|
For those seeking to move from academia to industry, one of your most important tasks will be to convert your CV to a resume. A crisp, brief PhD resume is critical when you apply for industry roles, serving as your starting point for conversations with a recruiter, hiring manager, or interviewer. It’s important to spend some time polishing your resume to capture your career journey, your strengths, and your research experience. In this post, I’ll share 5 tips on how to polish your resume to move from a PhD to an industry role. These tips draw on my experience reviewing 100 resumes as an interviewer at Facebook and Google, empowering 50 PhD students to land jobs in industry as a coach, and having made the move from PhD to industry myself. My PhD research was with chimpanzees and I landed a role as a data scientist at Facebook via effective networking and a strong resume. I want to share these tips with you so that you can confidently make the leap from your PhD into an industry role. If you want even more details on how to make this leap, leverage my playbook, Academic Exit. How to write an industry resumeLet’s start by setting out your goal and a key expectation as you begin to turn your CV into a resume:
Creating your resume is a process. You will start with a blank page, your CV, or some sort of resume template. You’ll need to identify key areas of your work that you want to highlight, prune those into pithy bullet points, and order sections according to the story you want to craft. I’d recommend spending more time creating a solid 1-page resume than on any courses preparing new job skills. Learning how to convey your PhD research experience in a way that translates to industry will be one of the most difficult but important things to get right and it’s worth investing time in. My initial resume in moving from academia to industry took more than 10 iterations to produce something usable - but, now that I have that template, I’m able to edit it quickly for new roles. Putting in the upfront work to make a solid artifact matters. Be ready to ask for help along the way. Prepare an initial draft of your resume and then run that draft by people whose feedback you trust. Early on, friends or colleagues can provide input on whether it is easily readable. Once you’re getting close to a polished draft, ask someone close to your target role to provide feedback on whether you’ve gotten the jargon right. If you don’t have a network connection in your target area, leverage “cold” applications and upload your resume to job sites to see whether it successfully passes through the screening algorithms. If you have multiple target roles that you are applying for, you may want to create multiple versions of your resume. For example, if you are applying for both data science and quantitative UX roles, the focal areas of the listings may differ a bit. You may want to emphasize different bullet points or use slightly different phrasings. Where possible, list your skills using the same language as the description of the precise job that you’re applying for. If you’re uploading your resume to a job site, it may be scanned by an algorithm before it reaches a sourcer. This sourcer may not know the full details about the role and will have a certain set of skills they are scanning for. It’s important to make sure you’ve got the right keywords included and highly visible. Your target is to create a resume that is quickly scannable, easily understandable, distinctive relative to other candidates, and straightforward in presenting the right keywords that demonstrate why you’re a great fit for your target role. How to describe your PhD research experience and publications on your resumeTip #1: Keep your industry resume short For a CV, length is helpful. As a graduate student, I remember hearing praise for my CV being “as long as my arm.” For an industry resume, in contrast, shorter is better. Everyone in industry is busy, tasked with way more work than they have time for. You may have only seconds to make an impression on a recruiter, hiring manager, or interviewer who is scanning your resume. It’s critical therefore, to edit your resume down to the essentials to get your message across quickly. I’d recommend 2 pages max. 1 page is even better. Keeping your industry resume short may be difficult, so it’s OK to start with something longer and prune as you edit. Focus on getting the content first and then whittling down to the points that matter most. Tip #2: Clearly convey your relevant industry skills Unlike a CV, where selling your topic matters, for a resume, your research topic is less relevant for an industry role than the skills you bring to the table. Unless you happen to be applying to a job where your area of graduate expertise is relevant, what’s more important is how you got work done in grad school rather than what you’ve done. You may be saying to yourself, "but wait - I don't have any relevant skills!" You do. You just need to figure out the language with which you can convey those skills so that they come across as relevant in industry. If you’ve been conducting informational interviews (get my free guide here), you’ve started to pick up on some of the buzzwords of the fields you’re interested in - data analysis, project management, user research, experimentation, statistics, etc. You can also learn these buzzwords from listening to people speak about their experience (like they do in my Career Explorer series). Your goal in creating your resume is to translate projects that you’ve done into bullets using that jargon. Ideally, your bullet points should be easy to scan even for someone with little to no expertise in your academic field. In addition to your