PERSONAL GROWTH

How I Defected From Academia

Things I learned while finding a career (and happiness) after doing a PhD in Philosophy.

When I decided to take the plunge into graduate school, I had dreams of becoming a professor. I fantasized about living a life of contemplation, earning a comfortable salary, teaching great students, and ultimately retiring with a great pension and a long list of scholarly contributions. I would ride my motorcycle to campus on nice days, wear a tweed jacket, and sit in my book-lined office, stroking my beard in deep thought. It was going to be awesome.

Reality is quite good at scuttling our dreams of course, or at least changing them.

For me, the reality was that although pursuing a career in academia remained technically possible, it was becoming less and less desirable. The academic job market had all but imploded near the end of my program, meaning that even after a decade of schooling it would still be a long, tumultuous test of perseverance to realize my dream — if I was lucky.

Further, since my initial decision to go to grad school, I had married and started a family. Pursuing my dream would now require moving not just me but other people, multiple times, to wherever a good teaching job (and eventual tenure-track position) might become available. Not only that, but we’d be leaving our extended family and would thereby lose our best support system.

And so even though my love for philosophy hadn’t waned one iota, I now had other dreams — dreams of a happy life focused less on what exactly I’d be doing for a living and more on my family.

Seeing the writing on the wall, I mentally prepared to make the jump from instructor to non-academic employee as I neared the end of my PhD.

Perhaps you are in a similar position; perhaps you find that your dreams are changing as well.

If so, the good news is that you can­ and will find a job outside of academia. There are great companies or organizations out there that are interested in your particular abilities and will pay you well to help them get things done. You will be a brain for hire!

Not only that, but you can find work that is rewarding. Although you won’t be able to spend the day working on or teaching the topic of your choice, there are many upsides to getting a job outside academia.

One advantage is that you have much more freedom as to where and in which industry you work. Further, you get to work on new challenges on a monthly, weekly, or even a daily basis that exercise your mind. Finally, there is no upper limit on what you can achieve, and what you can earn.

Since there are many good general resources for being successful on the job hunt, the tips I share below are targeted towards folks coming out of academia with a graduate degree outside of the sciences (such as the Humanities, and of course Philosophy in particular.)

The Details

If you have any preconceived notion that getting a job outside of academia is all about merit, get rid of it

Leaving academia will take some time. Be prepared to spend at least three to six months to find a good job. Further, be prepared to work hard, be humble, and stay positive.

My search took just over six months, and was filled with many ups and downs. In all honesty it was a hard time, something that I would not want to go through again. This is partly why I wrote this article — it is designed to help you get through it as fast as possible.

The first thing I did was ditch my academic CV, and created a resume more suited to non-academic jobs. The graduate career counselors at the university will help you with this, as well as help you with your cover letter and interview skills. But here is a rather crucial point:

Highlight your transferable skills.

Coming out of grad school (and especially philosophy), you probably won’t have the specific content or knowledge about the industry in which you are applying. Don’t let this get you down: most employers know that there will be a steep learning curve for almost anyone they hire anyway, since so much of the information you will need to know is company specific. The key is to stress that you have the underlying skills needed for success on the job.

You may have never perceived your abilities in the following ways, but this is (in part) what recruiters care about:

• Critical Thinking Skills: I hear this over and over again in industry — they desperately want people who will ask questions and think critically. Philosophy is all about critical thinking (although not uniquely), but the recruiters may not be aware of this. This is so important that my advice is to just come right out and say that you have extensively honed your critical thinking skills in grad school. You can mention the fact that you took/taught logic (if you did) but be prepared in interviews to give concrete examples of how you have deployed your critical thinking skills, and what this means in practice.

• Research Skills: some jobs need this skill. Perhaps you may not be interested in jobs that don’t, but either way, you have the ability to perform copious amounts of research, analyze information, and synthesize the results. Since most of the specific content will be learned once you’re on the job, it is this underlying skill that is crucial to have.
• Communication Skills: you have the ability to take complex information and present it clearly to target audiences. This is very important for many jobs. Here you can highlight any teaching experience you have, or any publications or writings. At the very least, discuss your dissertation and defense.
• Ability to Learn (quickly): a PhD requires you to prove competency in multiple areas within a fairly short time frame, and this may not be obvious to those looking at your resume. So just make this clear: you have the proven ability to learn about many different subjects and display competency in them very quickly. This is a very transferable skill, crucial in your case since you will inevitably need to learn a lot of stuff when you start your job.
• Computer Skills: think about all the programs you’ve used while doing your PhD. First of all, you probably used Word or something similar to write your dissertation and many, many papers. Further, you’ve had to stick to specific style guidelines and use add-ons for bibliography tracking like Endnote. You’ve kept and analyzed grade sheets in Excel. You prepared dozens of PowerPoint presentations for your classes or seminars. You had to use your University’s corporate “Enterprise resource management” systems to get registered for classes, get paid, file reports, and submit expenses as a grad student.

