Okay. I think I am going to get us started. My name is Laura Shram and I'm the Director of Professional and Academic Development at Rackham Graduate School. I welcome you to our workshop today on the job search beyond the professoriate. Let's see. I wanted to just briefly go over some webinar guidelines. I want to flag that I understand we are all feeling a lot of stress right now so please as you're in the webinar practice self-care for yourself if that means taking breaks or leaving early we understand and as you can see we've already had our first question but we invite you to use the Q&A function to ask questions at any point in the webinar. If you have attended a lot of Zoom meetings you may be a little bit more familiar with using the chat function to ask questions but we would encourage you to use the Q&A function because it has some great functions for a webinar with a large audience. We have about 130 folks in the room right now. You can ask questions anonymously. You can also upvote a question that one of your colleagues asked that you also would like to see answered and you can also comment on questions from other attendees and Dr. Crook will answer questions both at various points in the workshop and at the end of our time together. We do invite you if you have a technological challenge to let us know by using the chat as you can see in addition to Dr. Crook who is our main presenter we have several Rackham staff who are also panelists and that's because in such a large meeting like this we wanted to assist with moderating the Q&A and responding to any technological issues that come up in the chat so just let us know and one of us will work with you. I am briefly going to introduce our presenter Dr. Anne Crook. She offers training and consulting to graduate students and postdocs who want to prepare to seek non-academic employment and she also consults with faculty deans and directors of graduate students who want to support their students in exploring diverse careers. I am not going to share her very interesting full professional bio because she said she wants to weave that into her presentation so with that please join me in welcoming Dr. Crook. Thank you so much okay yes that is okay all right I am going to share my screen share okay all right thank you so much for that introduction so today here's what I'm going to walk you through. I know a lot of graduate students look for non-academic jobs and those searches are often way different from the ones that graduate school gets you ready for. My goal is that at the end of this session you will know how to search for non-academic work should you ever want or need to so here's what today is going to look like. We have two hours which includes time for questions. If you would you should have all received the slide list which will help you follow and take notes and you should have access to the excel template exercise the first tab of which is instructions and the word resume so if you have them open that will help us all. My Michigan colleagues will make sure I see questions in the Q&A panel. You should also feel free to take notes via phone photos or to tweet or post about the session if you wish but don't feel you have to capture absolutely everything now because I am going to send you templates of the exercise a PDF of the slides and the resumes that we discuss you're going to get all that stuff. So here's the formal agenda. I'm going to start off with a section on graduate training and the non-academic job market. I'm going to talk about how you can prepare yourself right now and then I'm going to talk about the academics of the non-academic job search and that is the bulk of our time together and then there are three sessions that are briefer what you should do next some resources and some reminders. Okay first thing the graduate training and the non-academic job market the first section is about me me me and then the second section is about how people like me look at people like you when we are hiring. So my career path so far I am a faculty brat my father taught veterinary medicine at Cornell for a hundred years and I went right from high school to college to graduate school and when I was 26 years old I was an assistant professor at Michigan then I became a bartender and then I transitioned into corporate technology I was at Amazon for many years I was vice president at a startup and then I was vice president at a medium-sized engineering firm and now I chair the board of directors I'm actually the immediate past chair I just transitioned and I'm a consultant and an author doing what you see me doing now so you can see why the term path is in quotation marks. Now here's part of what everybody wants to know which is how on earth did I make those changes so the first change was a force change I was at Michigan and I didn't get tenure so I needed a job I moved to Seattle and I got a bartender's license the second change was when I sought out uh I was a bartender but I was looking for a full-time day job and I talked to a friend of mine who I played softball with in graduate school and he told me about Amazon and I interviewed with them and I discussed my skills not so much about my previous jobs but I got new skills at Amazon and I used them to take on new roles I learned absolutely everything I know about technology on the job at Amazon and then when I became chair of the board of directors this was an unsought change but voluntary I had been a donor for a number of years and I hated their website and I hated their Twitter feed and I hated everything about their technology and I complained about them constantly and just as I was leaving Amazon a friend of mine said to me you know if you hate it so much you could help them make it better so I spent about a year consulting with them about how to improve their web properties and as a result of that I was invited to join the board of directors and then elected to chair the board so there are three examples of change one that was forced one that I saw it and one that I didn't seek but that I took up so what do we learn from this this is an incredibly important point for PhD people many many jobs do not require a specific credential but all jobs require skills we hope that everybody who's operating on you in an operating room has MD after her name and we hope that all the pilots at the front of the airplane have pilot licenses but most jobs are not like that most jobs do not require credentials but every job requires skills this is the thing I knew least when I went to Michigan because I was a faculty brat non-academic work is awesome it is interesting it is challenging it is varied and it is always developing and you don't know what you could be doing I didn't know what e-commerce was until I stepped into it and you know you're going to spend part of your career in fields that don't exist now there's also a lot of ways to engage with it academics tends to make you think first you get a credential and then you get a job but I learned a ton on the job and your interest not just your training can lead to a job and so and finally if you complain about it ask yourself if you can help fix it nobody I have spoken to at these sessions has yet taken this has yet taken me up on this for the cable companies but man if you can fix that please do and then finally and I am the best example of this you can get an academic job and still need to change jobs so if you are here and your goal is a to get an academic job go tiger I hope you get one but I also hope you learn this stuff because it is possible that you one day will need or want to change jobs so that was sort of me me me but here I want to talk about how a non-academic employer like me thinks about graduate training if you're getting a job in a related field a PhD indicates your commitment to advanced training and it could be an advantage but for those of you who are going to look further afield it's not really an advantage or a disadvantage but here's what it is to an employer it's a choice you made about how to spend your time that you will need to explain including why you did not finish if you don't or why you did finish if you do because you guys have made a big investment in time and in cost and in opportunity cost now I like hiring people with graduate training and here's why I like especially that we tend to look at really persistent difficult problems in new ways I like that we all think that other people have things to teach us right we've been in a teaching environment for a long time and and it's great we value collegiality right we're in an environment with lots of people who teach and lots of people who learn and we listen to them and then finally because we've been teachers we realize that explaining some things is hard and learning some things is hard all of these are terrific traits of people in workplaces now there is a dark side to the force um some people especially people like me who entered the field very young have a narrow view of intelligence you're all here because you've succeeded in the academic world um and sometimes that sells other types of intelligence short because people associate smart with academics and I am here to tell you that there's a lot of other smart people out there also some people believe that intellectually rewarding work must be found in academic workplaces so I sometimes hear graduate students particularly in the humanities say things like oh you know if I can't get a job as a faculty member I'm definitely going to look to be you know a university librarian or I'm going to work at admissions or you know alumni relations or something and those jobs are awesome and they are interesting and challenging but I also want you to believe that there's really terrific interesting challenging work out there and then finally uh this is a really tough one psychologically some people with graduate training think if you take other kinds of work you are not using your degrees um and they get resentful and I am here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth uh your degrees are now part uh of your mental makeup they are part of how you approach problems intellectually and how you learn new stuff please do not sell yourself short by thinking that if you work outside the academy you are not using your degrees so I wanted to just put up this list of what my former graduate students are doing and my fellow former academics they're doing a lot of actually cool stuff and I want to particularly call out the faculty member who now directs study abroad at a university and she was one of my graduate students at the University of Michigan uh she like a lot of academics liked traveling abroad and she does research there but like a lot of academics she didn't have a ton of money so what she did and what she does is she does those three week sessions in the summer where you go for three weeks and study intensive art history in london or something like that and um and it turns out when you take 30 undergraduates abroad at a time you learn all kinds of interesting things you learn for example what to do when one of your students has a little too much to drink in a london bar and propositions the ambassador's daughter uh and you learn what to do when uh the same student apparently uh goes up to you know those tall guards in london with the tall furry hats uh and throws up on their shoes uh so lots of things you learn anyway when the director of her program retired she was invited to apply for the job uh and she got the job and that's now half of what she does and what is interesting to me about this is primarily two things one is she didn't realize that was a job uh until she was invited until she got to the school and eventually was invited to apply for the job but the second thing she didn't realize is that all of the things she had learned in the year she spent taking students abroad were skills and they helped prepare her to get that job so i'm going to encourage you and have an exercise later in this session to think about skills that you may not know you have so uh and at the end of this slide i'm going to take questions so how to adapt to the non-academic job search i want you to believe that there is interesting awesome work for you i want you to describe your skills not primarily your credentials i want you to broaden the range of people you seek out for help and i'm going to teach you how to do that i want you to treat everybody you meet along the way as a valued uh and respected colleagues one of the kind of icky things about academics is its academic class hierarchy where um you know tenured faculty are at the top and your dissertation director is at the top and you know and there can be a tendency not to treat everybody quite as well and then finally this i want this to be your message to an employer my skills can help solve your challenges okay i'm going to stop now and i'm going to ask uh dr shram or elling or miss willis or dr jensen to let me know if there are questions and then i'll answer them we do have a logistical question um about um whether people can pass on the materials from your workshop dr crook to colleagues in their department who weren't able to attend they absolutely may okay and then we have a second question should you put your phd on your resume if you're searching for non-academic work um can that automatically over qualify you for some positions uh you can certainly put it on and uh in the section around the resume i will talk about where and how to do that great question we also have a question of what your degree is in what's your background uh 17th and 18th century british literature uh the literary literary approaches to the bible uh literary approaches to classical literature uh and detective fiction so as you can tell completely perfect for learning how to build out data centers and our we also have a question when the recording will be available it's recording to the cloud in zoom right now so it will be available by the end of today but we may not be able to send it out till monday since our webinar ends towards the end of the work day um i see if you were 26 when you were an assistant professor when did you have to switch to becoming a bartender and then amazon uh huh uh i left uh michigan after seven years i was denied tenure in my sixth year i had one more year i looked for more academic jobs and didn't get them uh and then i tended bar the year after that in seattle and then after a year as a bartender i got a job at amazon um what is your suggested approach to think expansively about available paths uh uh that is much of the rest of this talk so hold fire and i will address it perfect i see another couple coming in um will you discuss a way to transition from preclinical um animal model work for phd to working in a more clinical role or a