Like many of you reading this right now, I visit The Chronicle's Career Network regularly because I am interested in others like myself who have left the classroom for a gig on the outside -- those Ph.D.'s and A.B.D.'s who've broken into alternate career paths like book publishing, magazine feature writing, or museum programming.
But it was a recent Beyond the Ivory Tower column -- in which Catherine Evans revealed her reasons for resigning from a plum, tenure-track job at Almost Ivy U -- that motivated me to reveal the insights I gathered from the experience of moving from a career in the academy to the professional world, and then back again.
Why I left my first academic job (a very nice three-year position at a very good private, liberal-arts university on the East Coast) and moved without friends or professional contacts to San Francisco more than four years ago is not a simple question to answer.
To begin with, I needed a break. I also wanted to write for a larger audience than the four people who read my last academic journal article, and I was skeptical about the value of my scholarly contributions. Like Evans, I was good at research, but it felt less and less like what I really wanted to be doing.
My first job out of academe was as a content editor for a nonprofit charity Web site (which I'm proud to say is still operating, and, in the Bay Area, that's saying something). After the Web site launched, I took on a few freelance editorial projects and taught a couple classes at a local university. Finally, after searching for what was then considered a long time (four months), I was offered a position as a senior editor with an educational technology magazine for schoolteachers, one of numerous publications owned by a for-profit international media company.
Perfect, I thought, and for a while, it really was. In addition to editing my own section of the magazine, I had a wide range of responsibilities, such as coordinating magazine-sponsored events, redesigning a Web site, and writing regularly for other sections.
Shedding the academic idiom and learning how to write for different audiences were among the most rewarding experiences of my new career in publishing. Once I got past that, though, there were less obvious lessons about corporate culture to be learned: Its pragmatism and efficiency were a welcomed reprieve from the often ineffectual university bureaucracy. And the emphasis on accountability meant that everyone had to produce, a democratizing force that a few tenured professors I'd worked with in the past wouldn't be able to resist if they wanted to keep their jobs.
Eventually, though, I realized that the company's culture wasn't for me. I had grown frustrated by its fixed promotional hierarchies, its bottom-line demands at the expense of quality, and its lack of opportunities for professional development. At the time, however, I wasn't considering a move back into academe. But after a serious course of career counseling (which I highly recommend) and a look through last fall's Modern Language Association job list, I started to appreciate academic culture in a way I hadn't before I left.
That's not to say I'm now blind to the academy's more maddening traits: its limited means of measuring success by publication record, its ideological insularity, its mean-spirited department politics, its apathetic students, and its often crippling lack of resources.
What appealed to me this time around were the things I missed working for a corporation -- independence, collegiality, and working with students. So, when the communication-studies department at the University of San Francisco offered me a non-tenure-track faculty position -- with a renewable annual contract and a nice mix of teaching and service obligations -- I happily accepted.
Leaving academe was a difficult but meaningful learning experience, not so much for what it taught me about the real world, but for helping me understand what I wanted in my career (or, at least what I didn't want). I also now have a battery of questions to ask myself about any future career choices I make -- questions I wouldn't have even known to ask unless I'd left the profession to explore other options. Here are the key questions I've learned to ask and how I answered them:
Are You Ready to Start All Over Again?
Some employers will recognize the skills that a Ph.D. brings to the job, but many -- regardless of how hard you try to persuade them -- will see nothing except your glaring lack of industry experience. Either way, you're going to have to pay your dues. How long depends on how lucky you are.
I learned a valuable lesson in humility when I figured out that how well I performed, or how ambitious I was, mattered little within a fixed corporate hierarchy (and a bad job market) that provided no room to move.
Bottom line: Focus on smaller, innovative companies that operate with less rigid corporate hierarchies. Keep a list of all the projects you've worked on, their outcomes, and the skills you have acquire in your position.
How Much Control Over Your Schedule Do You Need to Work Productively?
The benefit of many nonacademic jobs is that they have a defined workday, set by the company or by its culture. But you may have to get used to spontaneous interruptions by panicked colleagues who want to discuss a snag in work flow. Or worse, you may find yourself with a chronically disorganized boss who regularly pulls you into three-hour meetings. And since she's your boss, and this is not an English department made up of relative equals, you have to graciously agree to suspend your schedule every time she asks.
Bottom line: Whether you're just seeking information about a company or about to be offered a job, get a clear outline of where you and your supervisor are on the corporate food chain. Unfortunately, you can't always tell whether the person interviewing you is going to be a bad manager.
When I interviewed for my last job, I didn't think about how my future boss's disorganization would affect me. She began the interview, as she later began most meetings, with an excuse about why she was unprepared. She hadn't read my writing sample (the one she had assigned) and was unable to answer some standard interview questions about promotion, professional development, and work culture at the company. While I wasn't in the position to refuse a job offer when it came, I might have adjusted my expectations had I known this was going to be her standard operating procedure.
Will the Position Allow for Professional and Intellectual Development?
Chances are you went into academic work because you're smart and you like to be challenged. And unless you're looking for work in a field very different from your own, you'll probably pick things up faster than the average bear, so it's important to flesh out ahead of time how much room there is for advancement, promotion, and development. Since many companies are currently experiencing salary freezes, you may not see a financial payoff for your quick skills and acumen, but you'll want to cultivate your talents while you're waiting out the market.
Bottom line: Investigate company-sponsored training programs, support for professional development, and tuition reimbursement. And if the company can't provide these perks because of cutbacks, keep working like an academic by pursuing interests via local conference attendance, publishing, and networking.
Do You Work Better as a Team Player or as a Group Leader?
One thing I learned very quickly working for a magazine is that for all my talk of collaborative learning, I'd never really worked as part of a group in which our success relied entirely on each member's strong individual contribution. Sure, I knew how to run the group and dictate the terms to my students. I'd worked with colleagues on discrete sections of papers for publication. But I had to learn how to be a participant and play nicely in the sandbox.
Bottom line: Give some thought to how much of your work you want to do collaboratively, how much autonomy you need to have when it comes to a making final decisions, and how you'll handle group projects with employees you don't formally manage. In other words, can you turn off the teacher when you're not in the classroom?
Can You Thrive in an Environment Driven by the Bottom Line?
In a nonacademic setting, it's not often about what's true or even what's good; it's about what works. This sage advice came from a former boss who was explaining why he rewrote a passage that I had already edited, recommending changes that I feared would water down a complex point. He then pared down my fact-filled, compound-complex sentences into beautifully seamless generalizations.
Bottom line: While your coworkers may delight and marvel at your analytical skills, too much critical thinking can be a dangerous thing because, ultimately, the goal is to get the job done, done well, and under budget. Period.
Can You Focus Less on Academic Inquiry and More on Pragmatic Approaches to Problem Solving?
Your training prepares you to debate the big philosophical premises, to question the soundness of reasons, and as a matter of principle, to take the other side in an argument. All are welcomed strategies in, say, a yearly planning meeting, but not generally as a matter of course. In the wrong environment, your innately contrarian spirit may be perceived as hostile or even insubordinate.
Bottom line: It's good to be smart, but it's better to be highly competent. There's a reason so many Ph.D.'s opt for jobs in consulting, freelance writing, or nonprofit work. These industries require and reward independent thinking and creative problem solving while also maintaining some of the best elements of academic culture. Look for jobs where your innate skills will be valuable, and not a liability.