These are all important to show that you have computer skills, and can quickly learn new programs they may want you to know. If you learned any other particular programs in your undergrad or elsewhere (which I recommend doing!), make sure to include them as well.

In my job search, many recruiters wanted applicants to be competent in at least a few of the MS Office programs, most notably Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

• Project / Time Management: this can be a big one. Recruiters want to know if you can handle multiple things and still accomplish something within a specified time frame. If nothing else, sell your PhD dissertation, or perhaps the PhD in its entirety, as one giant project. Think about it: you were responsible for planning a massive project, getting funding, achieving milestones, as well as reporting — these are all things that people do when they work on projects outside of academia. So again, don’t be shy: come right out and say that you can do these things all at once, and that you were (more importantly) successful at it.

Attitude and Approach

There are two big pitfalls I learned to avoid when it came to my attitude — lessons that shaped my perspective regarding my job search in general.

First of all, I had to get rid of any notion that my graduate work in philosophy, including my PhD, would speak for itself, and that getting a job outside of academia is all about merit. Instead I learned that you have to sell yourself, and you have to network.

Although it wasn’t comfortable at first, I got used to emailing and then phoning people I didn’t know, just to have an ‘informational interview’ with them. I approached them as a humble newcomer who was genuinely interested in learning about their field, and they often rewarded me with contacts that led to many good interviews.

But my suggestion is to not stop there. Go above and beyond when applying for jobs: find out who the recruiter is (be resourceful!), send inquiry emails for more information, etc. Make yourself stand out as an intelligent, motivated person. And network, network, network.

Secondly, I had to battle my insecurity. At first I found myself apologizing for the fact that my PhD is in Philosophy rather than something more obviously appropriate. But this was neither needed nor helpful, for I was in fact simply a professional moving from one field of specialty to another (for good reasons.) If anything, this merely showed that I was highly adaptive.

Humbleness without insecurity will carry you farther and faster in your career search than arrogance or crippling self-doubt.

Which Industry?

If you are coming out of the Humanities, you likely have a burning question about which industry to target. But here’s the thing: 99% of the cool jobs that exist you aren’t even aware of, so my recommendation is to not prematurely restrict yourself to any particular industry. Since you are leaving academia, you are already going to be doing something different for a living; the key is to find a job that requires those transferable skills you’ve developed, and such jobs exist in almost any industry.

So, I suppose my advice is to just not worry too much about where to look — look everywhere! You can’t know in advance where the job is that will not only make you happy, but will also be offered to you. Keep your perspective broad and your options open.

With an open mind regarding the industry, you can begin to target roles that seem appropriate for you through various job search engines or even particular company websites. To just name a few examples, the right job for you may be called ‘analyst,’ ‘researcher,’ ‘coordinator,’ ‘writer,’ ‘lead,’ or ‘decision support.’

My initial focus was on the health care sector because I had taught some courses that were tangentially related. But this focus only wound up wasting my time and energy. I never did get a job of interest to me in this sector, despite many promising leads and interviews.

Instead I was offered a job in the energy infrastructure industry. I never thought this industry would offer an interesting opportunity, or be interested in me. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. I accepted a ‘business analyst’ position on a quasi-legal team that required critical thinking on a daily basis, along with research and investigative skills. Further, I was privileged to work with intelligent professionals who were curious about the world, and loved to talk philosophy with me whenever they got the chance.

Don’t overlook these kinds of opportunities.

For all the finer details about resumes, interview techniques and practice, etc., there are many good resources out there, including (likely) your post-secondary school. Just remember that finding a good job will be one of the hardest things you do, and you’ve already done a graduate degree! So keep positive. You will come out of the process with a job, and hopefully a good one that gives you everything important that a dream job in academia would: fulfillment and a good living .

Thanks for reading! And before you go, I’d love to connect, chat and hear your thoughts on Twitter or Facebook!