professoriate team has created a free assessment tool where you can learn what stage you're at in the job search process. In addition to helping you identify what stage you are at, the tool will give you 3 steps to take to advance your job search to the next stage. We hope this career assessment will help you identify where you're at, so you can move forward in your job search with strategic steps and confidence.