consultant is that too far of a jump uh it's not too far of a jump and i will show you how to make it by describing your skills is the kind of exploratory hiring of companies like amazon still a possibility in the current economic certification heavy hiring market is the quote shadow market highly conditioned by where you live uh unsatisfactorily the answer is sometimes uh but i will also address that okay i think with those are all of our open questions okay super more will come and onward all right so now i'm going to talk about how you can prepare yourself for the non-academic job market from where you are now uh and there are three elements to this one is broadening yourself description another is finding people to help your job search uh and another is about preparing yourself mentally here we go so first um broadening your self description i assume your self description currently looks something like this right i'm a graduate student or a postdoc in this field and i have this expertise um i'm an experienced researcher and i do this that and the other thing i am a scholar i've presented this and published that and i am in training to become a p i or a faculty member very often people internalize in graduate school this is who i am i want to suggest that there is another way so i complete large projects with minimal supervision right every paper or every research project i am hiring you because i don't have time or energy to do the job myself i have worked in large enterprises and medium-sized organization within the enterprise the gentlemen have been telling us for years that size matters and this is one of the one of the instances where they do we all know people who are comfortable in small colleges and people who are comfortable in big universities one of the things that's really important is for you to be able to explain the size of the organizations that you've been working with i have participated in and led small teams within the enterprise i hear all the time from graduate students oh i have no leadership experience and honestly that's almost never true um because most graduate students have led a ta group or they have been on a research team or they've trained in an undergraduate intern or something like that i use research and analytical skills to identify problems writing a proposal in the academic world and writing a proposal in the non-academic job world are the same thing this is what work is identifying problems and solving them i manage contentious discussions toward productive conclusions um i got my first promotion or was recommended for my first promotion at amazon in the following way i was leading a horribly contentious meeting and i was trying to figure out where it had all gone sideways until a light bulb went off over my head saying oh they're all acting like sophomores um and then what i started doing is teaching uh and then it started to go better um i persuade reluctant adopters to accept and deploy standards so if you have trained new lab staff or taught freshman chem or freshman english or freshman calculus you have done this there is a whole series of jobs out there that are about saying here are the standards of this field and here's why they're valuable and here's what we get when we follow them and you're ready to do that a much better internalization than this is who i am is this is what i do because what you do is valuable to employers now once you have um uh thought about who you about what you do uh you have to think about the vehicle for that self description which is different in academics and not uh in academics a cv is written in academic shorthand and it's evaluated by skilled readers who understand cvs and it's comprehensive when i was at the university of michigan english department um i was on two job searches and i read all the applications that came in from graduate students and i knew exactly how to read them i knew exactly what their schools meant and i knew what their phd's meant and i knew what their publications meant and i knew exactly how to read them and i was the most junior on the search committees now a resume on the other hand is written for people who may not know how to read cvs but what they need to know is what you can do to help solve their problems it also may initially be evaluated by entry level employees or by software and i'm going to talk a little bit about that it is also selective i mean a cv is in some ways really easy because it's a reverse chronological listing of everything you've ever done sorted by category but a resume is selective and has to be so to write a resume instead of a cv you have to gather information from your entire work history and then you have to describe your jobs your achievements and your skills so how do you do this thing uh first you have to gather information from your resume for your resume now here is where i have to start to undo and deprogram you a little bit graduate school rewards a narrow focus but the non-academic job searches reward a broad one to to succeed in graduate school you have to forget all kinds of things about yourself all kinds of hobbies all kinds of pathways all kinds of interests so you can focus but in the non-academic job search to get ready for it you can remember those things so what you need to do is you need to remember where you've lived and what you did you need to define sort and count the skills you have gained and here's what this process does it reminds you um what you know which is more than you think and it will help you create a rudimentary skills database out of which to build your resume now i'm going to do a template exercise with you so what you need to do is you need to get that excel spreadsheet out i am momentarily going to stop sharing this screen and start sharing another one don't be alarmed stop share share screen of course for phd's and candidates share uh laura can you please confirm for me that you can see the uh excel spreadsheet yes i see it okay thank you much all right this is the instructions tab all the way to the left and this is a template exercise um it is a glorified excel spreadsheet uh that will help you remember describe sort and count your skills uh and this is the instructions tab so the first thing you should do is go to the first tab marked remember what this asks you to do is to write down all the things about yourself that have gone into making you who you are and so i have grouped things here by the way people talk about themselves in their lives where they lived where they went to school travel languages you know all the organizations they've been on and that ugly pink column uh in excel uh is the one where you will list in order your jobs and your volunteering uh and that is something you will need later on which i will explain and then there's a column for other characteristics and i will talk about what that means now uh i don't find templates actually incredibly helpful so what i did is i filled this out for myself and here's what that looks like um and man i went all the way back to the beginning right so every place i have lived uh every place i went to school uh travel i have done uh languages um teams i have played on organizations lessons houses of worship and then the jobs i've held and i noted which were volunteer then look at the other characteristics this is something that a lot of graduate students uh have a hard time uh with because again they focus so much in graduate school i've always owned dogs what does it mean that i'm good with dogs i'm a huge reader i'm interested in politics i'm comfortable in large organizations i'm a very good public speaker i'm good with languages i'm comfortable talking about all kinds of sports uh raised in a scientific household and with visual art and intellectual disagreement one of my parents was a non-native speaker of English i want you to think about all this stuff because it makes you you and you are going to have to explain that on a resume now this exercise uh takes i don't know i think it takes two hours over a couple sessions and it will be helpful if you can show it to a sibling or an old friend because you tend to forget a lot of stuff again graduate school really narrows your focus um and it makes you forget and i am here to sort of trip and your skull and go into your brain and help you remember because all of this stuff um is going to be useful so this is the first part this is uh in some ways uh easy and now i am going to show you a part that is much harder oh but before i do that i will say this the first time i showed this exercise uh somebody said to me well and that's easy for you because you're senior and you've got a lot of stuff on there so what i did was this i went to this tab and i'm sorry it's small at this um display i went to this tab and i highlighted everything in red that happened after my phd and the important thing about this is that almost everything on this list was present when i was where you are now almost everything that made me get my first job at amazon in fact everything that made me get my first job at amazon was there when when i am when i was where you are now and i hope that gives you confidence because going out uh into the job world i understand can be a scary thing but you are more than you think you are now and you have more skills than you think you do and this is the first way of sort of gathering them um anyway but look at that ugly pink column and and sort of after the next uh two tabs i'm going to take questions but then you take that the information from this column and you copy it uh to this sheet because once you have described all the things you've done and remembered stuff then you've gathered up all your jobs uh then i want you to tell me what you have done at those jobs and you have done a couple things you have done that you've had various roles and in those roles you've exercised various skills so here's what this looks like for me and i want to go down because you know i've had a lot of jobs over the time i want to go down to where sort of you are now so let's look at teaching assistant so when i was a teaching assistant that's what i was that's the role uh there's a lot of things i did interpreting the non obvious time management clear written explanations clear oral explanations engagement of the desperately skilled one of the things that you obviously know from teaching or lab work or anything like that uh is that the students who come in have shall we say varying levels of interest in what you do and varying levels of experience and varying levels of talent but you have to teach all of them that is an extraordinarily valuable skill in the workplace because the people you work with are not all going to have the same levels of experience and skill and anything and but you've all got to work together toward a common end uh a couple other things when i was a research assistant uh for my dissertation director i did library research uh she also asked me to line edit uh some of her articles and uh tacked oof i was editing my dissertation director and uh about halfway through the first edit i did for her i realized that i had written some comments that were perhaps somewhat better suited to freshman so i had to change um um and then the final thing i want to talk about before i take questions uh is if you look at line 66 there for when i was treasurer of my uh i spent a year in england and uh i was treasurer of the graduate student union there and i did obviously math but i also did budget allocation and this is an absolutely perfect example of a skill that my employer's value but that absolutely did not matter at all to the people who hired me to be an assistant professor but actually all these skills matter um when you go out in the non-academic job world uh and that's why i'm training you to gather the information about them and to remember them so uh now i want to throw it over to laura and ask you to please uh tell me what questions are out there we have a couple questions already um one person asks how selective are we talking for a resume is it one page two pages however long you need uh i will address that question particularly around the resume because there's a whole cluster of questions that go together that's the very next thing okay perfect um one person says they're interested in alternative academic and non-academic positions where they can still do academic things and this person wonders what types of skills are grant funding foundations looking for and how can phds and social sciences leverage those skills and stand out uh they are looking and again i'll talk about this on the resume but they are looking for exactly the same skills that non-academic employers are in fact um i know particularly from my time at amazon that there's a lot of grant writers there because they describe complex problems to organizations for example for government grants to work with aws so a lot of skills about synthesizing information writing clear and concise pros and explaining complex problems to interested non-specialist readers are absolutely at the top of the skills list incredibly valuable do we have any more questions oh two more just popped up um when you highlight something like budget allocation doesn't it feel flimsy when said against say someone who's been doing that in a professional capacity full-time versus like managing a budget for a graduate group or a grant project um how do you frame this well without overselling yourself um so i will talk about that on the resume but the point of it here is for you to capture the skills because most graduate students don't even believe they have these skills at all or that they are skills and i am here to tell you that you have them and that they're skills and absolutely you will not you know you will not be hired to be the cfo or the head of budget at a non-profit for your first gig out of a phd in english but what you but what you will show an employer is that you are interested in things other than your phd in english and that you are capable and can do other things and i'll talk a little bit about how to not over promise and under deliver um someone wondered related to one of the recent questions how do you talk about old experiences and skills without seeming naive or overly young and inexperienced um and another person asked like should these skills and resume go all the way back to high school so a little bit about right you know how far back to go and talking about so the way you go you you go back exactly as far as is relevant to the employer and i'll talk about how to set that cut off on the resume but the important thing is if you go back to that uh sentence i highlighted and read at the beginning um my skills can help solve your challenges you define the relevance of your work to the employer's job and so if what you did in high