Beyond the Ivory Tower

How a Career Fair Can Help You, and How It Can't

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By Robin Wagner

Last month, I talked about the first-ever virtual career fair for Ph.D.'s interested in nonacademic work. The February event, sponsored by 22 major research universities, was just getting under way at the time, and I could do little but speculate about the outcome.

Now it's over, and some preliminary results are in: The fair created a job market of 77 employers posting 475 job openings that were perused by more than 2,800 doctoral candidates and recent alumni who visited the site. Of those registered participants, 581 submitted a total of 3,452 résumés to employers.

It's too soon to say how many job offers might result from the fair. And the data on participation in the event are still being analyzed. But it is interesting to consider the range of employers and the relative popularity of the positions they posted.

Nearly half of the résumés submitted were directed at nine of the 77 employers. Not surprisingly, this group of nine included four major technology-research companies looking for scientists and engineers -- IBM, General Electric, Lucent Technologies-Bell Laboratories, and Sandia National Laboratories. Scientists and engineers have long moved directly to industrial research positions after finishing their Ph.D.'s. Indeed, nearly half of all the employers in the virtual career fair were from the technology, industrial-research, and information-technology sectors.

Rounding out the top nine employers were two management consulting firms (McKinsey & Company and ZS Associates); two companies in financial services (Goldman Sachs and Susquehanna International Group); and the Rand Corporation, a public-policy think tank. Rand hires many academics, especially in political science and sociology, to conduct research in their respective areas of expertise, but the other four companies were clearly looking for more general skill sets, such as quantitative-reasoning and problem-solving abilities. The positions offered by these nine businesses offered salaries that varied from being competitive with academe (in the $50,000 range) to being two to three times that amount.

The big question before the fair focused on what the demand would be for the skills found more commonly among social scientists and humanities majors -- writing, oral presentation, foreign-language skills, and qualitative research methods? The answer seems to be that there were healthy numbers of both employers looking for these qualifications and candidates applying for the positions. More than 20 of the 77 companies in the fair were looking for these kinds of skills. The range of opportunities for humanists and social scientists included survey design and research, editorial work, market research, teaching, and government intelligence. An important goal for any future virtual career fair should be to expand the range and numbers of opportunities outside science and technology.

Aside from any assessment of this event based on participation numbers or job offers, it has been greeted with great enthusiasm from graduate students and administrators across the country. Even when I had to deliver the unfortunate news that we could not admit additional universities into the fair, petitioners nonetheless praised us for organizing such an event and hoped to be included in future activities. Graduate students want access to jobs outside of academe and many graduate deans and career offices are eager to help facilitate this process.

Yet even as I report the good news about this virtual fair, I can't help but remind readers that such an event is not a panacea. Career fairs will never represent all the possibilities, and they will only help a fraction of the candidates land jobs. The virtual career fair did serve the employers by significantly reducing the cost of reaching a very large audience of Ph.D.-level job candidates, and candidates benefited greatly from the ease of access to so many desirable job listings.

However, its convenience is also one of its greatest dangers. Searching for a career is not an easy task. When done properly, it most often involves an enormous amount of time, effort, and emotional energy. Sending résumés to employers, whether through a virtual career fair or a newspaper job listing, is only one step in the career search. I fear that some students might view this opportunity as a substitute for assessing their skills and interests, properly researching potential career fields, and playing an active role in the process.

Furthermore, a Ph.D. job search, when executed primarily through the want ads and career fairs, can quickly turn frustrating. Academics are like complex and uniquely shaped pegs trying to fit into the very uniform round holes of job ad specifications.

Embarking on a search for just the right nonacademic career requires research and analysis, two skills that academics happen to possess in spades. The first target of your investigation is yourself -- your interests and skills, to be exact. Self-assessment has been written about elsewhere on this site by myself and others, but I'll just take this opportunity to emphasize the importance of looking both broadly at your experiences as well as very specifically at the nature of your accomplishments. The more research you can conduct on different types of careers, the better able you will be to find a good fit for your skills and interests.

My single biggest caution for graduate students engaging in career research is to avoid overreliance on your old friends, the library, and the Internet. Every career search involves some amount of library and Internet research, but a career is not an abstract theory, it's real life. The most important way to learn about a career sector is to meet real people who work in the field and ask them questions -- ideally face-to-face or on the phone. Here, too, I refer you to a previous column on informational interviewing and networking, the two key ways in which you learn about jobs and meet people who might be in a position to hire you.

Once you have gained the necessary insight into your own skills and interests, and an understanding of the sorts of careers that might appeal to you, you will be ready to construct a tailored résumé that relates your background to the employer's needs. It is both common and recommended that you create different résumés for different types of jobs. Then it's time to send your applications off to employers, whether they are ones that you've identified through virtual career fairs, job postings, or personal networks.

And if you begin to feel like that particularly hard-to-fit peg, seek out employers and careers that are less monochromatic in their hiring. Sometimes smaller companies are wonderful havens for eclectic types with an unusual set of skills, while some larger companies approach hiring more through personality assessment than straight résumé review. The more you meet people and the more research you do, the more insight you will gain into these important, yet subtle, distinctions.