The first step to finding a job outside academe, say those who have done so, is overcoming the fear of failure.
Many Ph.D.'s think that "by deciding to pursue another line of work they're admitting some sort of failure on their part," says Greg Laugero, who is now a technical publications manager at J.D. Edwards, a software company. That's simply not true, he says.
If anything, says Lori Rogers, "the academic job market has failed them. It's not their fault that they're graduating at a time in history when there's not a lot of room for them in the academy because of changes in the economy and in the university system." Ms. Rogers is a senior editor at Daratech Inc., a market-research company that specializes in computer-aided design.
The academic job market may be lifeless in some disciplines, but the corporate job market has never been more vibrant, says Peter Stokes, executive vice-president of content development at EduVentures LLC, a company that promotes investment in for-profit education. He is particularly confident about developing industries, like for-profit education.
"I had no idea when I was a student that there was such a thing as a for-profit education industry," he says. "But this is an $84-billion industry. There are lots of opportunities for talented people to work with innovative companies that are devoted to education."
Mark Johnson, a Webmaster at Intuit, the company that makes Quicken personal-finance software, says there are tremendous job opportunities for Ph.D.'s in the software industry. While a career in software development may not be an obvious choice for humanities Ph.D.'s, it's a good fit for them, he says. "It's all about intellectual assets," he explains. "It's human beings thinking and coming up with ideas and researching. So, in many respects, the environment at software companies is similar to the university environment, only you're paid better."
Once you decide to break out of academe, the next step is to determine how to market yourself. That isn't as easy as it sounds, says Mr. Laugero. "The problem," he says, "is that academe makes you believe that you're only suited for academe. Because you're not asked to look outside it, it's hard to imagine what skills you have that you can take elsewhere."
You don't have to be an expert in software or for-profit education to get hired, notes Ms. Rogers. "Expertise in a field is much less important in business than in academe," she says. Skills that are fundamental to academe, such as writing and analyzing reports, are "upper-management skills" in the business world, she says.
In the academy, having a doctorate means you're just one of many talented intellectuals with similar credentials, but having a Ph.D. in the wider world may be a competitive advantage, says Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a senior computing systems analyst at the Stanford University Library.
To people in the academy, where you studied, what you studied, and whom you studied with matter a great deal, but that's not true in the outside world. "One of the shocks that I had when I left the academy was finding out that in the business world if you're a Ph.D. from Harvard or a Ph.D. from Cal State Chico, it doesn't matter," he says. "You're a Ph.D. It's a fundamental unit of measure."
The trick is learning to effectively translate your abilities to potential employers, says Pam Moore, a senior editor at the MGM Journal, a bimonthly publication of the Medical Group Management Association. "Emphasize the skills you have, rather than the arcane knowledge you learned," she says. "Don't say, 'I wrote my dissertation on 19th-century sensation fiction.' Say, 'I was required to take many different ideas and present them in a convincing way in an article or report.'"
Unfortunately, says Mr. Pang, "the people you rely on most in academe, such as your professors and advisers, and the people with whom you're closest, are likely to be the people who can help you the least." A better approach, he says, is to talk to career counselors at your current institution or at places where you obtained degrees and stay in touch with your former undergraduate students. Mr. Pang learned of his first non-academic job, at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, from a former student.
Sharing that kind of information is a goal of PhdsWork, a site that provides advice on alternative careers for academics. The creators -- Mr. Stokes, Ms. Rogers, Mr. Laugero, and Ms. Moore -- are planning to transfer ownership of their site to the English department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, which has applied for a $10,000 grant from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation to run the site.
The money from the grant would go toward building a student-run site that would include data on the job market, job openings, and a chat room where students could talk about job opportunities with peers and mentors. Plans for the expanded site also include a section where students can post their résumés, so their credentials can be seen by companies looking for interns and employees.
Mr. Stokes says that he hopes that universities will come to understand that "preparing students for the current economy is a winning situation for students and universities, because if students have more job opportunities, then universities don't have to cut their graduate programs in half. If there are suddenly twice as many job opportunities for their students then they can maintain their graduate programs at the current size and perhaps even grow them."
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