informational interviews, you can pick up relevant jargon via job descriptions. These often provide great examples of the types of verbs and nouns that the job is looking for: led, analyzed, defined, collaborated. Think about what you’ve done in grad school using that same language. Did you take in fMRI data, clean it using Python and leverage R to analyze the outputs? Mention your skills in analyzing unstructured data. Did you lead a team of researchers to carry out a multi-year series of experiments? Mention your skills in team leadership and project management. Begin to shape your PhD research experience into your own personal story of experiences so that you can clearly articulate what you can (and can’t) do. Tip #3: Quantify the outcomes of your academic research for industry roles Successful resumes spell out concrete, numerical outcomes for the work that the candidate has done. Concrete outcomes make it easy for the reader to understand the “deliverables” or outputs that your work has created. This is particularly important in areas of academic work that are niche-specific. The person reading your resume may have no idea why the bend in that specific protein you sequenced was relevant. Make it abundantly clear what you did and what impact that had: “Sequenced 25 proteins to identify a candidate for an HIV treatment.” Quantities make it easy to understand the outcomes across any field. Early on in shifting my own CV to a resume, I remember really struggling on what to quantify. So I started off by quantifying what I was most proud of - the thousands of saliva samples I’d collected for my studies of ape behavioral endocrinology. The latter half of that sentence didn’t matter much in the Tech industry - behavioral endocrinology isn’t a big deal to Facebook (yet). In retrospect, even the fact that I’d collected two thousand samples was a speck’s worth of data relative to the scale of the data that I would eventually work with at Facebook. But, unwittingly, by quantifying those saliva samples I was able to call out that I’d analyzed that data in R, which happened to be relevant for data science positions since it showed that I was able to script. My work with that data set made it clear that I could work with datasets larger than those that can fit in an Excel spreadsheet, which was critical for a data science role. My recommendation, then, is to start off by taking what you’re proud of and what you can quantify. Here are a few questions to spark ideas:
Start with what you are proud of, re-read and get input from others, then revise, cut, and repeat. Tip #4: Be sure to include a strong summary statement for your resume The beginning of your resume is your chance to capture your career journey in a few short sentences to tell the reader who you are in a few short sentences. In my opinion, summary statements help because they put you in a straightforward bucket that is easy to remember. If a recruiter is looking at 25 resumes for a data science role and only one of them comes from a geneticist, that enables you to stand out. Coming from academia, it may be hard to figure out your own bucketing at first. This is a place to experiment and iterate. For inspiration, check out profiles on LinkedIn that have a solid one-sentence summary. Tailor your summary statement using words from the job that you’re applying for. Say you’re a geneticist applying for both roles in BioTech as well as roles in Data Science. For the former, your resume may have a summary statement like: “I am a geneticist with 8 years of experience in bench work, including CRISPR.” For the latter, your summary statement may instead highlight: “I am a quantitative geneticist seeking roles that leverage my experience with unstructured data sets.” You get to pick the topics and language to highlight your strengths and journey in the summary statement for your resume. As much as I dislike labeling or putting people into buckets in general, a resume is a good place to do so. Tip #5: Leave no major gaps on your industry resume As an interviewer at Facebook and Google, I would quickly skim a candidate’s resume so that I could walk into an interview knowing what skills I needed to assess. I would look for gaps between the role I was interviewing for and what appeared on the resume. If I were interviewing a linguist for a data science role and his resume didn’t mention any statistical techniques, I would focus on questions assessing his knowledge of probability. If I were interviewing a physics PhD who hadn’t put any examples of collaborative work on her resume, I would ask her a behavioral question to get a sense for how she would work in teams. My recommendation for you, therefore, is to do your best to address each of the major categories of skills with bullet points on your resume so that there are no “obvious” gaps. That’s not to say that you need a bullet addressing every requirement from the job listing - you very much do not. For each bucket of skills (quantitative, bench, leadership, etc), creating a bullet point that demonstrates your capacities will create fewer perceived gaps. ConclusionYou can move into an industry role with a PhD in a "niche" discipline. After all, my PhD research was with chimpanzees! Learn more about my experience on my About page. I had a client say to me once, "if someone can land an industry role with your research experience, anyone can!" And she was right. You can make this transition too. But, you will need to polish your PhD resume in order to move into industry. You will need to use your resume to confidently, concisely, and clearly convey your skills. Once your resume is ready, you will find doors open to you that you might never have imagined.
