It’s a standard exercise advice columns and career centres assign post-PhDs seeking non-academic employment: turn your CV into a resume. Unfortunately, doing so isn’t straightforward. And completing the exercise isn’t necessarily the best way of going about things. Trouble is, one’s academic path is only that. What it leaves out may well be the aspects of your skills and experiences most valuable to you on your job search.
Take my CV, for example. I’ve got three degrees, multiple awards, several conference presentations, a bunch of teaching assistant experience, and many entries in my professional and administrative service sections. Depending on the job, education can stay at the top or go to the very bottom. Details about my dissertation and thesis titles, supervisors, and comprehensive fields get deleted. Easy, done. Awards: ? My sense is that unless the resume will be for a position within a university—where hiring managers might know what SSHRC is—I can leave this section out. (Psychological crisis!) Conference presentations can be folded into one sentence or phrase: “present research findings at international conferences.” Having done them means I have communication skills. Same with teaching, which probably merits a few sentences, but these could appear in different places on a resume. Being a teaching assistant gives me administrative experience, judgement and assessment skills, and a number of other things depending on the resume’s intended audience. So far, so good. The rest of my CV items can be similarly judged with an eye to what employers are looking for.
Now, all that wasn’t so taxing. But the accomplishments of my university life are only some of my many potentially relevant skills and experiences. Even while I was enrolled in graduate school, I was doing all sorts of other things, most of which were neither strictly academic or for money. The sum total of my academic experiences turned into a “real-world”-ready resume is hardly the sum total of what I want to emphasize and celebrate about myself. And that’s why writing a resume is so much more difficult than the standard “CV to resume” approach leads us to believe. Translation is the easiest bit. Much more challenging is figuring out what I should be when I grow up… and then figuring out how I can craft a resume-based narrative to bolster my cause. No wonder I still don’t have a resume I’m comfortable sending out.
There’s still value in the “CV to resume” exercise, but only as part of a longer process. Building a resume is a major construction project, and making CV material resume appropriate is only a small part of the job. Sigh.
