Dear Reader,
I read a post recently arguing that the hardest part of leaving academia is learning to translate your experience into language employers understand.
And, like, no.
I disagree.
Translating your experience can absolutely be difficult. If you’ve spent years describing your work in the language of academia, it takes practice to talk about it differently.
This isn’t unique to resumes, of course.
If you’re used to writing journal articles and suddenly you’re trying to pen an op-ed? Whoa. Not the same thing at all.
But here’s the problem: A lot of PhDs try to translate their experience before they’ve acquired enough fluency and cultural knowledge in the new professional world they’re trying to enter.
If your target is simply “something outside academia” or “industry,” without a few additional specifying terms, you’re probably not ready to translate yet.
Because you haven’t figured out:
- which parts of your experience to emphasize
- what you want that person to understand about you
- what will matter to the person reading your resume or LinkedIn profile
- what you can safely leave out
There’s no universal translation of “professor,” “postdoc,” or “PhD researcher” into non-academic language.
The same experience might be highly relevant to one role and barely worth mentioning for another.
Teaching could demonstrate facilitation, communication, curriculum development, relationship-building, subject-matter expertise, project management—or none of those, depending on the job.
So the task isn’t really to figure out how you can translate everything you’ve done for non-academic employers.
Instead, you want to ask a different question, namely, “What does this particular audience need to understand about me, and which parts of my experience will help them understand it?”
That’s a much more manageable task.
But before you can take it on, you need clarity about where you’re trying to go.
No, that doesn’t mean whittling your options down to one ideal job title.
You do need a useful target, though: a type of work, organization, problem, audience, or contribution you’re interested in.
And getting there usually involves more than asking ChatGPT to list careers for someone with your academic background.
That kind of list might give you a starting point. It can introduce possibilities you hadn’t considered.
But it can’t tell you which possibilities fit you.
That takes a combination of reflection and research.
Reflection helps you understand what you’re good at, what you enjoy doing, what matters to you now, and what your next step needs to accommodate.
Research helps you understand what kinds of work and workplaces actually exist, how people in those settings describe what they do, which problems employers need someone to solve, and what qualifications genuinely matter.
And some of the best research involves talking to actual humans.
Once you’ve done enough of that work to identify a plausible direction, translation becomes much more concrete.
Now you know what kinds of roles you’re aiming for, where you might contribute, and which parts of your experience demonstrate that you’ll be a great hire.
So, if you’ve been endlessly rewriting your resume or LinkedIn profile and still can’t make the words feel right, the problem may not be your writing.
You may be trying to answer a question that comes later.
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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