I'll be sharing these tips and more in a free webinar on How to Build a Kick@$$ resume in the first week of October. Join us and bring your resume for feedback!
1 Comment
As you embark on your PhD job search, you may be concerned about your qualifications — particularly if you are considering a non-academic path. My PhD clients often ask:
Here's the good news: as a PhD-holder, you are already qualified for a number of existing roles. Your task is to find a job that is a good fit for you — not to contort yourself into some mask of generalized marketability. By taking a fit-based approach, you shift from a mindset of worry ("am I skilled enough?") to one of fact-finding ("where can my skills be most of service?") If you are considering a non-academic path, you are not alone. Fewer than 50% of PhDs now finish their doctorate with a job offer in hand. That percentage is declining decade over decade. Nearly 50% of PhDs in the US will end up taking a job in industry. Yet 60% need to seek career guidance online because they don’t get adequate mentorship within their institutional environment. In advising more than 50 PhDs on their career paths, I have uncovered a number of techniques that enable folks to successfully land non-academic jobs. Below I have listed 4 such strategies.  Strategy 1: Stop Reading Job Ads — For Now This sounds impossible, right? How can you learn about jobs without reading ads? Won't job ads give you an idea of the skills you need in order to be worthy of a job? The problem with job ads is that they are like a Tinder profile with airbrushed photos: they represent a distorted view of what a role will be like in reality. Moreover, they may spark insecurities about your own qualifications. Notice the "worthy" terminology that I used above? Ever found that you feel unbelievably unworthy after perusing job ads (or looking at hotties on Tinder, for that matter)? Reading ads can put you in a low-power and low-self-esteem mindset. This is not where you want to be as you embark on a job search. Instead, I recommend exploring roles using a tool called informational interviewing which I will describe in more detail below. You can start reading job ads when you begin to apply for jobs, since these ads contain buzzwords for your resume. But that brings us to another strategy that may seem counter-intuitive… Strategy 2: Do Not Apply To Jobs While You Explore Too often, I see job-seekers start sending out applications left and right without any focus or decision-making upfront. This approach allows them to get some feedback if they luck into landing interviews. But, it often yields a whole lot of rejection. And this rejection can make them want to give up on their job search entirely. To counteract rejection fatigue, I recommend that you take at least 3-4 weeks to explore roles before you submit any job applications. Using the information that you gather in info interviews, you can make a decision on 1-2 target roles. With target roles in mind, you can tailor your resume towards those roles, thereby increasing your chances of success. By sending out only focused applications, you will encounter less rejection throughout the job search process.  Strategy 3: Start Conducting Informational Interviews So by this point you may be wondering - what are these informational interviews that Tory keeps mentioning? An informational interview is a 30 - 45 minute conversation where you ask someone for information about their job. These conversations allow you to assess fit with a given role, company, and industry. Unlike a date with the airbrushed Tinder hottie, an informational interview is like a date where you have been set up by a friend. From conducting informational interviews, you can uncover:
And those are just the role-specific areas that you can learn about — not to mention the information that you can gather on an industry, company, or a specific team. Can you tell how much I love informational interviews?! If you are curious to learn more about how to leverage informational interviews in your job search, I have a free guide available here. Strategy 4: Learn the Local Language By definition, jargon varies dramatically across industries. To move from academics into an industry role, you're going to have to learn a new set of terms and new way of speaking about your work. Fortunately, you can uncover the language of your target industry during informational interviews. The phrases you hear repeated over and over? Those are your buzzwords. The language that your interviewees use to talk about their background? Borrow the elements that work for you. By learning these targeted ways of speaking about your experience, you will increase your credibility as an "insider." This practice is similar to traveling to a new country and learning a few phrases beforehand for how to navigate — these phrases go a long way in communicating with the locals. To illustrate this strategy, let's take a detour into my own experience in moving from academia to industry. As a science PhD, I had done quite a bit of statistical analysis in my doctoral research. But, I had no idea that this was a marketable skill until I started conducting informational interviews with data scientists. Soon, I recognized that terms like unstructured data, A/B testing, and multivariate statistics mattered to folks working in this field. By identifying ways to incorporate jargon terms into my own career narrative, I was able to bridge the gap. Doing so mitigated risks that might have come to mind in offering a job to a chimpanzee researcher — instead, they could feel more solid in offering a job to a scientist experienced in statistics and A/B testing. Importantly, in learning the local language, you are not learning any new skills — you are just learning a new way to describe skills you already have.  Conclusion: Your Mindset Matters
