This post is part of a (highly) irregular series of posts about things I learned as I transitioned from being a tenured Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice to being a Senior Research Associate at a research and evaluation non-profit. The information and advice I provide here is based on my own experience and may not be applicable to people in other contexts, other disciplines, or facing other push or pull factors in their careers. I offer my thoughts simply to try and ease the difficulty of making this type of career change, to be another data point for people collecting information and considering their next steps. You can find other posts in this series under the Leaving Academia tag.
I recently attended the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) and had the opportunity to talk to many friends, new and old, about my new “alt-ac,” “non-ac” or “industry” position. If you’re reading this silly little blog in my silly little corner of the internet, you might know that last year I left my tenured Associate Professor position to work for a small research and evaluation nonprofit, where I’m leading projects related to criminal justice reform – keeping people out of the system, getting the people in it out, and improving conditions for those we can’t get out yet.
It was fascinating to be in this old, familiar academic space after my year of transformation. Conversations that were once relatable to me – about the brutality of the academic job market or the struggles of teaching, research, and service in austerity conditions – now felt like something from another lifetime. I was approached by many people who wanted to hear about my new position, if I liked it, how I did it, and I tried to balance my responses in a way that communicated my happiness and relief without coming off as… gloating.
One of the conversations I had with folks interested in my career change was about the “how.” How did I prepare, how did I apply, how did I pitch my skills and experience. I think that academia perpetuates itself by convincing academics that they don’t have employable skills or that they won’t be able to pursue their research interests anywhere but at a university, and this ultimately keeps people trapped in demanding and low-paying jobs. If you apply to industry jobs in the same way that you apply to academic jobs, then it may seem true that you are not employable. You will likely not get much interest. But that’s not because you don’t have valuable skills or knowledge, it’s because you are not speaking the correct language to communicate your skills and knowledge to people outside of the academic culture. Your academic work is cool! But a privilege of academia is exploring very lofty and abstract ideas that sometimes don’t have a lot to do with applied work. The exact theoretical perspective or intellectual tradition of your work is not as useful in applied spaces, but your skills might be! So where you might lead your academic materials by grounding your work in academic traditions, you should lead your industry materials by emphasizing how your skills are relevant to the organizational mission and the income-generating work. What you can do?
I had thought about leaving academia many, many times before I finally did it, and at one of those times (back in 2015-2016, I think?) I took an excellent multiweek course through Beyond the Professoriate. One of the very helpful activities we did in that course was to break down the daily activities of “research, teaching, and service” into the actual skills and know-how it takes to be a professor of anything. I won’t share the activity itself, as it’s not my intellectual property, but I thought it might be helpful to share some of what I came up with to show academics that they do have valuable skills, they just need to be able to articulate them.
An example before I get to my list of terms: my dissertation was titled “A Narrative Inquiry of Women’s Substance Use in Pregnancy and Motherhood.” On the academic job market, I would describe this work as grounded in traditions of exploratory qualitative methods including inductive thematic analysis and narratology. I explored how narrative identity, stigma, and risk perception shaped women’s navigation of health and criminal justice systems. That makes sense to me and it made sense to enough people that I (eventually!) got a tenure-track position, but it’s not how I’d describe the work to a hiring manager in industry. Instead, I might say “I’m really interested in the connection between criminal justice and health. For example, I independently led a project that involved recruiting from a hard-to-reach community population and conducted in-depth interviews. I used qualitative analysis software to analyze the data and have shared the results with both academic and non-academic audiences, including my participants, community health organizations, and prosecutors.” This description skips over the exact intellectual tradition of my work and instead emphasizes the skills: leading projects, recruiting from hard-to-reach populations, collecting and analyzing data, and communicating the results to a variety of stakeholders.
Teaching:
- You are an expert in your discipline and can identify what is important for students to know.
- You can articulate the important learning objectives for adult learners and work backwards to construct a curriculum that will allow learners to meet those objectives.
- You are up-to-date on best practices for adult learners and are able to apply this knowledge to the specific needs of your subject and your audience.
- You are able to synthesize large amounts of complex information in a way that non-experts can understand.
- You have the organizational and time-management skills to accomplish the goals of teaching, assessment, feedback, and improvement within the tight limits of a 15-week semester.
- You are accustomed to taking anonymous feedback and identifying actionable suggestions for improvement, and you can provide examples of times you have made changes based on feedback.
- You are familiar with foundational work in your discipline and with new developments and innovations, and you are able to develop a narrative structure that links the old and new work in a way that makes sense to a non-expert audience.
- You have extensive experience in assessing learning outcomes, including the use of many different types of both formative and summative assessment and how to give meaningful feedback that provides learners with the tools they need to improve.
- You have had difficult conversations with adult learners to address performance issues, respond to people in crisis, or provide mentorship to early-career professionals looking to advance.
- You have extensive experience in public speaking. You are comfortable speaking in front of a group, both from prepared material (notes, slides) and off-the-cuff (responding to questions, adapting to classroom conditions).
- You are able to make connections between abstract academic concepts and real-world examples so that adult learners see the value of the lesson.
- You have experience developing and facilitating group learning activities.
- You have experience communicating and answering questions both in person and via email, and you are skilled in maintaining databases of student information for record-keeping, transparency (e.g., student access to gradebooks), and monitoring purposes (e.g., early alert systems for students in crisis).
- If you have taught online, you also have expertise in online learning environments for adult learnings, including developing clear written instructions, producing video or other multimedia content, building rapport in online/remote environments, and ensuring compliance with accessibility standards (e.g., using materials that are accessible to people using screen readers).
Service
- You have experience serving on committees that may include a diverse group of people with competing interests.
- You (may) have experience scheduling and leading meetings with multiple stakeholder groups.
- You (may) have experience navigating complex regulations and the inner workings of large institutions.
- You have served in advisory roles to help a group or organization make decisions about how to move forward with its mission.
- You may have experience working with budgets and resource allocation within specific units/departments.
- If you have reviewed for journals, you have experience assessing the quality of written work and providing meaningful and actionable feedback to improve the product.
- If you have served on promotion and tenure committees, you have experience assessing employee productivity and progress toward career milestones.
- If you have served on a search committee, you have experience in recruiting and assessing candidates, which may involve comparing applicants using set criteria or a rubric. You also have experience narrowing down the applicant pool to the most qualified candidates, interviewing, and negotiating offers.
- If you have served in any sort of leadership role, you have experience in organizational agenda-setting, future planning, personnel management and conflict resolution, building consensus and support for your vision, and making change.
I am sure I am overlooking plenty of other skills, but these are what I managed to come up with all those years ago. I’d be interested in hearing about other skills you have developed during your academic career and how they might be useful in non-ac/alt-ac/industry spaces!