school is not relevant that's you don't go back to high school um but i had a phd student leave for a job at gm and even though they had a phd they actually went all the way back to high school because they had worked in their uncle's car dealership and so they had hands-on experience and even though it was from when they were 16 years old it was really really relevant and they made it relevant that was the important thing they explained how it was relevant um a couple more questions will we talk about postdocs i'm wondering whether i should even do a slightly in-tific research postdoc if i don't want to work in academia but i still want to work in a laboratory uh yes i will address that a little bit later okay great um i don't see more personal experiences here for example being a working parent which requires multitasking skills a housewife which requires organizing skills is that a good idea to consider some personal experiences in this exercise absolutely and so when you if you go back to um i'll show my own to uh whoops sorry not that one um to remember um you will see that uh like in 10 there for the job i did i was a volunteer handicap van driver uh i have been a supply preacher in my house of worship so there's things i have done that are personal um that nonetheless contributed to how i think about the world and the working world and that is absolutely true um uh for working parents as well and in fact late in the presentation i'll talk about a blog post specifically that i've written about how to talk about those skills great any other questions i don't see any open once now so maybe i'll give it one second all right so no okay so here are the skills and then now the this part of the exercise is uh hellish it's very very hard and it takes a long time you should plan to spend six to eight hours on this over three different sessions uh because it's really hard and the hard thing is describing things you did with common language um now but the payoff for once you've you've done this because what you've done is you've created a rudimentary database of your skills now you've done the hard work so here is where it pays off for you because the next thing i want you to do is to sort those skills um and then when you sort them this is why you try to go for things in um describe the same things in the same language when you sort those skills i have displayed these uh horizontally so you can see them but you should work in two columns only like this whole stuff here uh because that's how excels tiny mind works um so first you sort them and then you do something even more rudimentary which is you count them um and so when i did this exercise for myself here's what i have done if you look at how often i have used these skills here is what i have done over the course of my career the top things clear written explanations clear oral explanations empathy customer service data analysis personnel management and development and understanding organizational expectations those are the things i have used most commonly throughout my career and you have all done them at different levels because i am more senior um but you have all done them and you should be confident that these are things that can help you in your job search so this exercise you know i don't know six to eight to ten hours um and very well done uh with a friend or with a sibling or both so now i'm gonna stop sharing my screen again and i'm gonna go back to the presentation share dump search share okay and we're gonna not gonna put you through all that again and we are gonna scroll down um okay so this template exercise should help you remember information and it should enable you to define sort and count your skills now once you have done it your next job is to create a resume from that data now how do you do that and how do you make a resume and not a cv i said to you earlier that your message to a non-academic employer is my skills can help solve your challenges your resume's message is my skills can help solve your challenges here's proof so what you do in a resume is you highlight critical supporting information you describe what you were responsible for and key skills you used and you describe outcomes with measured results where that is possible and i'll show you what to do where there aren't uh precise quantitative measurements so now we're gonna look at my resume um and i'm gonna stop sharing again stop share share and crew resume share uh laura can you confirm for me that you can see the resume yep i see okay super so first things first um uh at the very top your name you should have an email address uh you should have the one that you are most likely to answer uh i recommend that you have a non-academic email address um you should have a short url for your LinkedIn uh you should have the phone number that you are most likely to answer or respond to uh and i very strongly recommend that women not have their full snail mail addresses on their resume uh there's a lot of skeevy people out there uh and uh i don't think that information needs to be visible you do need to have some indication of where you are uh and what the assumptions people are going to make on the basis of that information are the following they are going to assume that if you are in the united states that that is where you are being trained and they are going to assume justifiably or not um that you are eligible to work in the united states so it is very important that you if you for example are eligible to work in in say let's say you have a us and an eu passport that under uh where it says seattle washington that's where you would have a line that said eligible to work in the united states in europe for example but that is the base information you have to have so then you have a summary and the summary highlights your best skills uh and uh i know it will shock you to hear sometimes that people do not read absolutely everything put in front of them so it is very important that your first sentence is a good lead sentence and highlights your best skills so here it is founder owner and principal of practical workplace advice consulting with university for and non-profit clients across the united states and canada teaching graduate students how to find non-academic jobs and organizations how to help women employees succeed and thrive if you read nothing else about me you would know what i do and that is what that summary paragraph is for and then i you know i go into a little more detail um then you have a professional experience in reverse chronological order um and uh i want to highlight um a couple things if you scroll down to where uh what i did when i was a just a member and not the chair of the board of directors um look at the two paragraphs under there as member board of directors responsible for reviewing and approving organizational mission and vision polish these strategies and budget of strategic planning and audit committees search committee for ceo chair of technology subcommittee for development and then as leader of seattle leadership team responsible for seattle garden party annual fundraisers netting in excess of three hundred thousand dollars that last sentence is the kind of sentence i want you to be able to write it is here's what i did here's what i was responsible for and here's the outcome now the numbers are going to be different for you because they're probably going to be a little smaller because you're at earlier stages of your career but it is that kind of thing that i want you to be able to say now um you notice that this is a this is a volunteer board um you notice i have not labeled it with this scarlet v for volunteering um and this is something that you do not need to do when you do volunteer work uh you don't have to label it v for volunteering because i don't care where people get skills if they get them from paid work um or volunteer work so now one thing i want to do is in this resume i want to scroll down to where i was um as a faculty member because there are some instructive things about this so uh you should be looking at the bottom left hand page there so when i was a faculty member uh as an assistant professor and i did undergraduate and graduate teaching and phd candidate supervision so placed phd candidates as assistant professors at harvard penn and bradley co-supervisor phd who won the university wide dissertation prize so again what i did what i was responsible for and outcomes um and then finally uh this interesting one on the top right faculty supervisor of graduate student journal turned it from dysfunctional mess into respected publication efficiently produced this is the sentence that got me my interview at amazon not the job but the interview and the reason is this is the sentence where i described what work is i came on a situation i found it at a certain level and i turned it into something else now the other thing is several people have commented on the tone here about it's about a little bit of snark and i could use this tone because i was applying in technology now if i were applying to a white shoe law firm uh i would not use this kind of language so you know there is such a thing as judgment involved when you put together a resume um but the final thing uh before i give a couple sort of concluding remarks and then take your questions about resume i want to say is this i recently sent this resume to a friend um whose husband uh is looking for work and he opened it up on his monitor and he read it and then he shouted to his wife oh my god teresa come look at this and then she read he read that sentence to her and she said yep that's an and what i want you to do over time and it's going to take a little time to get there i want you to be able to write the sentence that is yep that's you and you will do it if you think about yourself more broadly and you think about um you think about what what makes you you and how those skills are going to be valuable to an employer um and then finally uh just a couple remarks more uh education and languages uh and i'll address specifically the phd question but as you can see it's on here it's toward the bottom people uh with phd is often want to put their education at the top um i i tend to discourage that unless you're applying specifically to a very small number of academic jobs um there used to be a sentence at the bottom of resumes um called uh references available on request people assume that and you do not need to have it uh there's also sometimes a section uh variously called hobbies or what i do when i'm not working uh sometimes that is relevant and sometimes that is not uh but it is not required um but let me uh turn it over to laura for questions and i want to open by addressing the question about length of resume lots of people ask me about this um and i have two answers one is that i do not have religion about the length of resumes and the reason is you are going to be submitting your resume very often online you are going to be cutting and pasting and put it into online um forms and it will not matter as much how long it is so by the way pro tip always always always have a text unformatted version of your resume in one long sheet because you're going to be cutting and pasting forever um but the second so that's so that's i don't have religion about length but here's the thing i do have religion about if you are asked for a one page resume you must turn in a one page resume if you are asked for a two page resume you must turn in a two page resume in other words if people ask you to do a task do that task because if they ask you for one page and you send three they will take that as a very bad sign of the kind of employee you're likely to be um so laura let me uh ask you to send me questions we have a lot of questions here um i am going to start with the questions that got upvoted the ones that were more common questions um regarding your comment about how to justify the decision to spend one's time doing a phd what is a good way to do this what kind of language would make sense to an employer the kind of language that makes sense to an employer is the language relevant to their job so if they are looking for a job analyzing data one of the what you say is the reason i'm interested in your job is that my training has taught me to take large data sets and look for relevant patterns for example that's what you're looking for in your job so the question is not the phd per se it is not about the credential it's about the elements of the things that you have learned that are relevant to the employer's job you have to shift the center of gravity from you to the employer um a question about location for location on the resume what should someone do if they're currently in Ann Arbor but planning to move elsewhere this the person who asked that they're moving to Oregon after they graduate and they want to find jobs there and we had several people upvote that so um so it depends on how long um it it's going to be between now and the move uh if it's going to be six weeks go ahead and put the new place on if it's going to be six months or a year don't and the reason is is that the employer employers are going to make an assumption about getting you out for a visit right for an interview and if they have to fly you out that's a different decision than if they can ask you to drive to portland right so you need to clarify that for employers yeah that's great um we have a question i worked for eight to ten years between my undergraduate degree and entering my phd program with a master's mixed in i'm not sure if i'll be looking at jobs in the same field i used to be in how do i simultaneously account for both a quote career change field change in a six-year gap being the phd and we have several people who upvoted that so lots of folks in a similar situation so first of all it's not a gap it is work that you did where you gain skills so there's two ways to address this you can write a resume that instead of being reverse chrono is organized by skill set so data analysis teaching you know customer engagement you can absolutely do that and then within those sections you do reverse chronological of all the ways you have done that um you can alternatively which i think is more common you can show the things you did in reverse chronological order but focus on the skills within them again this is the thing where it is not about the degree as as such it is about what you worked on and how it is relevant to an employer and that's why i say uh these these periods where you worked is not a gap it's a different venue where you use skills and i want to particularly address um the issue um for women who sometimes have been um have had periods where they were focused on raising children um i love hiring parents especially mothers of young children because they use half an hour