As you start using these strategies to find jobs, you may still run up against self-doubt — moments where you wonder whether you are qualified for anything. In those moments, remember that you are on a fit-finding journey and not a journey where you need a job in order to prove your self-worth. The job that aligns with your goals and strengths is out there now, just waiting for you to find it. Curious for more tips on your PhD job search? I've distilled what I have learned from coaching more than 50 PhDs into industry in Academic Exit: a playbook for you to move from academia into industry without studying.  Have you ever reached a point where your batteries are totally empty? I’m referring, metaphorically, to your internal energy reserves - mental, emotional, physical, spiritual. Many overachievers can neglect to recharge our batteries until we hit that empty point. We throw ourselves so fully into our goals and pursuits that the basics of self-care fall by the wayside. We may only recognize that our batteries are empty because our bodies signal it to us, whether via sheer exhaustion, chronic back pain, or even a case of pneumonia. What if we could monitor our batteries’ charge levels more regularly? What if, upon recognizing we’re below full charge, we could recharge readily before we hit empty? For this blog post, I’ll focus on how each of us can check our charge level and find ways to recharge. With the continuation of COVID lockdowns, we may be stressed in ways that we don’t even realize and deprived of many of our typical recharge methods. So today, let’s get creative in looking at the practice of recharging our batteries. Check In Take a moment right now and imagine your internal energy and available resources as a rechargeable battery. Within that metaphor, ask yourself: How much charge do I have available right now? This question represents your charge check, akin to putting your fingers on the edges of a AA battery to see how much juice it has left. This is your diagnostic instrument. Now, I’d like you to ask yourself: What have I done today in order to recharge my batteries? Anything that you come up with here is your equivalent of setting your battery up to recharge. This looks a little different for each of us, so you’ll need to personalize your recharge equivalents. Let’s dive into how you can extend these two questions into a regular practice. Understanding Your Charge Level The first step in managing your charge level sounds deceptively simple: check your charge level regularly. By creating a habit of asking, “how much charge do I have,” you won’t have to wait until you hit empty to recharge. You will be able to adjust and recharge as needed in response to wherever you are in a given moment. There are two elements that can make this seemingly simple task quite tricky. First, you need to remember to check in with yourself. This represents a new habit, and it can be difficult to build a new habit that isn’t enjoyable in and of itself. In this case, it can help to use some scaffolding. You can check in on your charge level along with an existing habit like brushing your teeth. You can set a calendar reminder once per week that says “charge check.” Try out methods that work for you and see what sticks. The second element that can make it tricky to check your charge comes from imprecision in the conscious cognitive check-in itself. You may ask yourself, “how much charge do I have,” only to respond “I’m close to empty, but I’ve run on fumes before and I can do it again!” Our inner narrators can sometimes have quite a martyr complex. In this case, I’d encourage bringing physical elements into the check on your charge level. Try out a body scan meditation. Note - without judgement - how much sleep you need to feel well-rested and how close you are to that amount of sleep in any given week. Notice any habits you have that come with physical tension like biting your nails or hunching your shoulders. Those physical indicators can provide valuable input to cross-reference against your own perceptions. When they indicate that you are below full charge, it’s time to bring in your recharge techniques. Finding Ways to Recharge We each have different ways that we like to recharge. In general, I’ve observed that recharge methods fall into two major categories: the macro (recharging elements that derive from where you live, where you work, the people with whom you spend your time) and the micro (daily mindsets and practices). On “macro” recharge methods, it can be helpful to survey the overarching elements of your life every 6 months or so to make sure that they align with your values. If any of these areas are greatly mis-aligned, you will find yourself consistently consuming a lot of charge to keep yourself running. I’ve written a guide on how to approach these macro check-ins here: https://www.victoriawobber.com/blog/new-years-intentions. “Micro” recharge methods reflect your daily habits and practices. The activities that you make space for each day can greatly impact your general sense of well-being. What activities recharge you? Here are a few on my list:
For each of us, this list might look a bit different. I have ensured that my list is lockdown-friendly to show how these recharge habits are possible even now. If you are stumped on where to start, start by taking a walk outside. Time outdoors can be surprisingly restorative. Next Steps
As with any new skill, it will take two things to build out your abilities to check your charge levels and recharge: intention and practice. Your intention here might be simple: “I want to be less stressed.” Your desire to manage your charge level may come from physical necessity if you are currently sidelined by exhaustion. Whatever your reason, I’ll offer the opportunity for you to start recharging today. If you put this off until tomorrow, it may never happen. To start your practice, find something that you can do today. You may have to start small. You might just find 5 minutes for a walk down the block. You might carve out a few minutes to see if you can do a handstand. You might reach out to an old friend to catch up. Be patient with yourself and expand your recharge time as you start to get a sense of what works for you. Let me know what you learn as you go!  Happy 2021, readers! I’m grateful to have the opportunity to engage with you via my blog and hope that you had a restful and restorative conclusion to 2020. For my first post of the year, I wanted to write about intention-setting. The beginning of the year represents a good chance to take stock of where you’ve come and where you want to go over the next 6-12 months. I’ll share my process around self-reflection as well as a few of my individual intentions and goals, in case they’re helpful in sparking ideas for you. When I reflect
How I reflect
Selections from my 2020 + 2021 resolutions I’ll share a few of my resolutions from 2020 and 2021 below, in case they're of help.
