From Humanities to UX Research & Instructional Design | Joe Stubenrauch, PhD

Former history professor Joe Stubenrauch joins the podcast to talk about...

- What User Experience (UX) Research is and how he got his first UX position
- Why (and how) he left his position as a history professor
- How coffee chats and passion projects fueled his transition from academic to industry

Connect with Joe on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-stubenrauch/ 

Check Out Joe's Website: https://www.joestuben.com 

Ready to start going industry? Download my six week checklist: https://www.gradschoolsucks.com/sixweekchecklist

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Matt: Dr. Joe Stubenrauch, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Before we get started, would you Just introduce yourself to everyone at home, however you'd like to, and then let them know how they can follow along in your journey, where they can find you online, anything like that. 

Joe: Yeah, I'm Joe Stubenrauch. I am a UX researcher at a large tech company that you have heard of. And before that, I was a history professor specializing in the late 18th and early 19th century British history. Before that, wait, never mind, edit that out. We don't want to go down that rabbit hole. I spent about nine years as a professor, assistant, and then associate professor, and was the grad program director of my department at the time that I left. 

Joe: I spent a very long time in graduate school at Indiana University, Bloomington, before that. And I went straight from undergrad to a long time in grad school to a full first phase of my career in academia. Before hitting the eject button. And jumping from the Regency and early Victorian period to the cloud and to tech. 

Joe: It's been a very exciting experience of reinventing my life. Fundamentally, how I think about myself, what I do each day, where I live, my relationship to my work. And it's been, for me, a very exciting experience. It's awesome where you can find me on LinkedIn. Please connect, mention in your connection request this podcast or something. 

Joe: I generally accept requests, but it makes it really easy if I see that you're human. And I also have a website, www.joesteubenstuben.com where. I don't keep it that updated with content, but I have a couple articles there and ways to contact me.  

Matt: Awesome. And regardless of whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on the podcast, I'll have links to both Joe's LinkedIn page and website in the description. 

Matt: So you can scroll down and click on those. So Joe, let's start With what you're up to now, so you are a UX researcher. Could you tell me a little bit about what that means, what your day to day is like, the impact you have on the company, etc.?  

Joe: Yeah, so my job is to help a product team better understand our customers and to make decisions on behalf of those customers about what To build, what new features to add to our product, what to change about our product. 

Joe: So my job as a researcher is to understand the pain points, the needs, the motivations, and the behaviors of our users. Sometimes that looks like... Really focusing in on their actual behavior with the product. How do they use the product? Or if we're rolling out a new feature, what do they make of this new feature? 

Joe: How do they interact with it? And that's I don't want to say basic or simple, but that's on that more surface level, how someone interacts. With an app, or in this case, with a cloud service. Where do they click? Where do they expect to find some feature? If you show them the main page and you say, Okay, you know that this feature exists and you need to set this configuration. 

Joe: Where do you go? Or, you encounter this error message in your system. How do you troubleshoot that? Where do you start looking to find out what went wrong? So that's the sort of more tactical usability study looking at how our customers interact with the product. But then there's other levels of research where we will be exploring how do people do their jobs? 

Joe: What is their main motivation in their job? What are they trying to get done? Because when it comes down to it, the customer... Really isn't there to use our product most of the time at least especially my product in the space I'm in they're trying to get something done. They're trying to make the rest of their job easier or To accomplish some sort of task and they're using our product or considering using our product to do that And then sometimes we might even be talking to people who aren't our customer, but they're the type of person who could be our customer. 

Joe: And we're talking to them about how do you do your job? Oh what are, why do you do, why do you do that particular task? How do you do that task? Oh, I see. So do you have to have a workaround for that? Oh, that sounds like that's a hassle. Tell me a bit more about that. Oh, you sounded frustrated. Why is this frustrating to you? 

Joe: And really circling in slowly to reconstruct their experience of their work to one of the phrases we use mental models. How do they make sense of both their work and their tasks, but then how our product fits into that. And in that way, it's a bit like And we use this word in UXR, ethnography or anthropology, where you're really coming to an understanding of the user. 

Joe: There's many different types of UX research. I'm very much on the qualitative end. I'm not a quantitative researcher. So my research Is very much on that sort of ethnography or as a historian, what we would call cultural history, trying to uncover how people make sense of the world. And then alongside that, what their needs are. 