better than any other person i know and what you have to describe is what you did when you were learning um and i have a blog post that has some examples of that um but one person who got hired uh spent a lot of time uh raising money to uh redo the equipment on her two young children's playground um and she is an awesome multitasker and an awesome budget person she is a terrific project manager and that's what i hired her to do and she had been out of the workforce for three years so you know out of the paycheck workforce i should say she had been working like a dog so go ahead um one person has spoken to four or five consulting firms that recommended that they not have a summary but instead list skills directly under their experiences and this was especially true when trying to keep the resume to one page which many um of these consulting firms recommend um so the question here was when do you recommend using a summary versus not okay so two uh there are two sort of two answers to that if you look at where uh i have under international program manager you'll see i have a mini summary and bullet points um and what i recommend is that you use pros or a mini summary for describing responsibilities and you use bullet points for describing achievements so i'm going to go back up so sorry if it makes you a little queasy as i scroll um so i think it is good to have a summary um for describing complex problems because achievement what achievements often don't do particularly if they are disparate um is show uh the link between disparate kinds of work um but again you should produce the kind of resume that you get asked for now another thing to note is that some fields have conventions so particularly in computer science um and computer engineering you will find that it is customary to have instead you have a very brief summary but uh it is customary instead to have a bulleted list of the computer languages you work in so you do need to do some research around fields um this is for um a sort of corporate uh resume that is not necessarily technical but is managerial okay and how does one talk about activities and skills that one has developed during a phd program that don't have a title for it like teaching assistants so for example the work that one did taking preliminary exams for a candidacy for instance making reading lists attending several meetings with committee members indexing etc okay so that is where uh so i've talked a little bit about that in the past and i will talk a little bit about it more in the restless presentation but what you have to do is you have to describe those activities in terms that make sense to an employers so preparation for qualifying exams is not a term employers generally engage with but doing data and field assessments is an appropriate term um so schedule planning uh so writing a syllabus is not a term that employers typically engage with but project planning is a skill so what you need to do is you need to learn the uh non-academic nearest equivalents uh for the kinds of things you have done as a graduate student but on the resume you should use language that makes sense to an employer do you have a recommendation of where to find a list of skills to help folks identify what a skill might be um this person says they have problems verbalizing what they think their skills are sure uh so the most efficient way to do that and i talk about this a little bit later the most efficient way to do that is to reverse engineer it by reading job descriptions look at what employers are asking for and then you sit down with people and you talk about those skills and then they say oh here's what this means so that's how you figure it out is it worth listing your publications on your resume if they are directly relevant to the job for which you are applying um one person says your work experience seems easily divided into work categories but since i don't have that many work experiences but i have lots of skills under my graduate student work experience how do i think about that i've always divided my grad student work experience into different projects i've worked on is that the right way to go uh it depends on what job you're applying for if you are applying for a job that is a for example about project management and you can talk about projects that go from end to end then yes it is if you are applying for a job that asks you to use your skills at various projects then you may want to have a skills based resume but again it's not about only how you think about yourself it is how you think about yourself relevant to the work you are applying to do okay one more one more question and then i'm gonna go ahead on we have one that um three people have voted i noticed that you put the date of your degrees which can signify age is that important do you worry about age discrimination so several folks concerned about age discrimination uh you absolutely should think about age discrimination because it is a thing um but you should also put dates on there because honestly with all the information available on the internet now it's not like people can't find it out and if you seem to hide it that is worse so what you have to describe if you are older is the skills and the experience you bring because you get something different when you hire an older employee than when you hire somebody just out of undergraduate okay i am going to stop sharing this and go back to the presentation um share screen presentation share uh this time uh it did not go back to the beginning excellent laura can you confirm you can see my uh presentation i see it okay all right so you have now you have developed uh you have changed your attitude toward the workplace you have developed a mini database of skills you have put them in the resume and now you have to broaden the pool of people you reach out to for help this is a big change only a few people can help you get an academic job but many people can help you get a non-academic job so you have to assemble a pool of people who can help you reach out to others personal contacts help you find out what a job advertisement really means so in this i am answering the question of that person who asked you know how do i learn to define my skills this is one of the ways you do it also personal contacts help resumes not get lost in a pile so linkedin is the current tool uh it is it provides databases of companies jobs and people uh so you can research organizations it helps you ask for introductions to people you don't know through people you do know this is its core function linkedin is six degrees of kevin bacon for the workplace so you should use linkedin to make your resume available online and to create a group of people you know through whom you will reach out to others for information it is very very important that you make the transition from thinking of here is someone who can help me get a job which is rarely true to here is someone who can help me get information which is almost always true so to create your own pool of contacts you invite people you know to connect on linkedin that's people in your own address book uh and your own contacts people linkedin recommends if you know them so once you know you start doing it uh they will say oh do you also know this person uh members of groups to which you belong so you should join every alumni organization every professional society and every relevant club people with whom you have interacted well my dentist is on linkedin she has a big practice and i have a great relationship with my dentist so she and i are on linkedin together now here is where you will sometimes get very different advice i assume all of us on linkedin have had those connections from people we don't know at all i do not recommend uh that you add these people i want you to ask yourself would i introduce her to someone i respect would i do him a favor because how linkedin is going to work is it's going to say hey and i see you did some consulting work at xpedia would you help me i'm applying to their tax department would you introduce me to their vp of tax and i have to put my credibility on the line by saying sure i'll introduce you to rich prem and if i don't know that person i'm not going to do that there is a sub use case of this when people ask to connect with you on linkedin and they say they are recruiters um because i have a nasty suspicious mind um i don't say yes unless i know them because honestly anybody can say they're a recruiter so linkedin your contacts are a core professional asset and you've got to treat them that way you've got to keep your contacts updated and you have to bring them up to date and that means a name a private end or a work email address and a mobile phone number and i'm you know i'm not talking about your holiday card list here i'm talking about professional contacts linkedin contacts are enough for purely professional connections if you don't know them in any other way that's fine you should set a calendar reminder to invite new linkedin connections every week and you should do two like add two a week for the rest of your professional career back them up follow the rule of three um you know you you can let linkedin back itself up um but you should have a local a cloud and an external backup device um of your contacts okay now i am going into the next major section of this which is how to prepare yourself mentally for entering the non-academic job market and then at the end of this i'll take questions and then i will go into the mechanics of looking for a job so first a note about gender this is what a guy does when he applies for a job uh he applies if a job has six qualifications and he has three he views job requirements as negotiable and desired ones as optional and he routinely negotiates salary and benefits this is what a woman does when she applies for a job she does not apply if a job asks for six qualifications and she has five uh she views job requirements as non-negotiable and desired ones is required and she routinely does not negotiate salary and benefits gentlemen keep doing what you're doing ladies do not be this applicant you are cutting yourself off from jobs that you can do and you are crippling your financial futures apply for the job and negotiate your salary and benefits a note about starting over this is closely related to the mentality that you're not using your degree anymore um you will probably find yourself applying for some entry level jobs um in my experience people with phds will often be promoted faster right because they're more mature and they're more experienced this also goes to the comment about hiring older employees what you are selling is who you are and your experience that you have it is also the case that some non-entry level jobs particularly one or two levels up will be open to you if you describe your skills and your experience well now you can start with an interim job find almost any job you know work at home depot um and the reason for that is that having a job helps you present well in interviews also the second most profound bias in the workplace after the bias against hiring pregnant women is that employers prefer to hire employed people and very often people with phd training are embarrassed to say oh i'm working at home depot and if what you say is oh i'm working at home depot because nobody else will hire me i will join the group of people who will not hire you but if you say i'm working at home depot because i wanted to learn about another industry another boss in another supply chain then i'm going to be interested in hiring you because employers like to hire people who like to work you can also start with temper contract work um because what you're doing there is you are outsourcing the last mile of your job search um you know you learn about another company industry and a boss um and you know you can do this work successfully long term um and if you have child rearing responsibilities or a partner who works seasonally um sometimes contract work is attractive you can also relocate in some ways because if you have if you work for a contract firm that has multiple offices sometimes they can help you move a couple things about the four non-profit and public sectors uh there is a common misconception that if you leave academic based research uh for for-profit work that you will have less intelligent colleagues and less intellectually demanding work uh if you think this i hope you conceal it well because nobody wants to be your intellectual sloppy seconds i have never worked at a more intellectually challenging place uh than amazon uh non-profit work um sometimes people think that it is easier to get a non-profit job than a for-profit job without relevant experience and skills it's actually the reverse because non-profits um uh have less money fewer resources uh and they it is for them hiring mistakes are really hard so very often they are going to be more stringent about requirements um than for-profits uh sometimes people in academics believe that people in non-profits are better motivated uh than those in for-profit or public sector jobs uh again that has not been my experience um and sometimes people believe that lower material rewards you know in non-profit sectors where salaries are often lower that it'll be compensated for by more rewarding more rewarding work and and i have found that this is not a function of the work this is a function about the attitude that you bring to it so the people at lambda legal who do accounts payable and the people at amazon who do accounts payable are doing the same job and if their attitude is different then that's you know that's a question for them um but it is not because the work is different it's about how they conceptualize their environment so it's just it's important for you to do that that mental research for yourself now some things about the public sector um hiring requirements may be more rigid and this is because they are often set down in statute um it is possible that compensation and benefits are not negotiable also in statute um your salary may be publicly available this is something i learned at the university of michigan where my salary was published uh because i was a public employee of the state of michigan uh and i have to say initially it sort of creeped me out but i came to like it and i came to like it because information benefits people with less power and at the university of michigan salary differentials between men and women doing the same job were lower than at many other places and that's because the data was publicly available and i encourage you to like publicly available data uh if you're in the public sector your comments about your job on social media not all your comments but your comments about your job may be regulated um and finally a note uh i hope everyone listening to this call will consider running for office one day because not enough people with graduate training do that uh and i recommend that you shadow a campaign or volunteer um because i hope uh everybody with graduate training will think about public service um some final thoughts about handling the slog you know you guys are all here because you have done well you have done well in high school which is why you got into college you have done well in college which is why you got into your graduate program your job search is going to have a ton of disappointments uh great sounding jobs that get filled just before you apply you know not stuff that gets acknowledged phone screens that aren't very many and not very many interviews and fewer job officers rejection is normal not a sign that you are failing um there's an article i think you all should read by a faculty member from arizona state university um davoni lucer me and my shadow cv and it is about what her cv would look like if it had the failures uh as well as her successes uh and i think it really really helps contextualize um the job search okay um before i go on to talk about non-academic job search mechanics uh laura let me ask you if there are questions particularly related to the sort of psychological preparation for the job search um let me skim again i think we have a lot that are more logistic and resume related i'm going to get to them all right let me start the logistics and the mechanics and then the stuff i didn't get to we can do at the end how does that sound sounds good sorry i already know worries no worries all right i'm going to talk about the mechanics of the job search job postings hiring managers and the logistics so job postings uh here's all the things i'm going to talk about so most job searches start online uh you can constrain your search geographically you constrain it by field or job type you can constrain it by network um here is something you should not do um because there are relatively few academic jobs but the path to them is straightforward um graduate students apply for everything for which they are conceivably qualified um you cannot do that with non-academic job searches because there are too many um and so don't throw spaghetti at the wall this is how successful job searches start it is not where they end up but you take a set of keywords describing what you do best and you constrain it within some geography that's how the search starts um you can also find them by looking for companies nonprofits and public sector services you either admire or want to improve in other words search for the organization rather than the job you can search for publications about places you would like to live search for places rather than the job one of the things about non-academic job search is that it is much less constrained by geography so you can you know make more decisions about where you want to live and then for international students you should look for companies from your home country that do business in the us and vice versa um your embassy or your consulate can help because those are the companies that have strong vested interest uh in your joint preparation now here is a really underappreciated thing which is who writes job descriptions um the hiring manager or somebody in human resources or the last person to hold the job here is the important thing the person who you will be directly working for um has not always written the job description so a personal contact that the organization is your best source of information about what the job description really means another slightly strange fact who are job descriptions for you believe you know it is for internal and external candidates and that is absolutely true but it is also indirectly for the hiring manager's boss and finance to like prove that the position is needed applicants aren't the only audience for the job description again this is why i stress so much personal contacts at the organization because you want to find out what the job description really means all right uh so this gets back to the question i got earlier about how to describe skills you got to read a lot of job descriptions to learn their jargon uh and i link in the presentation to blog posts i wrote about how to do that but you got to read a lot of job descriptions and then you have to learn the academic nearest equivalents for the required and requested skills and that's that slide i did at the beginning about how you start to learn to describe yourself differently you have to ask friends in those types of work to help you understand the job descriptions and what is communication skills required oh you have to be able to present to the boss and customers all those kinds of things and then this is one of the best ways to learn you ask organizations that have posted interesting job descriptions if you can have informational interviews and sometimes those are with hr and sometimes those are with people in the particular discipline but what they say is hey you say communication skills who are the primary audiences you need us to talk to you talk about data analysis tell me you know what's the most difficult data problem you guys are solving at the moment um you learn to read job descriptions by reverse engineering which is basically you read a ton of them and you ask about them lather rinse repeat here's how you use your linkedin context let's say you find a job description you want to know more about and you troll through linkedin and you find someone either with that kind of job someone who worked at that place or a connection and here is what you say hey and i see somebody you know worked at this place i'm interested in would you be willing to answer some kind of questions or introduce me to that person this is the core function of linkedin and of course it obviously works for anybody not on linkedin but this is what you do you find something you're interested in and you use linkedin to get yourself better information this is how you learn about job descriptions and this is a long process and so this is why i say that if you let's say you're doing a six month a job search after your phd and maybe it's going to take six months there's going to be three or four months of those upfront where you're learning and doing research the good thing is graduate students are good at research now here is a very very very very important thing there are no perfect candidates applicants have different skills in different degrees all hires are compromises if you like the job description and you don't have every required and desired skill find out which are the key ones if you can make a credible case that you have done that kind of work well apply for the job women you are socialized to take yourself out of consideration re-socialize yourself to put yourself in the ring if you like the job description and you can make a case that you have the skills for it apply for the job do not give in to the myths of there are no perfect candidates somebody is better than me it's like yeah but lots of people aren't as good as you too so that was job descriptions now i'm going to talk about hiring managers which is to say what they need and want and how they behave how people like me behave when they hire people like you whoops sorry about that hiring managers need somebody to solve problems for them to handle the volume of work or to take on a new type of work notice it's about them and their job so they are not thinking i need a phd they are thinking i need somebody to do this thing now they want every skill they need but believe me when i say they will take a subset some of those skills are in high demand the job is hard to fill it's been open for a while but above all if the candidate is smart and willing to learn the people i hire today are not going to be doing the same thing in 18 months the workplace is changing too fast uh the job world is changing too fast and jobs are changing too fast i must have people who are smart and willing to learn and that is something that you can say about yourself now here is an important thing they want the new person to start as soon as feasible or as soon as budgeted and they are going to expect you to start not you know when you finish your dissertation or whatever but really within a notice period and that's typically two two weeks or so so it's important that you be aware of when you will be willing to start a new job and so a new job and so what you have to do um is uh understand when you are going to finish uh and plan to start your job search ahead of that now this is how hiring managers behave um they have an idea of the person and the skills they want but they can be persuaded otherwise when i go to hire i think oh i would love it if they could do x y and z and all this stuff um but if you can make the case that you are the right person with the right skills you can be hired we all have ideals in our head right because honestly hiring is just like dating we all have an idea about what we want um but real human beings are different they also hiring managers also trust somebody who has worked at their company to refer candidates more than anybody else this is why i encourage you to build up contacts and figure out how to reach out to people at companies to say so i see this cool job and they say they want these 97 different things but which of them really matter and what are they really looking for um because again remember the person who's doing the hiring is not always the person who has written the job description okay um laura before i go on to uh the actual logistics of the job search are there any questions that are about job descriptions or hiring managers let me scroll down to the most recent ones um no i know we have we do have lots of other you know linked in and contacts kinds of questions but nothing specific to hiring managers so we could probably save these for the end or okay okay super all right then i will talk about logistics uh then i have those brief slides at the end but then we can answer a ton of questions okay here are the things that you must do before you apply to any non-academic job you must draft a resume you have to get somebody outside of academics to critique it revise it and then you update linkedin with your reviewed and revised resume if you already have a linkedin profile don't worry about it you don't have to take it down um but just you know before you put something out there make sure you get somebody with non-academic eyes to have a look at it you must read lots of job descriptions this is how you learn how people talk about what they're looking for so not just what they're looking for but what their language is you have to look at your online presence and you have to be able to explain what's there and that means blogs facebook twitter instagram pinterest you have to do a vanity google and you have to read three pages of results um do not engage in the futile exercise of trying to erase the internet um but please do be able to explain what's out there uh you have to revise or create a short writing sample uh for intelligent interested non-specialist readers there was a question earlier about grant writing and this is a phrase i use constantly when i talk to academic audiences your new audience with the exception of a very few jobs is intelligent interested non-specialists i want you to do something like you know a proposal or a course description uh or a description of an activity you've been involved in um but unless they uh unless your employer asks specifically for something from your academic work i generally advise against sending that and it certainly has to be shorter please identify and clean your interview clothing um if you can arrange a mock interview uh either with career services or with a friend schedule a mock interview and dress for it international students you must be absolutely buttoned up about your visa status you must know what it is you must have documents for it and you must know how long the various phases of it last and you have to do all of this before you apply to anything here's the basic process you find a job listing you research the organization you find a contact there if you can and discuss the job you apply with a resume and a letter you have a phone or a video interview you have an in-person interview you submit references and any supporting material and you receive an offer and you negotiate it now we have all heard the nightmare story of somebody who says oh my god and i sent out 200 letters and resumes and i didn't get a single answer back the people who have done that have not done the stuff in blue because again throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks is not a great job search strategy the first thing you have to do is find out if your skills are suited to the job and that's why you have to do research and um find a contact there and discuss the job but that's the basic process and now i'm going to discuss the sort of pieces of it so your first contact is after you research the job type the organization and the individual job you write a job letter that is tailored to the job one-on-one all those people who sent out 200 generic form letters are not getting answers because they don't seem to be putting the effort into researching the job you submit a resume that is suited to the job most people have about three resumes you know they have the research let's say the if they're a chemist let's say they have the research job they have the bench job they have the public science job and maybe the grant grant writing resume so you submit a letter that is one-on-one you submit a resume that is suited to the job and your LinkedIn profile must support your letter and resume it has to be credible but a lot of people have a lot of different interests and so what you do on LinkedIn is you just put the thing that you are most interested in at the top so pro tip um most people most employers will read either the letter or the resume but not both equally carefully so make sure that the letter or your resume could stand on its own if they need to here's what interviewers usually do they look at your LinkedIn profile and see if they know anybody they google your name they read your job letter and or your resume but not equally carefully they ask around to find out if anybody knows you personally and they review your writing or your work or your code sample so that's what an interviewer is typically going to do so here's what you need to do for phone video and in-person interviews they prepare you have to prepare at least three questions for your screener or your interview one each about the job the company and the location this shouldn't be hard and if you don't do at least as much research about the job to be able to do this there is no reason for them to take you seriously so for phone and video you may be asked to use one of the current platforms if that's not a platform you use all the time make sure you download it and test it first you should free your phone area from distractions right if you have posters that you know not everybody may love or if you have noisy roommates or noisy pets you know ask career services if you can get some help for for an area that's quieter to do a phone screen okay this is very important don't stop your job search if you get a phone screener and interview do not stop your job search until you are in your seat after orientation at your new job when there are very few academic jobs and you advance in the stage it is typically it is tempting to focus and and sort of rejoice in that and to narrow your focus don't do that stuff happens right projects get cancelled you know companies get acquired senior people leave and all of a sudden your boss can't take on your project don't stop your job search until you are at your desk when you interview in person um somebody's going to call to schedule it um and you may ask the schedule about the interview standard of dress um but if you forget don't call the day before and ask uh in that case just dress business schedule uh if you are given the names of your interviewers you very often will not be but if you are do what they do what i said they do look them up on linkedin and google uh you should bring a pad and pen even if you usually take notes on a device and the reason is a pad and a pen will lift your eyes about 10 degrees and it will help you look your interviewer in the eye uh you should bring a hard copy of your references names and contact information that should not that information that private data should not be on your resume and you should wait to be asked to hand that information over uh if you are not told when you can expect to hear back you may ask at your last interview which will either be with a hiring manager or hr or recruiting uh after the interview you should send the thank you note to the hiring manager it should be professional not fulsome in tone email is fine and a hand written note is better um i spend a lot of time as a volunteer raising money for lambda legal and the single most powerful tool i have after lambda legal's good work is a hand written thank you note uh it is a skill that i strongly advise you to cultivate uh if you have had good interactions with people who interviewed you invite them to connect on linkedin and you can do this whether the hiring decision is positive or not because you never know who you're going to work for um and a good interaction is a good interaction references so this is something that works very differently than in academics they are usually given by phone or submitted online rather than written ahead of time and distributed once uh and here's a big thing that's different from academics uh response time is shorter than for a reference for an academic job you're going to need three to five of them uh the your referees can be current research colleagues uh one of them need not be your supervisor or pi this is a big difference uh in academics you essentially cannot get an academic job or a postdoc without a strong recommendation from your thesis supervisor uh in my world references tend to be confirmatory rather than gatekeeping it is helpful but not required if one referee can speak to your work in non-academic settings you should make sure your resumes have the job description and your current resume and as i said before references are less critical for non-academic jobs than for academic based ones uh i want to say something about your future as a hiring manager because everybody i'm speaking to uh is going to be good at their jobs and going to be good in the workplace and one day you are all going to be hiring people i want you to remember today i want you to remember being new to the job search and i want you to remember being rejected um and i want you to craft a courteous professional rejection and i want you to send it as soon as it is appropriate we all know how gross it is to apply for admission or a fellowship or a postdoc or something and you don't get it you don't get it you don't get it and you wonder if there's hope that's awful and here's a thing that is way different from academics everybody you interact with may be or may refer your next great employee i want you to treat everybody courteously and professionally and i want you to treat everybody as somebody who can contribute to your organization um the golden rule is golden for a reason and and again academics has this sort of thing where the people people respect tend to be you know tenured faculty members or people who bring in a lot of grant money but but relatively few people and i want you to treat everybody well because you never know who is going to be your next great employee or who is going to tell somebody who is your next great employee so um here are the things i want you to do next and then i'm going to shift to uh laura because i see we have lots of questions you should do the template exercise you should update it once a year uh initial exercise takes i don't know eight hours and yearly updates are cake they take half an hour in one session you should join linkedin you should add the people you know well in respect you should do the template exercise and add the people it brings to mind and you should create a calendar reminder to add two people a week forever um don't add your resume until you have someone outside of academics review it um you should create a non-academic email address if you don't have one um unless applying from your academic department is an advantage please please please do not create something like margarita mama at hotmail.com um and you laugh but you would not believe what has crossed my screen clean up your contacts uh and keep them current please set a regular backup schedule for your contacts uh and your files uh i have some resources here for you uh negotiating compensation careers in gov this is a quick way to learn about job listings and in the public sector they post everything from entry level public service to data setting manager for um Calgary the University of Michigan's career center uh has one-on-one career counseling for graduate students there's a link to make an appointment um i have posts on the non-academic job search and then because i'm an academic i have a book list uh and these are books that i think will really help you um in their various topics uh i'm not going to go through each of these lists but i have long lists of blog posts for the various um aspects of job searches now before i go on to uh reminders whoops go back go back um i want to laura uh i see we have tons of questions i am certainly happy to hang out here but why don't you just start from whatever looks good and then i'll answer questions for as long as people want to stay okay um i am i'm starting at the top the ones that have gotten lots of likes um or upvotes um what are some questions you should ask during the informational interview you referenced earlier that you could request an informational interview if you see a just a job description that really appeals to you the questions i always ask to find out are things like um what is the most important problem you're trying to solve what is the hardest problem you're trying to solve who are your customers um whose world are you changing those are really critical questions um do you know any temp agencies that are particularly good at placing candidates with graduate education uh the question isn't placing candidates with graduate education the question is temp agencies in particular fields and are you suited to those fields because a lot of temp agencies have specialties right they place you know people in finance or they place people in business or they place people in in science research roles so it's not about placing graduate students it's about placing people in fields and jobs for which you are suited that's why you have to do your work upfront i know you talked a little bit about timing and how soon before folks graduate with their phd should they start applying for jobs and how do they tell the company that um they're still in school but almost done um so i tend to i tell people that they should assume that a non-academic job search will take at least six months and that that four months of that should be research which should obvious which can obviously be done in conjunction with your academic work because you know you don't search for a job 24 hours a day um once you go on the non-academic job market you have to be prepared to start when the employer wants you to start or to turn down the job right because some employers for example um employers who want you to do um biometric research or chemical engineering research or things like that will want you to finish your degree um but others may not be so understanding about it so the really important thing you have to do is to have a handle on when you will be done and then if an employer says in i can't wait that long that may be the answer but it is critical that you know and that you can answer credibly when you will finish one person says one of my biggest issues is once i have contacts i don't know what to say to them to keep in touch and stay in their mind for when and if they hear of openings that may be relevant to me do you have any advice on that how how to keep your professional contacts um having you in mind for opportunities um you don't have to do that um what you have to do is um you have to let them know like when you when you engage with them right that i'm on the job market um you can absolutely write a general post uh that you send out to LinkedIn contacts saying for example uh i wanted to let you all know uh i am in the process of finishing my dissertation which i expect will be done at time x i am currently looking for world work in field y i would value any expertise or insight that you have um in the meantime um i very much appreciate your support uh so far you know and that is enough to let people know that you are looking um but generally reaching out specifically is much much more useful it's a better use of your time and it's a better use of the person's time to whom you are reaching out because you should always reach out with a specific ask not you know how the hell am i going to get a job because that is a that is a question for your two best friends that is not a question for professional context we had a follow-up question about the job search timeline do you have any thoughts about um adjusting how early people should be applying given the current time of pandemic um i know you had said roughly six months do you think the current climate that is any different than that recommendation and no i don't um because the uh first of all we don't know we don't know anything about this pandemic we don't know how long it'll last we don't know if there's going to be another wave we don't know when and if there's going to be a vaccine i mean we just don't know enough right so what you should do is focus on the things you can control and the things you can control are defining your skills writing a resume and a high-level cover letter based on those skills learning about jobs learning their jargon and applying for jobs for which you are suited that is what you can control and that is what you should do we have a question that is quite popular how can you acquire personal contacts at an organization outside of your network when you don't have any possible connection on linkedin what about cold emailing um i find that uh not very helpful you can always do informational interview requests at organization where you don't have contacts and what you do there is you go through the person listed as the hiring manager or you go through hr or the recruiters um but do not underestimate your contacts you should of course add everybody you respect in your program and everybody you know in graduate school you should also add like all your undergraduate friends you should go back to high school and add the people you have worked with you should add vendors you have worked with you know more people than you know and they know more people than you know so if you don't know somebody at a place that you would like to be considered for that's when you go the informational interview route um but start building up your contacts and you must crack out of the mentality of oh it's the people in my program who can help me tons of people who can tons of people can help you in response to your point about even if you don't have all the qualifications whether or not to apply to a position if a company has multiple job openings at different levels how do you know which level to apply for in the example they gave us senior scientist one versus senior scientist two etc so what you should do is you should read the job descriptions and you should see where they are differentiated and that is a case where what i would try to do ideally is to talk to somebody who holds those jobs um and talk to somebody in your department for example and say what the and find out what the difference is but that is a case where i would feel very comfortable calling their HR or their recruiters and saying you know there are two different jobs here um i have the qualifications i just want to understand what the right level is that's a totally legitimate question a one person asked but five other people have um liked this question for applicants of color or other minority groups what are things we need to be looking out for should we put information about our race slash ethnicity on our resumes um i would not put it on your resumes um there is differing advice about whether you should have a photo on linkedin um some people believe that that uh triggers unconscious bias in hiring um but it is worth googling yourself and images and seeing how easy it is for someone to find a photo of you because if it is easy for someone to find a photo of you then you know you may want to get a decent head shot and put that on linkedin so they're looking at that and not necessarily whatever's out there in in the world of google um um for applicants of color i think it is particularly important that you network because in addition to everything else you want to learn about an organization you want to learn if the organization has a good track record of hiring and promoting and retaining employees of color um because some at some organizations have a good pipeline up front but then don't invest in their professional development some uh organizations uh hire very well but then don't retain them well uh and all of those are things you want to know ahead of time it is incredibly important for people who are in any underrepresented group that you network as