What’s next for you Hopefully these help provide templates for you if you enjoy reflecting and setting resolutions or intentions. If I can be of help in clarifying anything for you, don’t hesitate to reach out. My calendar is always open for a free 30-minute chat to hear what’s going on in your world and where I can be of help: https://calendly.com/tory-coaching Looking forward to where 2021 takes us...  Do you have an unwieldy, never-ending to-do list? My clients are often frustrated when things on their to-do lists aren’t getting done. They feel that they must be lacking in motivation or self-discipline. While it is possible that motivation or self-discipline can impact your productivity, more often than not, to-do lists become unwieldy because they contain large end outcomes (e.g., “write a book”) without clear, small immediate next steps (“draft a table of contents”). Honing your skills in a technique called T-Shirt-Sizing can help you to make your to-do lists less Herculean. One solution: T-Shirt-Sizing What do I mean by "T-Shirt-Sizing"? At Google, we used the term "T-Shirt-Sizing" as a metaphor for the process of estimating how much work each project or task will take. If a project seems like it might take multiple months, that’s a “Large.” If a project seems like it can get done in an afternoon, that’s a “Small”. T-Shirt-Sizing is a critical skill for making your to-do list...doable. How do I T-Shirt-Size? You can leverage T-Shirt-Sizing once you've identified and prioritized the list of projects that you need to work on. This technique enables you to create and size concrete next steps.  I recommend asking yourself three questions to T-Shirt-Size while you’re making your daily to-do list:
How will T-Shirt-Sizing help me?
T-Shirt-Sizing will ensure that the tasks on your to-do list are small enough that they are possible to accomplish. This technique will break a behemoth, Large T-shirt project down into a set of Small T-shirt tasks that will make it easier for you to take action. Once you start taking action, you'll create a sense of momentum so that you feel proud of your progress instead of buried beneath a behemoth. Ideally, your Small tasks will be easily doable in 1 day and will have a clearly measurable result. Here are a few examples:
By practicing making Small tasks and checking how many you’re able to get done, you can revisit and revise your to-do lists until T-Shirt-Sizing serves you. Know someone who could benefit from coaching around time management? Schedule a time for a free chemistry call with me.  Where does your time go?
Are your days filled with reactions? Many of the folks whom I work with on time management run through each day reactively. Here are a few examples of what this looks like:
Sound familiar? In this mode, you may end up getting things done but it's tough to feel productive. Folks in reaction-mode feel like their time is out of their control - like they’re being pulled in too many directions. And they're right. By not setting conscious priorities, it’s easy to waste time even when working long hours. In corporate jobs, there are always plenty of squeaky wheels needing grease. In academia, no one provides a clear roadmap of what needs to be done, so it’s easy to lose days, weeks, or months in limbo. Take control of your time with 3 questions The first step you can take in (re-)gaining control of your time is to consciously prioritize. This involves taking a few minutes to reflect on what's most important - don’t worry, this shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes. Here are 3 questions to help get started on prioritization. If you’re a leader, you can answer these questions for yourself and on behalf of your team.
