Dear Reader,
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I have two reflections for you this morning, both about what gets misunderstood in career change.
First, who actually needs support leaving academia.
Second, why a stalled job search often looks like a resume problem, even when it isn’t.
One of my clients will be a full professor soon; another has been granted tenure. Both are leaving academia in the next few months.
This isn’t the standard narrative of PhDs changing careers that I witnessed earlier in my career, when I was just starting out as a coach in 2013.
Folks tended to assume that businesses like mine were aimed at graduate students, or very recent PhDs. Maybe postdocs too.
But, while finishing and new PhDs were certainly my clients, I had professor—tenured, even—clients from the beginning.
And that was something I didn’t expect. Didn’t they all have the best job in the world?
Yeah. No.
That’s just another part of the sticky academic narrative of success, eh?
Anyways, fast forward to now and my clients, including the members of my PhD Career Clarity Program, are typically professors and postdocs, and other PhDs who graduated (sometimes many) years ago.
They’re at a point in their lives where they want to be thoughtful about what’s next, but also not waste time. Been there, done that.
So, yeah, cheering on a signed book contract, promotion to tenure or full, or hearing about conference presentations or papers is part of my work.
These activities and achievements may be bookends to a career, or part of the transition to the next—or just what someone wants to contribute to the world. (Love that for you.)
Here’s my point: If you’re thinking about or planning for or actively working on your own career switch from faculty life to something else but don’t see yourself represented in career services, maybe now you do.
And once you do see yourself in this conversation, the next question is often: okay, what do I actually do next?
I’m in the middle of preparing and facilitating a four-part workshop series for a Canadian organization.
It’s been a great experience so far. The participants have been thoughtful, engaged, generous with each other, and very willing to reflect and share.
And one thing I’ve been reminded of, again and again, is how much the job search can feel like everything, everywhere, all at once.
Each workshop has a specific topic. One session is about job-search strategy. Another is about transferable skills and employer value. The third is about STAR stories and communicating impact. The fourth one will be about informational interviews and networking.
But of course, real people don’t show up with their questions neatly sorted by session title and learning outcomes, however well thought out they may be.
They show up with everything that’s on their minds about their own job search.
And that means I got questions throughout the first three workshops about all kinds of different topics:
- How do I get interviews?
- How do I explain my PhD?
- How do I know what employers want?
- How do I network without feeling awkward?
- How do I answer interview questions?
- How do I get past ATS?
- Is my resume good enough?
And I get it, of course.
When your job search feels messy, frustrating, or completely stalled, all those questions and more can blur together.
The job search feels scattered when you don’t have a structure for sorting what kind of problem you’re actually dealing with.
So, understandably, you focus on your resume.
Your resume is visible. Editable. Concrete.
You can open the document and do something.
But not every job-search problem is a resume problem.
If you don’t know what kinds of roles you’re aiming for, that’s a direction problem.
If you don’t know which experiences prove you can do the work, that’s an evidence problem.
If you’re describing your work in language only academics understand, that’s a translation problem.
If you’re applying online over and over without learning much from the process, that’s a strategy problem.
If you freeze when someone asks, “So, what are you looking for?” that might be a clarity and confidence problem.
Yes, your resume matters.
But your resume can’t do all of that work for you.
At some point, the next useful step isn’t another round of tweaking bullets.
It’s stepping back and asking: what problem am I actually trying to solve?
That’s why I built the PhD Career Clarity Program around a step-by-step process, so you can
- clarify your direction,
- identify the evidence you already have,
- translate your experience for employers, and then
- take strategic action.
Going through it may still feel a little messy (that’s life) but there is an order of operations, and it does help.
As for my workshop participants, I’m going to remind them of this order in the final session this week, and make sure I’m connecting all I’m asking them to do back to their real life job searches.
Because the point of structure isn’t to make the job search tidy for its own sake.
It’s to help you stop throwing effort at everything all at once, and start taking the next right step for the actual problem in front of you.
Cheers,
Jen
P.S. Want to explore working with me? Visit my Services page to learn about options, or reply to this email and let me know what you want my help with!
Jennifer Polk, PhD
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