Below is a listing of organizations that provide a variety of tools helpful for finding employment outside of the academy, from career search databases to advice.
Grad Logic maintains a blog devoted to academic success as a grad student as well as advice articles about finding employment outside of the academy.
Beyond Academia is an organization run by the humanities graduate students at UC Berkeley. Its mission is to help students access career opportunities by hosting an annual conference and providing job search tutorials.
Versatile Ph.D. provides job search and professionalization tools to organization members. This is a subscription service that is thankfully provided by the UC Irvine campus. Here members can search for non-academic jobs specifically catered to Ph.D.’s and it also provides access to a variety of advice and discussion boards. Humanities forums address topics such as networking, resume writing, how to transition into other careers, staying motivated and strategically building job search resources. To access, simply click the UC Irvine link from the list at the page’s bottom.
Humanists@Work is a career initiative organized by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). It provides programming and events intended to connect graduate students in the humanities to communities integral to employment within and without academia.
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) advances the humanities and social sciences by coordinating with over 75 scholarly organizations to provide professionalization and fellowship opportunities to graduate students and post-docs.
The Mellon Public Fellows Program is a fellowship program developed by the ACLS and the Mellon Foundation to extend humanities research into public non-profits and the governmental sector.
The Graduate Career Consortium is an organization that provides professional development resources for gradate students and post-docs in their career searches. Resource links aplenty.
The American Historical Association has created an interactive database listing where history Ph.D.’s find employment. Half are on the tenure track, however half are not. See where they go.
Articles of Interest
What Can You Do with a Ph.D.?: What can you do with a Ph.D. outside of joining the tenure track? Quite a bit, it turns out. This article from the Mellon Foundation, one of the nation’s leading advocates for the humanities, illuminates some possibilities for those who seek serve the public in some meaningful ways.
Letters of Recommendation for Non-Academic Jobs: Rather than simply emphasizing your intelligence, research skills and interests, these letters should explain how you have helped to save time, money, labor or face.
Tips to Ph.D.s for having a life beyond their research projects (essay): This article provides helpful advice about how to keep your dissertation from running your life.
Why Colleges Still Scarcely Track Ph.D.s: The following article does two things: it expresses the necessity of finding where PhDs land post-grad, and it provides some data about what professional sectors wind up absorbing PhDs. Tracking PhDs draws attention to the variety of job sectors that universities ought to keep in mind when structuring programs that prepare their students. This also identifies just how far universities must go to prepare students for 21st century careers – beginning with the basic step of keeping track of alumni.
Give Us a Voice in Our Own Future: This article makes the case that grad students ought to be involved in directing their educations. The author suggests that, as it stands, grad seminars equip students with very specific skills appropriate for a future in academia, but perhaps miss the mark for careers outside of academia. The solution? Grant grad students access to the conversation.
MLA CAREER EXPLORATION ACTIVITY PACKET: SKILLS SELF-ASSESSMENT, JOB AD ANALYSIS, AND NEXT STEPS: This blog post comes from the MLA’s Connected Academics, a program funded by the Mellon Foundation to “support initiatives aimed at demonstrating how doctoral education can develop students’ capacities to bring the expertise they acquire in advanced humanistic study to a wide range of fulfilling, secure, and well-compensated professional situations.” The linked post provides graduate students with a functional template to use in evaluating their various skills – particularly those skills acquired in graduate school that may have wider functionality outside of academia. As a resource for what The Next Gen PhD project is attempting to accomplish, this post may provoke ideas.
How to Prepare for a Teaching Career: In this article, English professor and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. James Lang shares his reflections on what search committees look for in strong faculty candidates fresh out of their PhD programs. As the head of numerous tenure track search committees, Lang explains the importance of gathering teaching experience, no matter how small, the necessity of pausing one’s research activities to join committees, and the value of knowing the major teaching approaches in one’s field. This article is directed at PhDs produced by major R1 universities who may feel apprehensive about smaller teaching colleges.
The Chronicle’s Best Ideas for Teaching 2017: The Chronicle of Higher Education has produced this helpful manual for teachers and professors in search of ideas to enliven their classrooms. Some articles provide helpful recommendations to get students more engaged, and others talk about about the importance of starting with a good “hook” at the beginning of class and ending with a concise “closer” in the end. The information contained within is helpful for any of us who spend considerable amounts of time at the front of a classroom.
Ph.D.s Do Have Transferable Skills, Part 1: Just how transferable are a PhD’s skills? This article describes one academic’s journey out of academe, the assumptions, the corrections to those assumptions, and the insights she grappled with along the way. The point is to know that, for those looking for options outside of the tenure track, the skills we acquire as PhDs are of value to the outside world. The task is to find the best way to frame and sell those skills to others.
Humanities PhDs Discuss Making It in the World of Tech and Business: This article comes from Georgia State University, a fellow recipient of the NEH Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. grant. The piece is a synopsis of a workshop centered around humanities Ph.D.s who have found successful and meaningful employment in business and technology. Some of the highlights include how and why to brand yourself, the importance of a more holistic approach to resume writing, how to set a plan for yourself, and the realization that “many new PhDs do not know how valuable what they’ve learned in grad school can be.” If nothing else, the article can be thought-provoking and inspiring.
The Many Careers of History PhDs: A Study of Job Outcomes: This report is the result of a study conducted by The American Historical Association into the career outcomes for humanities Ph.D.’s. While it is true that only about half of graduates found employment on the tenure track, the results for the remaining half are certainly cause for optimism.
Applying Research Skills to Explore Careers: Are you beginning to consider a career outside of the tenure track, but unsure about how to strategize your approach? The good news is that your humanities graduate program has equipped you with the single most important skill to find and land a promising career: the ability to research. This article provides some guidance about how best to apply this all-important skill.