thoroughly and well as you can um so i guess that's what i would say about that thanks and you've referred to data and data analysis a number of times can you explain what counts as data this question's coming from a fellow english trained person but we've had five people who like the question so uh so um what i understand is data is perhaps uh a little broader than how some people describe it uh it is possible for example to think of a data set as for example um all anonymized income tax returns from pennsylvania for 10 years that's a data set um another data set uh or another set of data um is all the representations of women in 18th century literature and how they change from the first two decades of the century to the latter two decades of the century that's a data set what i'm really interested in is how people look at a large body of information how they synthesize it how they analyze it and how they draw conclusions from it that at a at a really high level that's how i think about graduate school and graduate training and so i'm really interested in how people talk about data how they conceptualize it do they like it do they like wrestling with it and what happens when they run into a weird new data set they've never seen before i care a lot about how people think about that stuff regarding the interim job and employers preferring those who are already employed what about freelancing or self-employment after the phd would that be better equal or worse than the home depot or contract work scenarios you gave um it's a terrific supplement and if it's more closely related to the job you're looking for so much the better um in my experience people often do both um and they do both because you know home depot brings in a little more money in a little more reliable way for those of you who are interested in this option at the end of my pdf of these slides i have a whole section on a going solo for yourself i don't go over it because only a subset of people want to see it but it will be but the advice for that will be there in the slides and i will send those slides by the end of the day today we had an earlier question about who should do a postdoc but we have an additional one um this person asks if they want to move into consulting or an msl which i think is medical science liaison position should they do a postdoc um the question is how relevant it is to where you want to be um i do not advise doing postdocs to mark time because you know we've all seen the scary statistics about people who get a phd and then do three consecutive postdocs and wake up at you know 42 with not being paid very well and no retirement savings and that's no good um where postdocs are really helpful is especially if they are at another institution if there are another institution or another kind of workplace and it helps expand your work or if it helps you do a subspecialty in new techniques or research methods that you have not been exposed to um or it helps you gain supervisory skills um those are great reasons to do postdocs um so it depends on you know how it helps you branch and how it helps you grow because the key thing is that the postdoc should help you as much as it helps the people for whom you're working right um we've had a couple of questions from international um scholars could you say a few things about employers approach toward applications from non-us citizens the excel sheet makes me think that all the experiences that come along with being an international student would be positively projected on the resume still there are migration related issues that can affect employers judgment totally well and it's not just affecting employers judgment it's affecting their budget right because because when employers have to help employees like apply for visas or apply for green cards i mean the green card process is very expensive and very time consuming um so what you have to do as an international student is you have to know your visa status you have to know how long you can be in a particular place and you have to have documentation to prove it and then when an employer asks you um you have to uh talk about that honestly um but yeah you but a lot of your experiences are incredibly valuable live i look for people who live in multiple countries and who have passports because when i worked in international at amazon and i sent people abroad they had to represent themselves and the country and the company and me so international experience is incredibly valuable also um a multilingual experience very valuable we have a question very basically what title and date range do you give to quote being a graduate student for time when you are not a research assistant or a ta slash gsi and um also ken slash should you include a description within the education section of the resume by description so i'm guessing this means like if someone has a grant um you know so they weren't necessarily employed as an r.a. or a ta for the full time of their degree i see um i'm gonna stop sharing my screen and go back to my resume um and show you what i'm uh what i recommend there in crook resume share um okay so uh so here's what i had uh under education languages cornell university phd here's when i got it awards competitive fellowship awards ba's the languages i speak so you notice i do not have a description of my phd research now i would have a description of my phd research but only if it were directly relevant to the job for which i was applying that's great um one person says i am not confident about the skills i've learned in my graduate program how do i know i have enough technical skills um well one answer is that they're never enough and you're never gonna stop learning and everybody i hire is never gonna stop learning and i am also constantly running into skills i did not know i would need um so what you have to do is you should never be confident that your skills are at their end state what you should be confident of is here's a skill i have here's what i can currently do and here's how i would plan to develop them to the next level i mean one of the reasons i like hiring graduate students is they're often very good at describing how they plan to learn the next thing i expect you to be able to do that as well one person says they remotely know someone at an organization they're applying to is it okay to reach out to them and let them know they're applying um you should let them know you're applying but a better reach out is i have a this specific question for you about the organization you should when you reach out to people um you should always reach out with a specific limited ask just not like not anything you can tell me would be great that may be true but it is not helpful one person says it might take me longer to finish a phd if i do get a job how do i communicate that to a hiring manager well the only question is is it relevant to a hiring manager because if you're applying to do a job you're applying to do the job and the fact that you're working on a phd on the side either is or is not relevant if it is relevant and if it's related to the job then you're going to have to say um here's when i expect to defend if i take this job here's when i expect to defend um but if it is not relevant to the job it's not relevant to the employer it's it's not your employer's job to care about when you finish your phd unless it's relevant to the job i see one person says i've heard commonly that you should wait if you are in the interviewing process um i think this was when you were talking about and um maybe adding the person as a contact on linkedin um but this person says largely largely because it may burn the bridge it seems you suggest otherwise have you had experience with numerous offers and how that may impact relationship with the company that you denied oh maybe this was more about right you know to keep interviewing right so the key thing is to identify the job you want and not to assume that you have that job until your butt is in that seat so that's the first thing and that means you keep your job search going until that stage now if you get two competing offers at the same time which is i think what this person is asking what you have to do is do research and understand which of those jobs you most want and negotiate with that as the lead person and that's when you say um you know that's when you negotiate salary and so on and so forth and then what you want to do is when you tell the other person that you are not taking a job uh their job it is very important to understand the rules if there are any in this state about whether you need to tell them um that where you are where the other job is that you are taking um and the reasons why but you uh the golden rule applies treat people the way you want to be treated uh if you say you know the third person i spoke to in the interview seemed like an idiot right that's a bad way to approach the issue but if you say uh this other job uh offered a little more of work i'm immediately interested in doing but i loved interviewing at your company and the people i talked to were great and smart and i appreciate the chance to do it can you suggest a bit of verbiage on how to craft a linkedin message to connect with jobs that you received a rejection for but had a great interview with so any thoughts on that so i assume it's um you want to stay in touch with the people who interviewed you and you say uh i'm very sorry we won't be work colleagues but i really enjoyed interviewing you and just you know for future professional contacts and development um i would uh appreciate the opportunity to stay connected with you on linkedin we we have a question um would jobs at academic institutions that are not faculty such as academic advisor count as non-academic i've often heard instead of people talk about alternative academic or um but yeah i don't know if you have different thoughts on that and i don't think it matters i mean sometimes they're called alt-academic and sometimes the uh the degree is an advantage but all the things i talk about in this presentation uh about how to apply also apply to that group of of uh jobs yeah i absolutely agree with that um clarification regarding location on your resume do you recommend using the nearest big city or your specific location i know you said earlier and not to necessarily link to link your exact home address so do you have thoughts on whether it matters to list an arbor versus detroit versus westland no i just uh just uh i would say uh where you live i mean it you know if you if for example you're a student at the university of michigan and you lived in ipsilani you might decide an arbor rather than ipsilani just because an arbor is so strongly associated with the university and there are situations where that might be an advantage um but otherwise you know just just the city where you live is fine if you find out who the hiring manager is is it inappropriate to address them directly in an application uh only if it's appropriate if the hiring manager's name is listed um on the um on the job description if you have found it out in some way then no then you say um to the hiring manager colon or something like that um one person says but two other folks have agreed i am good a good public speaker and teacher but with one-on-one interviews i think it generally goes badly and i come across as overly nerdy and dry with no personality any tips on how to improve this or should i just be looking for jobs that value this kind of person uh you should look for all jobs to which your skills are suited now the way you improve interviews is the way you improve playing the clarinet or dribbling a soccer ball or making biscuits from scratch which is practice and so if you feel you are not interviewing up to you know the level of your skills then have practice interviews um i do think that one thing that really really helps interviewing is changing how you conceive the person to whom you are talking in graduate school as you go through your graduate work you work with a smaller and smaller group of people who are more and more specialized until you get to speak a language that is unique to that group and that specialty and if you put together a writing sample that is for interested intelligent non-specialists then working on talking to that audience will help you talk to people in interviews because what you do when you're nervous is you revert to the language of which you are comfortable and the language on which you are currently comfortable is hyper specialized graduate student geek that's what we all do um i am encouraging you to develop a different language that is for interested intelligent non-specialists do you this is a quick one do you see value in paying for linkedin pro no succinct um how would you recommend highlighting dei work that many of us many of us do naturally as teachers at um slash are able to engage with as scholars and the humanities so diversity equity and inclusion work yep uh so what you have to do is you have to describe specific instances of it whether it is counseling or whether it is advising student groups um and you have to talk about the skills that you bring to it um and how you want to use that in the workplace if it is relevant to the employer a question regarding informational interviews and asking for one with organizations who posted a job description for a position that interests you is it okay to ask for this informational interview if it's a job you actually want to apply to absolutely and in fact it's better to do so because the more information you get about it and the you know the more of a vibe you get about the people who work there and about the language they use all information is good information also when you get the informational interview the job you think was the job you really wanted may turn out to not be the job you really want at all and that's even that's even more valuable because then you don't spend time on it um we have a couple people who ask why not use an academic email address one person said that seems more professional than a personal email address um it depends um when you use uh like a gmail address for example which you know lots of people have these days um it is a sort of a neutral thing an academic email address may be an advantage um but the the signal it may send unbidden to an employer is that oh they really want to stay there or that's the information they like or they've built up all of that side of themselves but they haven't paid attention to the other side uh it can be more professional but um I strongly advise people to have an email address that is something like you know first name dot last name some number at gmail.com or something like that can you talk about working with a recruiter rather than directly applying to posted jobs yeah so to work