These 3 questions will enable you to build skills in conscious prioritization and creating realistic milestones. My clients who use these skills begin to see their days shift. Instead of reaction-mode, their days are filled with proactive choice. Their days start to look like this:
 What's the deal with burnout? Burnout is pervasive among working professionals and COVID-19 is making it worse. Ongoing surveys indicate that rates of burnout have increased from 61% of professionals in February 2020 to 73% in May. Job burnout is defined as: “a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. The three key dimensions of this response are overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.” Sound familiar? Too often, when it comes to burnout, we only realize that our time, energy, and health have dwindled away when it’s too late. What can we do to avert burnout before we reach that point? What does the research say? The academic literature on burnout has demonstrated that both characteristics of the workplace environment and individual personality can contribute to burnout - sometimes additively. Here are a few interesting learnings that I've gleaned from reading research in this area. Aspects of the workplace that contribute to burnout include: Individual characteristics that predispose one to burnout include:
What can I do to address burnout? Many of my clients, when we first start working together, are overwhelmed, overworked, and exhausted. I’ve found 3 areas that have helped them, drawing from the academic literature that I cited above as well as my own experiences with burnout.
My Request from You
I’m honestly truly fulfilled when I see overburdened clients make a few small changes and take back control of their time and energy. Know anyone at risk of burning out? Willing to introduce us? I’m offering a free 30-minute coaching session for you in exchange for 1-3 email introductions to your friends, relatives, or colleagues who could benefit from coaching focused on averting burnout.  I moved to Mexico two weeks ago.
Hearing that might make you furious, curious, or frightened. You may think that it’s ridiculous that I left my house, got on a plane, and changed countries during this crazy time. It wasn’t easy making the decision to move now. Once the pandemic hit, plans that I had made shifted to the side and fear set in instead. What would it be like to leave a stable job during this time of economic proto-collapse? What would it be like to move, given that international borders were closed? What if I got sick, or got someone else sick? Those are some weighty questions. It’s a weighty time. Emotions are running hot right now, with the entire world facing a mental health crisis as people are pushed far outside of their comfort zones by COVID-19. Moreover, in the weeks since I’ve moved, the United States has erupted in protests over the murder of George Floyd and systematic racial injustice. It is a challenging time for so many of us. How can we find clarity and stay grounded even amidst those challenges? What I’ve observed, if it’s of any help to you, is that anticipation and contemplation can add to the stress coming from whatever challenges are being heaped on us by the outside world. Often, contemplation over substantive decisions can prevent us from making decisions at all. We remain stuck in “analysis paralysis,” held in a state of inaction by our indecision. For me at least, that place of feeling stuck is terrible. It’s disempowering. It creates a great amount of stress. What I find is that taking action can relieve stress - even if the action you take represents a poor choice. Metaphorically, once you open a door, other doors tend to open in front of you. Even if you open a door and fall over a precipice, you may discover you’re wearing a backpack with a parachute. Too often, instead, we sit and stare at the door, looking at every angle of the doorknob to attempt to best figure out how to approach opening it. And perhaps, because we’re looking for the “best” way to open the door, we never do. By taking action and opening a door, we open up new opportunities. Those new opportunities can release the weight you may be carrying from your doorknob-staring. How do we move forward amidst uncertainty? For me, the number of nights that I lost sleep over *whether* I should go to Mexico far outweighed the stress of the trip itself. I’m not saying my move was without risk. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t all be cautious and careful right now. And I’m in no way saying that the stress carried by those who are racially discriminated against is solely due to anticipation and contemplation - these stressors add burdens on top of a system filled with prejudice that creates real, tangible danger for Black Americans. We don’t always have power to change the circumstances around us. But we do have the power to choose how we act and to choose our perspective. What I’d ask you to consider, then, is:
I’m overwhelmingly excited about having moved here to Mexico. I’m glad I decided to lean into discomfort and cognizant of the fact that the perceived discomfort was far greater than any that I experienced. What about you? Please feel free to comment and further the discussion here, since I know my perspective is just one of many and I want to hear from you.  “You’re not qualified to do anything other than {insert what you currently do here}.”