Joe: Then I take all of that from observing our customers. And then I have to communicate it to engineers to product managers, to UX design and help them then make decisions. What do we build? What do we change? What do we prioritize? Otherwise, if a product team is operating in a vacuum. Sometimes they hit gold. 

Joe: Sometimes they make something that's exactly what a customer, what customers need. Maybe they don't even know they need it yet, but it meets these needs that they have. Other times and more frequently a product team will design a product for themselves because they'll imagine, oh, I understand the user. 

Joe: I am the user. What do I want? And that's, especially something, we over in the humanities argue. That's not actually how the world works. People are fundamentally very different from each other and their needs and how they understand products and use products. 

Joe: And the more customers you can talk to, the more you can... advocate for that voice of the customer or many voices of the customer and the experience of the customer to the product team. The more the product team can build something for the customer that meets their need rather than building something that they imagine the customer wants, but it's really what they want. 

Joe: That was a very long description, but that's UX research.  

Matt: Oh, that makes so much sense. And so how did you, how'd you find out about UX research?  

Joe: Serendipity randomly. When I pivoted out of academia, I did not jump to UX research. I jumped into a field called instructional design. I can talk about that separately in a moment if you want. 

Joe: I briefly, during that time while I was looking for pathways out of academia, I came across the term UX. And I looked at UX a little bit. It did seem like a field that academics were going into. But I honestly didn't look that deeply. And what you'll find on the surface when you start looking at UX, Are ux design roles. 

Joe: There's far more design roles than there are researchers and looking at ux design I realized oh, this is you know, this is fascinating. This looks really neat. This is probably not a great fit For me, I can't see Myself excelling in this field, I would need to learn a lot that I don't have now. It would be a very long transition to go into UX design, and it just didn't capture my interest. 

Joe: And many designers, and in fact, originally, designers did do the research piece as well, and over time, there's been increasing specialization, and that's split where UX research is its own role. But I just didn't really look at UX research. Cause I was seeing mockups and wireframes and designing the actual sort of UI of, and UX is much more than the user interface. 

Joe: But as far as I'd looked, that's all I'd seen. So then it was after I was intact, working as an instructional designer, a someone in my network who has a Ph. D. in history she'd gotten her Ph. D. at the same institution I had. We'd overlapped slightly, though I don't think we ever had talked to each other. 

Joe: She saw me on LinkedIn. Thought that was super interesting that I'd made a jump. She was working, is working at Google and she's a UX researcher. So she said, Hey, we should just have a chat. Let's just talk about our careers. And by the end of that conversation, cause I started asking her, so what do you do? 

Joe: Oh, wait, like how does that work? And I was telling her about some of the work I was doing in instructional design and she said, You should look into UX research because what you're interested in instructional design, you're asking similar questions to what we, about your learners in instructional design that we ask about our users or our customers in UX research. 

Joe: So it was a random networking conversation. And I left that conversation saying, I want to. Learn more. I researched on the internet. I got a couple books about UX researcher about UX research and within maybe two weeks, I decided that was right at the end of 2021. I decided 2022 will be the year of me exploring UX research and seeing if I can transition into the field. 

Joe: And I started October 31st of 2022 in my UX research role. So it was a random networking conversation. That's very  

Matt: cool. And did you stay within the same company to transition to that role? Yes. You did. That's a part of your story that I found very interesting. And I think you had a post on LinkedIn where you talked about that. 

Matt: How do you think your transition would have been different if you was just, were applying to a different company or if you were in academia? Applying straight out of a professor role.  

Joe: I think breaking into UX research would have been much more difficult for me. There are some fields where the research methods and the work that they do very clearly translates to UX research. 

Joe: And there it's not that it's easy, but there's a more direct path and a more direct bridge. For historians, that's not the case. I think underlying the work, there's a lot that's in common. After I've maybe talked to, in fact, I was just doing this last week, I did the research readout two days ago, I had interviewed ten different customers an hour each. 

Joe: And you've got that big pile of transcript, and now I'm gonna bulldoze through it, pulling out insights, synthesizing, what are the main stories. from this hundreds of pages, really, if it was all in one transcript. That's what the, historians know how to do that. That's our bread and butter. 

Joe: Give me several hundred pages, I'll plow through it. But, I don't do usability studies. I wasn't an oral historian. I, so I wasn't interviewing users. I wasn't... doing surveys. So a lot of the basic tasks of a UX researcher, I wasn't doing as an academic. So I think if I had been applying completely from the outside I would have had to do much more work on my own ahead of time, building out sort of passion projects and side projects, proving that I could do this work in order to get my foot in the door. 

Joe: Whereas internally, I was able to, in my instructional design role, start doing user research, and legitimately to help the projects I was working on because it in fact is useful to better understand how learners were going through the training materials we were creating, what their needs were, what they were trying to accomplish in their job, and how training fit into their lives as employees of our company. 

Joe: And so I was able to begin doing UX research in my current role already in the tech space. And I was able to reach out to other researchers at my company, form friendships with them a couple of them began to shadow, and then one of them who was very close, nearby, like structurally, she was in my org said, hey, do you want to collaborate with me on a project? 

Joe: Because we'd had enough of sort of a friendship and had enough conversations at that point. And she'd seen my work on my own team. I said, yes. And so by the time I made the internal move, I was able to say to my new hiring manager, I've already done these UX research projects at AWS. 

Joe: And some of them with actual customers, actual external customers. And so be already being at the company already being able to show work I'd done and at the company in that space made all of the difference. Whereas if I'd been applying externally I think the barrier would have been much higher and especially now in the current market would have been much more difficult. 

Joe: And I know I'm monologuing at you here, but one thing I would encourage anyone listening to this is to think about their career not as one final jump or one final destination like we do in academia, but instead realize that once you step through a door into industry, Many other doors open and you can begin to earn trust with people at your company and in turn actually at other companies who will see your success and in your first role as evidence that, okay, this person can work in industry. 

Joe: But it will allow you to then begin to pick up new skill sets, begin to explore, begin to use those internal connections to then grow in new ways and into careers you won't know about. So again, when I accepted my role and walked away from tenure and left tenure, I didn't know the field that I'm in now existed. 

Matt: Yeah I feel like now is a good time to ask the question. Yeah. Why did you leave academia  

Joe: there? There are many reasons. I think most of them will be recognizable to listeners One was the very basic geography. I Had thought oh, I'm cosmopolitan I'm broad minded. I can bloom anywhere I'm planted. 

Joe: I could live in any culture. I can, fit in, disappear into the, the local population. I'm, I'm a world traveler. I can be happy anywhere. If it's a good job, it doesn't matter where it is. And I think the, there was parts of that were true. And I think some of that was true in my early thirties. 

Joe: But the more time that went by, maybe the less true that became, where in my 20s, I didn't value being near family as much, and now I do. So one aspect was we were in Texas I'm originally from California, I've done my undergrad in Michigan, grad school in Indiana my wife's from Michigan. Texas was good to us, I'm not criticizing Texas, but after nine years it wasn't home, and we were very far from all family. 

Joe: At that point we had a daughter. And, again, very far from any cousins, very far from grandparents and, increasingly, I felt, rather than feeling more and more at home as time went by, I increasingly felt out of place. So place was an important part of the story. Some of it was, honestly realizing over the course of getting tenure and then moving into that sort of associate professor role where you start taking on more service, and I was stepping into department leadership. 

Joe: Realizing things about myself and what makes me tick. And the thought of spending another six years alone in the archive Writing another book as I was in a book field. So I'd written my first book for 10 years So here was book number two to get the full professor. I wasn't excited about It was like the tank was empty. 

Joe: But also I realized I liked working with other people on shorter term deadlines getting regular feedback. And the thought of, alright, go be self directed for another six years and come out on the other side with another book that makes a major intervention in the field. And you get some feedback at conferences, but come on. 

Joe: Everybody's there to get the line on the CV and to drink in the bar. And you've got four people and inevitably they just ask about their own research or ask you why they... You didn't work on what they work on, you don't get that much feedback. And I realized I involved I fell into a lot of negative self talk as an academic, always beating myself up for being too flaky, for not being passionate enough, for not being dedicated enough. 

Joe: And so related to realizing how I worked and what gave me energy, which was in fact, interacting with other people, having some sort of. Product, not product, but deliverable to use a jargon from my current context, to be producing a deliverable maybe every month or every two months that people get value from and give you feedback on and are like, thanks, that was great, or that helps me was something that really appealed to me. 

Joe: And I realized that what, in academia, was something I beat myself up for wasn't actually a broad character flaw. It just meant maybe I was in the wrong spot, because I would always beat myself up over Oh, I've been working all day, it's the evening, my daughter's finally asleep, I have a spare moment, why am I not cracking open the Journal of British Studies? 

Joe: Why am I not running to read some more in my field? Instead, I'm, messing around, doing something else. And I would also beat myself up over just... My productivity and why was I not more productive? Why was I not more passionate about just working alone as a historian? And I realized that the things that do give me energy and the way I did work Maybe it didn't work in academia or it wasn't as beneficial in academia, but in another context, it would be fine so some of it was coming to realize that academia wasn't good for my mental health. 

Joe: I was constantly Critiquing myself for not being passionate enough and not being productive enough. I felt constant guilt that I wasn't doing more. There was no such thing as a vacation, right? You're always taking along the journal articles and the book. And at the end of every, whether it be winter break or summer vacation, at the end of every vacation was a feeling of dread of ah, I didn't get as much. 

Joe: I've been looking forward to the summer for so long, right? For that whole year, looking forward to what I'd get done. I didn't get as much done as I was wanting. And just realizing that there might be a healthier space. So going back, some of it was geography, some of it was realizing how I work and that academia wasn't good. 

Joe: I just felt like an imposter and a fraud and a flake all the time. And some of it was also, I mentioned the tank being empty. I think I had been passionate about it, but I just wasn't anymore. And I could admit that to myself. Some of it was wanting to be more mobile. So not just geography, but like wanting more opportunity. 

Joe: It was a weird moment of the 2020 election season and the COVID pandemic and just realizing as a tenure professor, I had nowhere to go. I wasn't a superstar. I wasn't going to be able to move to some other better job in some other better place. I could maybe, with a lucky roll of the dice, move to some sort of equivalent position somewhere or a step down somewhere. 

Joe: But really, I was stuck where I was. And I was looking ahead at this life of, alright, the next 35 years here in Waco, Texas. If I could design my life from scratch, would it look like what my life is now? And the answer was no. So I feel like I'm probably even forgetting some of the things. I also wanted to make more money though I was very comfortable in Waco, but just realizing again, that feeling of Oh, I couldn't go have a life somewhere else. 

Joe: And so all of that led to this feeling of kind of claustrophobia and being trapped and not in a very good mental health space. And I found myself dreaming I would love to get a job on the West Coast for a global company so maybe I could move internationally, maybe not, I don't, but I just wanted to have that door open to me. 

Joe: But I wanted to live on the West Coast, I wanted to live near family, and I wanted to make more money. And I wanted to just do something new. That's a very, it was like a very multi faceted, there was no one thing, but it all led to this moment of me pulling the trigger and starting to truly explore. 

Matt: And, that's so interesting to hear. And, so you were a couple, was it a couple years into your associate professor appointment? That's right. And so what was the process like of searching for the next thing?  

Joe: I didn't go about it the way I would advise people to do. Now I would... I didn't really know what coffee chats were Now I would have done more informational interviews and talked to more people, but instead I was just trying to Google and find things. 

Joe: There were also fewer discussions about leaving academia online when I started, because I first started having some of these thoughts 2017, 2018, and there just wasn't much out there, and I chalked it up to, Oh, I'm just like in the post tenure blues which happens to everyone. But in 2020 there was more. 

Joe: I felt like more resources. I didn't explore enough, but I talked to a program manager at Google who does consulting for academics and wanting to leave, and she. in our conversation said you should look at instructional design. So I didn't explore all the pathways I should have. I just took the first pathway I found that clicked. 

Joe: There was a few other things that were suggested to me and I looked at instructional design and I realized oh, this is close enough that I can pick up this skill set and some of the work that instructional designers do overlaps enough with my own kind of side interests and things I tinker with that I think I could move into this space quickly and successfully. 

Joe: And this is a ticket out now and so that's, that first COVID summer of 2020, I did I made my goal to, to see if I could get out of academia and I saw that there were tech companies hiring instructional designers and so that's what I went for maybe I should have I probably, I could have done a longer series of explorations, but, sometimes what I do advise people is, Go through that early exploration phase, talk to more people than I did, find out about more roles than I did, but at a certain point, just pick something that's good enough, because it's not your forever job. 

Joe: It's gonna be your job where you grow for the next year or two. And you'll learn more about yourself and what you should be doing. In that next role and and that I was fortunate because I wasn't necessarily strategically thinking that when I did it but I found instructional design, I then did do some networking and one particular, he was a freelance instructional designer who was putting out free content about how to become an instructional designer just writing articles on his webpage and making some YouTube videos. 

Joe: And we connected and he became, we became friends and he really became my mentor. Since that time, I actually posted about this recently on LinkedIn. Since that time he stopped being a freelancer and does nothing but help people break into instructional design. So at the time he was working with me. 

Joe: There's a couple other people he was working with who landed good jobs, like one at Sephora, one at at other tech companies. And he realized, oh, I could make this a thing. So he now does that full time, and I've made the jump. But I found the right person to give me feedback and critiques, and that really accelerated my progress out. 

Joe: And I started looking to, seriously looking to leave academia. In May of 2020, and shortly before Thanksgiving that year, I accepted my job.  

Matt: You, would you say you applied for six months?  

Joe: No. I, oh, okay. I focused on building the, building myself into a competitive candidate. I did send out, early on the consultant I talked to said, just Apply. 

Joe: Apply to something and you'll see that you don't get the job and it doesn't matter because in academia We tend to oh my gosh People are gonna know I applied and like they'll be laughing at me at conferences when they think about how they rejected me or you Know I'll be like blacklisted or whatever We're out here it's like nobody cares Nobody nobody cares. 

Joe: Just apply, and you'll see it's painless. So I'd done a couple, I'd done that application, and I once or twice just threw out an application to see if I got any nibbles, but I didn't seriously begin applying until late September or October. So in the meantime, I had read in the field I was targeting, and made sure I was, like, conversant in the theory and the language of the field. 

Joe: Bye. Created a portfolio that's important in instructional design, and I'd learned all the tools necessary because there's particular, they're not hard to learn, you just have to spend time with them, tools that instructional designers use to make e learning and so I'd learned those tools, and I built a portfolio, and then I spent some time working on my resume, and then when I had all of the pieces I got, feedback from that mentor, he said, you're ready, apply apply to those jobs that, That big tech company you keep talking about. 

Joe: And so I did and one of those, I think I sent out about 12 applications in that round. Seven to the, seven or eight to the tech company that hired me. All of those applications went nowhere except for one. So I wouldn't, now I want to warn anyone listening, don't spend so much time waiting until you're a perfect candidate and you may not have the. 

Joe: I did as a professor where I could wait and choose my moment when I felt like I was really competitive. So I applied before I really felt like I was ready, but I had spent a bunch of time getting ready when I applied.  

Matt: That makes sense. So where to go next. So I think one of the things that's been on my mind recently that dovetails well with this conversation. 

Matt: Is that my list are the listenership for this podcast is pretty split between we've got the physical sciences folks, we've got some social science folks, and we've got some humanities folks. And 1 thing I often hear from the humanities folks is that there's no place for me in industry. What would your response be to a statement like that? 

Joe: My response is that it's not true. There is a place for you in industry. I've met many people. with humanities backgrounds in industry. Of course, since my fields have been instructional design and UX, that's where I have been meeting them, but I've found them elsewhere. We have skill sets and abilities that are incredibly valued in industry. 

Joe: We don't always have those direct one to one industry Bye. obvious other side of the coin from, I'm saying that poorly, from what we're doing in academia. There's no applied history or at least not on the surface, and so what we have to do is do a little bit more reinvention, do a little bit more networking, do a little bit more exploration. 

Joe: It's true, we have to take a different road into industry, it can Be a little bit more zigzagging. You can have a little bit more serendipity, I think. I've used that word a couple of times. But it doesn't mean that there isn't a place for us. And when we get into industry, we do well because lo and behold, we're smart, hard workers who know how to get things done and bring fresh insights and are competent. 

Joe: Academia often teaches us the opposite makes us feel the opposite but it's not true. There just has to be a bit more exploration work, I think, ahead of time, and a bit more there's I've heard the, on a couple different podcasts and articles, this phrase of it let's see, let's make sure I say the phrase right, of Expanding or increasing the surface area of your lock. 

Joe: By talking to more people, by picking up more skill sets, by doing more exploration, not necessarily by just shotgunning applications out. Sending out 500 applications instead of 400 applications is just gonna waste more of your time. That's not what I mean by increasing the surf, like your luck surface area, but instead by as I was saying, networking and talking to people and exploring and putting yourself out there so that you can discover more doors or encounter more doors to walk through, I think is what we have to do as. 

Joe: People in the humanities and then alongside of that we have to figure out ways to demonstrate that we can do the basic work of the next job. And what I mean by that is portfolios is one way. If you're, if you target a field, look for, Oh, here's a basic portfolio that people who at least get good jobs in this field have. 

Joe: That's actually great because you'll feel like, Oh, I don't have that. I don't have that skill set. I don't have projects to show. But in fact, you can build that on your own. It takes time. It's hard. But that then becomes the thing that opens the door. So for instructional design, I couldn't have just applied as professor to say Hey, big tech company, you should have me do your training for new tech employees. 

Joe: It would have been like, no thanks. But I had a portfolio that showed I could do the daily grunt work of churning out e learning courses, an articulate storyline is the name of the program, and that I had good design sense, and I understood the like technical underside of the tool, I could work with variables, I could design a learning experience that looked slick and looked corporate. 

Joe: And then alongside that in the portfolio, I had paragraphs talking about my method. It showed I was using the language of the field. And that then, oh, this guy can come in and do the basic work. Then suddenly my academic experience went from weird to interesting. Oh, we could hire someone who can do this basic work. 

Joe: And, oh, he's got a PhD. And what? Oh, he's got I wasn't leading with I've published a book. But suddenly those other things that are irrelevant or intangible become tangible and interesting. If you can prove you can do the basic work. So the same thing for UX research, right? 

Joe: Can you find and create your own research projects in your current role, in your current spot? So for me, it was. Already in industry for someone in academia, there's tons of UX research that could be done for the library system. Think about, or for any of the like academic systems that we as academics have to use for entering grades, for getting access to resources for all of that world of stuff is this sort of. 

Joe: Complicated machinery that causes pain and annoyance and lack of productivity for scholars. There's tons of work that can be done there, and it might not be real work in that you're impacting the product. But you could be doing user research on it, talking to fellow professors or graduate students. 

Joe: Or maybe you could actually be partnering with the library system to say Hey, I'm gonna talk to and record, let's record 12 undergraduates using your like resource page. Let's give them some basic tasks. Find this article, do x, y, z. Let's see how they navigate what you set up. You've got all those opportunities where you are, and creating those examples you can talk about is something that we have to do in the humanities. 

Joe: Oftentimes, because we can't simply stroll in and say yeah, as part of my PhD research, I did usability studies in a lab. Some people have done that. We haven't, right? So you have to create those opportunities.  

Matt: Yeah. So I want to be mindful of time. We're reaching the end of our conversation. 

Matt: But looking back on what you said, I feel like there are two two kind of buckets to pull from. There's the mindset of, as PhDs, or specifically humanities PhDs, we do have skills that are valuable to industry. It's just about identifying those and being able to, Not only translate, but demonstrate. 

Matt: And then the practical of not just shotgunning out a bunch of job applications, but, networking, putting yourself out there, making connections. Building a portfolio and then when you're ready making that step into applying. Yeah,  

Joe: and it's Yes, when you're ready, but part of the process is figuring out what ready looks like I think that's one of the most difficult things coming from the humanities. 

Joe: What rules are out there? And how would I make myself competitive for them? And I know networking doesn't sound fun to a lot of people and to a lot of academics, and it may not be, like, in the wheelhouse of many people who don't feel like that's something they're comfortable with doing. But whatever way that exploration is for you there's lots of live webinars that get streamed, and you're there in a semi anonymous audience, and you can connect with people afterwards on LinkedIn. 

Joe: There's... There's other ways to just start to get your toe in the water. But doing that will start to give you feedback will give you, you'll begin to get the information of what would I need to be able to get this job? Or to get a job like this? What are the gaps I need to fill? 

Joe: What are the skills I need to demonstrate? So the process is, yeah, like waiting until you're ready, but also figuring out what ready looks like. Because job ads will list a lot of things, but in fact, there'll be a couple key pieces. One of my, I've given this advice multiple times on LinkedIn, so apologies to repeat, but one of, one of the pieces of advice I'd like to give is when you have identified a field or type of work you're interested in and you're beginning to talk to people in that field, Ask them, not, am I ready, or can you give me a job, or I'm good enough, right? 

Joe: Instead be asking, what would I need to do next to become more competitive for this field? And you'll get that feedback of oh you need to be able to demonstrate that you can do this method. Or, oh you need to be able to demonstrate you can use this tool. Oh, you need to be able to demonstrate. 

Joe: And at a certain point in doing that, You'll hear, Oh you've got like all of the pieces, but you really, you just maybe need a little bit of experience or you just need to find the right, person to talk to. And then there'll be this moment of it flips of, Oh, I think you're ready for this role. 

Joe: You just need to find the right one. And that's when you know you're close. And you probably should already be applying a little bit before that. That was a very long derail from what you were saying of the two.  

Matt: No, that was great. That was great. Okay, so final, I'll say final question, might not actually be the literal final question. 

Matt: I sometimes sense, and I have also had this attitude, I sometimes sense an attitude of maybe resistance towards learning something new or doing free work to show, to prove that I can do something. Let's say most grad students are probably not that way, but for the small amount or for the small part of us that feels that way, even if most of us don't feel that way how did you do your own work on that attitude? 

Matt: And then what would you say for others?  

Joe: I think maybe for me I had to do less work on this because that I just didn't assume anyone would give me a job without having to do a lot of reinvention. Hey, I wrote a book on early 19th century religious tract distributors. Yeah, look at the value I can bring you immediately. But I would say, that's true, but you need to lean into one of our superpowers as academics, which is learning. 

Joe: We are expert learners, and it's true. You've learned a lot, you've got a lot, you've put a lot in, you should be recognized for all that work. Wouldn't that be nice if you could just be handed a job? But the fact of the matter is you can learn, and you can learn new things, and showing you can learn new things is one of the things that will get you. 

Joe: Second, I would say that's, I guess this probably isn't very helpful advice. It's yep, we've got that, maybe that sense of pride or that sense of exhaustion, right? Cause we've been so exploited doing free labor for cheap. So doing Oh, doing more side projects for free on top of all my other stuff in the evening, more free work. 

Joe: Yep. I get it. But put yourself here being bringing in some UX research thinking. Think about the user, think about their needs. The hiring manager isn't here to recognize your credentials. The hiring manager isn't here to make you feel good. The hiring manager has work that needs to be done. 

Joe: And it's causing them pain that someone is not doing it. And what they're looking for is someone who can walk in and do the work. So it's not that they think little of your degree. It's not that they have disdain for you or academia. It's that they need to see you can do the work that they need you to do. 

Joe: So if you're in a field where your academic training sufficiently does that, then you're right. Don't run out and pick up extra stuff. But if you're in a field where no, where hiring managers aren't going to look at your current. resume and say, ah, this person can come in and do the work that I need done. 

Joe: And that, my team ever since the last person left, or since our team is our demand for my team's resources has been growing, like we haven't been able to do it and it's causing us all stress and we're falling behind. We need someone to come in and help us. You need to show that you're that person. 

Joe: You need to meet. It's not just about your own need for feeling good about yourself and having proved yourself, previously it's about the, your future team's needs. And your future hiring manager's needs which are to do the work.  

Matt: Yeah, I Think that's a great note to end on joe. Thank you so much for coming on the show reminder to everyone check out joe on linkedin i'll have a link in the description of the podcast or YouTube. 

Matt: You can scroll down and click that. Joe posts. You post daily, right? Feels like daily.  

Joe: Wow. See, there's the power of the internet. I post once or twice a week. Really? You don't actually have to put yourself out there very much because so few people interact and create content and engage. Just posting once or twice a week makes me a regular for some people in their feed. 

Matt: I see you as a daily poster. Joe posts at least once a week great content on how to go from academia to industry on LinkedIn. You can also check out his website for extra stuff there. Joe, any final thoughts? For the listeners at home,  

Joe: if you have survived graduate school, either most of it or all of it, you have already done a harder thing than getting the job in industry. 

Joe: You have already done a harder thing than succeeding in industry. It doesn't mean it's easy. It doesn't mean it's going to happen immediately, but you have already overcome bigger challenges. Then the challenge facing you right now to find something else, to escape, to reinvent yourself, to survive being forced out, whatever your situation in academia is, you've already overcome bigger challenges than what's ahead of you. 

Matt: Awesome words. Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was great to talk to you.