with a recruiter the recruiter has to have some reason to work with you there are lots of people applying for entry-level jobs um but what recruiters do is they typically fill relatively specialist needs for companies so if you have a specialized skill set like you are working in um for example currently if you are working on synthesizing vaccines currently and there are a bunch of um drug companies who want want your skill set um I can absolutely imagine working with a recruiter um but going out and finding yourself a recruiter at an entry professional level uh can be hard because it is you know it's not clear to me what a recruiter would bring at the entry level that you would not bring unless you have a specialized skill set would a research postdoc ever overqualify someone for a non-research non-academic job assuming a phd has not already overqualified them would a postdoc ever hurt or would it only help okay i'm about to rant there is no such thing as being overqualified if you are having a conversation about being overqualified you are having the wrong conversation the conversation cannot be about qualifications postdocs phd's anything like that the qualification has to be about your suitability for the job for which you are hiring if they say to you well you know you have all this experience and you know i could certainly get somebody with a ba uh you don't engage with that what you engage with is here's why i'm interested in your job i've done this research that's directly applicable and i am interested in solving the kinds of problems you're addressing for the kinds of people you're solving this problem for if you are having a conversation about being overqualified you are having the wrong conversation and i so rant about this that one of those blog posts i'm going to change my screen share again that one of those uh blog posts i wrote is entirely about that um because i answered that question um um nearly uh all the time apparently so let's go down let's look at this let's make sure i anyway there we go uh there it is number two going on the job market and worrying about being overqualified what that means okay i'm going to stop ranting now you can ask me another question um what elements make a strong cover letter um clear pros not over long and clear relevance of your skills to the job for which you are applying and a clear statement of why you're interested in it um do you have any thoughts about user experience ux research positions for academics companies like amazon google facebook more and more academics i know are applying for these jobs i interviewed for a position interviewed well but was not offered due to a shift in business direction with covet i was told they would get in touch if things changed any advice on whether to follow up with the company in the future or move on so there's sort of two questions that's one question yes so the answer to follow up is definitely and you know follow up about two or three months later and then say if you know if it's too soon and if you don't know and if there's a an appropriate interval to follow up follow up but in general i would advise following up when somebody uh if somebody could not hire you roughly every three months or so um because you know units of a quarter of a year are often how companies plan uh and what i think about ux jobs is i think they're fabulous jobs for people with academic training because they they rely on research and interaction and often do teaching and often work with lots of people who don't have those skill sets so they're perfect for academics i love them what kind of questions are appropriate to ask the hiring manager should you expect that there will be follow-up interviews with other managers um typically you know i often find that the first uh round of interviews is uh i usually five so it's the hiring manager three people from a team or a related thing and one from hr recruiting and then if they think you're either interesting or if there are two candidates who are very different for example sometimes they bring in other people to do like comparative interviews for example so the kind of questions uh that are appropriate to ask a hiring manager are anything you're interested in but some of the things i always ask are what's the hardest problem you solve like what is it you know what problems do you think are in your way and how do you want the person taking this job to help get rid of those problems you know where do you see your company in the next five years like what do you what do you think that your company currently can't do that you want it to be able to do be looking to the future and how you can contribute to it if a gap in your employment is unavoidable what is the best way to frame it so the hiring the employed bias does not work against you um so it depends on the reason for the gap you know it's harder to describe a gap if you've been in prison than a gap if you have been raising young children um so what you what you what you what you want to do is you want to show because you know because really unless you were flying to mars and been put in one of those weird chambers you were doing something so what you want to do is describe what you were doing and describe what you learned from it you know because you were never not learning and you were never not doing something so just you know be clear about what that is and i also um i have a blog post about that it's not listed here but i have one what about accepting linkedin connections from people one doesn't know but who are in the same linkedin groups like professional associations and so on uh my personal rule is not to accept linkedin connections from people i do not know because if they if somebody says hey and you know would you be willing to introduce me to so-and-so and i don't know so-and-so or i don't know the person asking i'm not willing to risk my personal reputation when it is from us from a learned society or something else like that your mileage may vary i do not do it personally do you have a list of contract firms no because they are so specific to fields contract firms generally specialize and so a better way to do it is talk to folks in career services or talk to people and talk to people in your field and find out who they have used but it's very field specific should i aim for different strategies to write my resume if i'm applying to a job through online portal versus when i am internally introduced or recommended no um how do we connect to hiring managers most directly do we apply directly online through linkedin or go to the company's page um you apply for how they tell you to apply if they tell you to apply online you apply online if they tell you to go through hr you go through hr if they tell you to go through recruiting you go through recruiting if you have a personal connection if somebody has recommended you for the job then in the cover letter you say one of the many reasons i'm interested in this job is so and so whom i respect greatly uh told me that this was a great company a great project a great whatever when jobs ask for a research summary should you try to include skills instead of your research um if it's not particularly applicable to that job if so do you have any recommendations on how to do that you should when somebody asks for a research summary you should say here is the research and the you know the critical techniques i used were a b and c and then you what you might want to have is a sentence like um additional techniques that were related but that i didn't use on this particular project were d e and f um but what you should do is answer the question asked so if they ask about your research describe the research and describe the things relevant to the research because if they ask about it that's what they want to know about one person wants to take a break after they graduate will this gap in my resume be seen poorly take a break and do what they don't say and it's anonymous okay but if it is take a break and travel or if it is take a break and work or if it is take a break and go to you know the cia's cooking school and and learn how to make buttercream roses or whatever it is you want to do you just have to have a good reason to explain why you did it and why you took that break for those who have finished this term thinking they might be able to find temporary employment like um a bartender like the example you gave Anna and now find themselves unable to find even an interim job is this kind of gap a hindrance well for any situation but the one we're in i might have said yes um but it's not like people don't know about covid you know and so i think you explain how you look for work and what you were doing um and if you were willing to go do front line work you know if you were willing to work in a grocery store or you know all those kinds of things um but i think there is no one who will not understand uh the current situation what are the norms about adding former students on linkedin if you are there gsi they're teaching assistant um the norm is that you should not add them while you are in a position to have any power over them because they are not in a position to say no so if you add students on linkedin make it's important to consider whether they are still likely to ask you for a recommendation for example um but then i think it is okay what you must not do is abuse the power imbalance now hold that most applications require hand inputting your resume and experience i was told that my work experience likely doesn't get credited in a way that would get beyond a resume but how do i get past these ai systems okay uh another rant is coming do not try to game the bots um what you must do at all times and in all places is describe your skills as accurately as you can and as truthfully as you can because you will get by the bots when you are applying for a job for which you are well suited but just like tossing random word salad in like project manager in two years and product manager is not helpful um because the stuff is getting first of all stuff is getting more sophisticated in that it can tell when garbage words have been thrown in but the other thing is suppose you got by a bot and then you got to the interview and then the words you had thrown in were not suited to what you actually can do right that's not helpful um one person is wondering about reaching out to contacts and organizations who they've met but aren't they're not sure if they'd remember them because they weren't thinking about job searching at the time so right so the way you reach out is exactly the same way you reach out which is hello so and so um i met you a number of years ago in venue x i am currently interested in applying for work at your company why i have a specific question question would you be willing to spend a little bit of time talking to me about that question do you have website it's um job search websites you would recommend um so in resources so here's some of the ones that i think are helpful let's add there we go um payscale.com is really good because it talks about the thing that causes most people incredible anxiety which is um uh salary and benefit negotiation glassdoor.com is also really good about it um uh i flatter myself that my website is good it is filled with helpful information uh and it's uh the graduate and postdoc tab on incrook.com um i think those sites uh are all pretty good um you know those oh oh and the twitter feed of careers in gov is great just because it is not a site as such but what it does is put a lot of job descriptions in front of you and it expands what the marketing people teach us to call the consideration set like the things that you actually care about we have a follow-up from the person who asked the question about the ux research tab would you suggest also requesting um their interviewers and recruiter from that position um which they were not offered on linkedin so could they reach out to those folks on linkedin oh for a connection absolutely absolutely and we have one last question any recommendations for speakers or writers to model your writing voice after for interested and intelligent audiences this seems like a very broad question so what you have to do is you have to read widely and think who's interesting so the slide i have in front of you at the moment has four books that i rely on all the time and the last three in particular manifest really different writing styles and it is worth thinking about them so atul gawande has done the most persuasive work i have read about how to manage large blobby projects which is exactly what a job search is and the checklist manifesto i think is marvelous because it is written for such a broad audience also um his he has another book uh called his several books but he has another one called on being mortal and it's about handling issues around the end of life and it's worth looking at those two books together to see um how he modulates for different audiences uh amanda litman run for something uh is a book about why uh particularly young people should run for office and but the reason i bring it up in this context is that she uses profanity the way i use punctuation and interestingly uh for some people that is not their kind of language and so that this is not your kind of book but it's worth reading it and getting a sense of how deliberately she uses it and how she modulates it and then molly weisenberg who is a former graduate student who transitioned to make her own career out of being a food blogger before that was a thing and is now a restaurateur um is a narrative style about how she describes how she made her own life so i think all those three are good but uh i will say that the way you discover a writing style you like is to read a lot of writing styles great i it's a miracle that we answered almost 40 questions in 30 minutes so um you're really good at concise punchy answers so thank you dr crook i know um some folks um have headed out already but i just wanted to flag for the 85 folks who are still here um christin jensen did put um a link to our um evaluation just we always appreciate feedback on any of our workshops in the chat and we will also we got lots of questions about are we going to get the slides as dr crook said we will send out the slides and the presentation once we um take that down from the cloud um and send that out to you all as well so thank you again um for this great workshop um dr crook and um thank you to everyone who attended the session for your excellent questions i could tell people were really engaged just because we got something like 60 questions total so thank you again everyone i'm going to stop our recording okay stop the recording and then if you will hang uh just for a moment i think that would be helpful so everybody else can you know can bail