Heard this before? Thought it yourself? It’s easy to question whether we’re capable of doing anything other than what we’ve done in the past. One of my doctoral advisors, when he heard I was looking to leave academia, told me that I wasn’t qualified to do anything other than be a professor. Even though he was one of my fiercest advocates (and still is to this day), it was truly foreign for him to think that I could do anything other than use my PhD to become a faculty member. I’m here to tell you that it is absolutely possible to move: between roles, companies, or industries. In fact, it may even be desirable to move into a different area given that COVID-19 is likely to shape the job market for years to come. You may be skeptical that you can move into something new. You may think that you need to take an additional course, obtain more training, or somehow prove yourself to move into something new. But what I’d like to convince you is that you already have skills and intellect. Where you may need practice is in the toolkit that you’ll need to use to conduct your job search. The EXAPT model From what I’ve learned, having made the jump from academia to the Tech industry to running my own business, there are four core steps to any career transition. I’ll share them with you, just as I’ve shared them with more than 45 people whom I’ve coached in identifying the next steps in their career. These four steps form the basis for a model that I’ve called EXAPT:
Why EXAPT? In evolutionary biology, one of the concepts proposed in the past 50 years was the notion of an exaptation - a trait that is currently being used for a function other than what it evolved for. For example, say bird feathers initially evolved as an adaptation to keep birds warm. Birds that grew feathers made it through the winter and so survived more readily than those who didn’t have feathers - this trait would therefore be adaptive. Now let's say that once birds had those feathers for warmth, the feathers also became useful for another function - flight. Those feathers were exapted for flight, or stretched beyond their initial adaptive use. My goal is to give you tools to EXAPT — to take the skills you’ve already acquired and stretch them to a different function, beyond their initial use. Many of the folks whom I’ve coached believe that they need to learn new skills to make a career transition - following the metaphor, they believe that they need to adapt. But instead, you can EXAPT — take the skills that you already have and use them elsewhere. If you do so successfully, you won’t need to learn any new formal skills beyond those related to the job search process itself. Get Started With a Free Webinar Returning now from evolutionary biology to pragmatics of how to search for a job: I’m currently formulating more detailed online courses around each of the four stages of this model. To get started, I’m offering ************************************************* A free webinar at 5 PM EDT on June 11th 2020 ************************************************* In this interactive webinar, I’ll share an overview of the EXAPT model that will tee you up for a career transition. Again, this webinar is completely free, with the expectation that you fill out a survey after the webinar to give me your feedback. To sign up for the webinar, RSVP here or on the "services" tab. I’m excited to share these tools to help you make a successful career change. Join us on June 11th to learn more. Until then - happy searching! Hello, reader! Thank you for giving me a small moment of your day to read content that I’ve created. I know we all have a lot going on in our lives, so I’m grateful that you’ve decided to spend a few minutes here to read what I’ve written.
In getting started with my blog, I thought it would be valuable to define what my mission is in writing it. I’m writing a blog because I want to have an impact on the world - even if that impact is tiny. If I’ve made 1-2 people laugh, learn, or think about the world a bit differently on a given day, my goal will be achieved. Why does this type of impact matter to me? I’ve had variegated forms of impact throughout my career, and am finding that right now, interpersonal impact is the most fulfilling for me. Early on in my career, I received a PhD from Harvard and had an impact on the world by contributing to scientific knowledge. The world now knows a little bit more about things like bonobo cognitive development because of my thesis. Hurrah! When I worked at Facebook and Google, I had an impact on the world by changing customer experiences and making money for those companies. At Facebook, my proudest achievement was being able to point to features in the product that changed because of A/B tests that I ran. My work had a tangible, visible impact. At Google, my team’s efforts brought in more than $1 B in revenue, so I could easily quantify how much I’d contributed. Recently, the impact that has meant most to me is interpersonal. In focusing on personal growth myself, I’ve come to enjoy creating moments of growth for others. Allowing someone else to live a slightly more meaningful or fulfilling life because of a conversation we’ve had? Amazing. To that end, I’ve started a coaching business. I know that I can’t work with everyone 1:1 given that the time in my day is finite. My hope, then, is that through my writing I can reach others who I may not have the opportunity to work with directly. For today, then, perhaps I’ll leave you with the question that I wrangled with myself in this post:
If you’ve read this far, hooray! According to average read times and the word count of this article, it’s taken you 2 minutes to read this post. I hope that it’s been a valuable use of your time. Looking forward to what comes next! |
AuthorI'm writing this blog to share my perspective on career transitions, time management, and personal growth. Archives
September 2021
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed