Hey folks, and welcome to the Grad School Sucks podcast. My name is Dr. Matt Carlson, and this is the show for grad students and academics who want to start an industry career. So recently I held a webinar on how to do just that, how to transition to your first industry job, and I had a great time. Over a hundred people registered, tons of great questions from the folks who showed up.
And I want to actually provide you with about a 10 minute clip from that webinar. It's the section where I went over 6 steps to getting your first industry job. So that's what we'll be covering for the show today. But before we get there, I want to let you know about my next upcoming webinar. I'm going to zoom into developing an industry resume.
So taking your academic CV and developing an industry resume based off of that. It'll be more of a workshop style webinar. So I expect people to show up with their CVs and get ready to get to work making their first industry resume. I think it's going to be. A great time and I hope to see you there. If you'd like to sign up for that, you can do so at a link in the description of this episode.
Whether you're on YouTube or listening on the podcast, you can just scroll down and register and hey, it's free. So I hope to see you there. All right, now let's jump into the episode. At this point in the webinar, I've gone over basically my first job search in industry, which was a failed search. I submitted about 200.
A little bit more than 200 applications to industry jobs. And frankly, I did a lot of things wrong. I go over some of it in the clip and some of it I go over later, which may not be shown in this part of the webinar, but essentially I created a really bad resume. Which you don't have to, if you come to the webinar.
I applied for a ton of different kinds of job titles. Many of which I was just clearly not qualified for. And there were a handful of other things that I just didn't do right. And what I should have done right was follow these six steps that I'm about to go over. So, let's jump into the episode and I will see you on the other side.
And my experience was most recruiters just didn't care. And a lot of it was my fault. I didn't frame myself the right way. I didn't really prepare. I wasn't focused in my job search and I didn't get anything. So eventually I dusted myself off and I figured out I got to do this the right way. And so this is what I've come to.
As the right way to do a job search after grad school. First one is identify possible career paths. So you can do this a couple different ways. You could simply Google your PhD and add jobs for this PhD. You could ask your professor, or you could have a career coach or a social media person tell you what kind of a job to get.
I don't recommend really any of those things. I recommend digging into the dirt. Going into LinkedIn. Finding PhDs from your field, finding out what jobs they have, starting to do informational interviews with them. Again, I'll give you my guide for that at the end. And then making informed career decisions with that data.
Here's how to find industry PhDs on LinkedIn. Simply go to the search bar, and you search PhD in whatever your field is. You look at the people tab, and you scroll. Most people on LinkedIn with a PhD are going to be students or academics. You ignore them. Probably 3 in 10. Are going to have what you're looking for.
And that's an industry job. If you're from a small field like mine, you're probably gonna want to search adjacent fields. So for me, that was developmental psych, family psych, and I will say there is a limit on the amount of free search results you can get on LinkedIn. And that is one reason that you could get LinkedIn premium.
It's like 60 bucks a month right now. It's not cheap. Uh, but if you're on the job market, you may find that it's beneficial. Once you've started figuring out what kind of jobs those PhDs get, you're going to start building your professional network. And you can do this again in a couple ways. You can go to in person events, you can hand out business cards, or you could create content on social media to attract employers to you.
I don't do those things, and I don't recommend you do those things. I recommend you do informational interviews. To do an informational interview, you find a PhD, which you've already done at this point. You connect with them on LinkedIn and you ask them to meet. I recommend video chat. And then you talk with them.
You really only have to chat for about 15 or 20 minutes to really answer the questions you're going to want to answer. And those questions that you want to ask break into three categories, and that's Tell me about your job. How did you get your job? How can someone like me get a similar job at the end?
I recommend you ask them if you can get a copy of their resume that you can use To make your own and you ask them based on our conversation today Is there anyone else you think I should talk to? Typically, people will think of at least one person, if not two or other three. And that's the snowball that you use to build your network moving forward.
If you've not done any networking, here's a brief pitch on why you should do it. Networking gives you real life information on potential jobs. And you use this to make your ultimate decision on what to pursue. It also gives you example resumes that you can use to model from your own. And it expands your circle That increases the chance of potentially getting a job opening in the future.
And if you want, we can talk more about, uh, the specifics of that in the Q and A at the end. So step number three, three out of six, we're cruising through this. You select a career path. And I say a career path. I think it's very important to pick one and be focused and not just shotgun to like five or six different job types.
There's no perfect job, of course, but good enough is what you're aiming for. You just want this first job. So, salary, work life balance, career satisfaction, those are the big three to be thinking about. I think another great thing to think about is the likelihood of actually getting it. I applied to a lot of jobs that frankly were well out of the scope of my expertise.
And I probably wasn't, it wasn't reasonable that I was applying to those jobs. And if you get two out of three, or frankly even one out of three, it might be worth it. It might be worth it. And if you don't like the first job you get. It's very easy to get another one in industry. And frankly, to go back to my story, this is a key difference for between industry and academia.
And one reason that I'll never go back is that it was impossible for me to move. I couldn't do it. I would have had to take an adjunct position or. Maybe a postdoc, but that would have been competitive. So yeah, you can always get another job in industry. Pardon this brief interruption. I want to take just a second to tell you about something that I've got coming up.
If you've been with me for a long period of time, then you know that I love groups. I actually held a writing group for people trying to finish their dissertations, I believe about two years ago. And if you go back even further, I had my own writing group with my friends back when I was a research scientist and we were all challenging each other to write more and get different publications.
And if you go back even farther into my history, you'll know that I've led... Tons of therapy groups way back when in my previous life as a therapist. And I think there's something really powerful to groups. And for a long time, I've been wanting to figure out how to run a new group with going industry in mind and the whole idea of taking your career to industry.
That time is finally here. I am pleased to announce that I am finally starting my first group called The Industry Social Scientist Boot Camp. This is specifically for social science grad students and academics who want to get their first industry job in the next 12 months. And so this boot camp is made up of a collection of individuals who all have that same goal and will be meeting weekly for 8 weeks.
That'll be starting in mid October and going into early December. Every week that we meet, we'll be covering a different topic. Everything from optimizing your LinkedIn profiles, to fine tuning your resumes, to applying with bullet like accuracy to the exact kinds of jobs that you want to be applying for.
Again, I said this is a small group bootcamp. There's only going to be 10 participants total. And actually... Five have already signed up. Five people who were at the webinar that I did, the one that you're actually listening to right now. So if you are a social science grad student or academic, and you want to get your first industry job in the next 12 months, and you're interested in adding some community, some confidence, and some clarity to your job search, I recommend you check out my bootcamp.
I'll have a link in the description below, and I hope to see you there. Now back to today's episode. Next is creating your materials. So this is when you should be thinking about applying. You're pretty close to applying. You need a resume and a LinkedIn profile, and that's about it. So you're going to start with those example resumes that you've been taking from people or, you know, graciously taking from people after doing informational interviews with them, you're going to use them to develop a template, and then you're going to take 90 percent of the info on your CV.
You're going to throw it away, just release it into the wild. Let it out of your heart. And don't think about it anymore. Those presentations, those volunteer positions, all of that. It just, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter anymore. You're going to take that example layout. It's probably going to be something like skills and tools at the top work experience as a PhD in the middle.
That'll be the biggest section. You want to focus on quantified impact and then education at the bottom. You really want to actually minimize, I think, the physical representation of your education on your resume, because people are going to see PhD at the top. They don't need to see everything about your education typically for an industry resume.
Just to give you an example of the quantified impact. So this comes from my resume. I created 50 plus technical reports, 50 plus numbers. I managed a team of 10 plus researchers, budget of quarter of a million dollars worked with a hundred clients. Then down at the bottom in the third role, let all aspects of five studies.
1, 000 participants, co authored 14 published papers. I even saw an example resume from someone that I loved, that they took, they recorded, they went back and they looked at every class they had taught as a grad student. They looked at the enrollment number, and then they looked at the cost per class that students paid to be in that class, because they were the primary instructor.
And they calculated the value they delivered to the university. in their teaching roles. And it was something like, it was several hundred grand. And that's pretty easy if you've been the instructor for several classes that are at least mid size. Again, think about how to quantify your impact. It gets reviewers attention.
Next, you're going to create a LinkedIn profile. You don't want to reinvent the wheel. You want to emulate those who have gone before you. Most of your LinkedIn is going to be copy and pasting from your resume. I will say there is one exception, and that is the about section. And this is more storytelling oriented.
And I've got an example from a friend of mine, Savannah, she was on the podcast. I think she has a great, she has a great about section. I would show you mine, but I actually don't think mine is very good. She talks a little bit about, in the first paragraph, about what she does now. She's got a lot of keywords, like industry, strategist, fast paced, strategic design.
Things that'll stand out to people in her area. Then, in the middle, she moves into what she's done in the past, doing a little bit more storytelling about where she's coming from. And then at the end, she's got some bullets that people can take away as they're scrolling through her profile. Recruiters.
We'll look at your LinkedIn profile. Frankly, I think many recruiters will look at your LinkedIn profile, maybe a little bit more seriously than your resume these days, and they'll probably spend more time on your LinkedIn profile compared to your resume, assuming they look at both. We're almost done with the six steps.
The next one is bridge gaps and experience, and this one is optional because you might not need to do this. A gap in your experience is simply when you do not have a required qualification for a given job. Something that's actually required, not just stated as required. For example, if you want to be a data analyst and you've never analyzed quantitative data before, that's a gap in experience.
You can address gaps in experience by upskilling. You can read books. You can watch YouTube. You can do online courses. You're a PhD. I guarantee you, you can upskill maybe even better than anyone else in the world. I upskilled with Coursera. I just wanted like a course that told me what to do and walked me through everything.
That's how I learned SQL. Or SQL. I also learned R. And then I made a portfolio project as part of that program. And many people ask me about what kinds of certificates recruiters want to see. And I will tell you, they don't, they don't care. They don't care about any of them. There are very specific fields like key security has like really specific certificate programs.
But for the vast majority of things, they don't care about certificates. A portfolio project will actually tell about your competence. way more than a certificate will. The next is step six. Apply, apply, apply, and continue networking. If you have a resume and there's a job title that you want to aim for, it's time to start applying.
And I recommend you keep track of the number of applications you send out and then compare yourself to the standard and it'll kind of tell you where you're falling. The average Just based on like what I've read online and what, what job experts say is a hundred job applications will give you 10 interviews, which will give you one job offer.
So it's a, you know, order of magnitude or whatever it's called in between each one. And I think particularly if you're. Getting your first industry job or maybe you're changing lanes into a different space, you'll probably have to do maybe more than 100 and that volume does sound crazy, especially when you're coming from the academic world.
But frankly, that mirrors my experience in a lot of ways. Also, while you're applying, you do want to keep networking. This goes back to the second question. Job experts recommend you spend as much time applying as you do networking. And so I think, I think a reasonable frame of mind to be in whenever you get to the place to where you're applying to jobs is to think about.
Three to five applications a day, and that'll probably be about half an hour and one informational interview a day. And that'll also be about half an hour. So that's an hour of job search work a day. And of course you can do more than that if you want. When I was on the job market, I was doing more than that, at least in terms of applying.
But I think that's a good breakdown. And the more connections you make, the more chance you get for referrals. And of course a referral is the easiest way to get a job. And that's it! That's your roadmap to getting your first industry job. Alright folks, that's my show for you today. I hope you enjoyed the six steps that I think it takes to get your first industry job.
If you're interested in signing up for my next webinar on how to make your first industry resume out of your academic CV, then sign up at the link in the description of this episode. And also if you're interested in joining my industry social scientist boot camp, you can also check that out also in the description of this episode.
I'll have a link there. Anyway, thank you so much for listening. I will see you all in two weeks when I come out with our next episode, which will be an interview. See you all then.