“Just do it” ought to be the motto, not of a shoe company, but of our culture.We’re supposed to get over it, push ourselves outside our comfort zone, challenge ourselves, take no prisoners. We’re supposed to listen to our guts, be brave, take chances.
At the same time, we’re supposed to get in touch with our feelings, honor our boundaries, be true to ourselves.
It’s enough to make a girl crazy.
But what if…
This particular back and forth always led me into a back and forth.
When was I supposed to believe my gut and my feelings, and when was I supposed to recognize that I was holding myself back out of anxiety? When was I supposed to push and when was I supposed to accede?
Was I conflict averse, or was this not important to me? Did I really not want to do this or was I just afraid of possibly failing?
Invariably, I’d end up pushing myself because the “what ifs” were so much more regretful on the “not pushing” side. What if it turned out I was just scared and I didn’t pursue my dream?
Often enough, I found myself on the other side of something I really wish I hadn’t done, something that, in retrospect, was so obviously wrong for me. The journey was still worth it, but oh, what I could have saved myself.
Back to you, dear reader
I bring this up because it’s something I see all the time in my clients. They’re procrastinating writing that job application, or they’re not sure whether to try the academic job search one more time or bag it altogether, or they can’t decide if this possible career they’re considering is a good idea or a very, very bad one.
This is totally normal. Whenever we’re faced with a decision, especially a big decision, these brains we’ve trained to look at all sides … look at all sides and find them all valid.
That’s great in academic research, and not so great when you’re trying to decide where to leap next on your grand life adventure.
How to get out of the paralysis
When you’re in that kind of back-and-forth, pay attention to the difference between fear and aversion.
In a situation that isn’t actually life-threatening, fear is a sign of beliefs we’re believing — and that might not be true. (If the situation is actually dangerous to your existence, you won’t be thinking. You’ll be acting.)
What if I don’t prepare well enough and I embarrass myself? What if I’m so unqualified that they laugh at my application? What if I decide to leave academia and the job market turns around and I could have stayed if I had just waited a little longer?
Each of those anxieties is based on some deeper belief. Embarrassing myself is the end of the world. Not doing it perfectly will cause shame. I should be able to predict the future.
Given our cultural and academic backgrounds, it makes total sense that we’d have these beliefs and the attendant anxieties. It’s just that they aren’t based in reality. And if they aren’t based in reality, then they’re things we’d do well to work with and untangle and trace back to their origins and disprove.
I still don’t think “just do it” is all that effective, because what we do straightjacketed by fear is unlikely to be our best work. But it makes sense to gently work on dislodging the fear so you can move forward.
Aversion, on the other hand, needs to be respected.
Have you ever had really bad food poisoning or a really bad case of the flu, and suddenly you can’t eat whatever it was you ate right before your guts turned inside out? When you encounter that food again, you probably have a bodily sense of near-nausea, a complete lack of desire for it, even though your rational mind knows that this food is perfectly fine this time.
That’s aversion. When you experience that about a choice you’re considering, it’s your being’s way of saying NO. It’s your essential you-ness trying to say this is a bad idea, no matter how good it looks on paper.
We often override the no with those logical brains, because we don’t trust our bodies, because we can’t figure out how to explain WHY we don’t want to do whatever it is, because we’re afraid of getting judged for it. (Notice all of those are fears that can be untangled.)
But we generally regret it when we push on through aversion.
You have to get quiet to tell the difference
In the moment, it can be hard to tell fear from aversion. Our minds are a tangle of thoughts, our bodies are tense with anxiety, and we don’t really know up from down.
When you’re in that situation, you’ve got to stop. Just stop trying to make the decision. Get in touch with your insides however you best do that. Meditate and quiet your mind, go for a run, write in your journal — whatever will get you connected to yourself.
Then notice what’s coming up. Is it a whole set of stories about you and this decision? Is it a feeling you can’t shake but can’t explain? If it’s the former, start untangling them. If it’s the latter, pay attention.
When we’re surrounded by other people’s judgments and expectations, it’s even more important to get quiet, because they make an added layer of fear and anxiety. But they don’t tell you what you should do, only what someone else thinks you should do.
You know, better than anyone else ever could, what the right answer is in this moment. You know, better than anyone else, whether what you’re feeling is fear or aversion.
Trust yourself. I do.
There’s been a theme in my conversations with clients lately. They’re at a crossroads in their life and career. Something has shifted for them. They’re trying to figure out what to do next.
Everyone around them is making suggestions for that next, suggestions that seem to make a lot of sense. These suggestions are direct outgrowths of degrees my clients already have, or interests they’ve already expressed. These loved ones are even offering to put money behind their suggestions.
My clients want to like these suggestions. They think they should like these suggestions. But really, the idea of carrying out these suggestions make them want to lie down on the floor with the dust bunnies and never get up.
Oh, stability. How we long for the idea of you.
All of these practical suggestions have certain things in common.
- They’re full-time jobs with reasonable benefits packages.
- They’re in existing career fields that have a certain level of professionalism or prestige. They’re “good” careers, in other words.
- They’re coming from a place of fear.
If my clients were jumping up and down at the very idea of getting to do this work that’s being suggested to them, I would be jumping up and down with them. Yay! Work you want to do! Paycheck! Yee-haw!
But my clients are not jumping up and down. They come to me because they’re afraid that the fact that they aren’t jumping up and down means that they’re ungrateful or entitled or lazy or impractical, and they want to talk it out with someone who has no stake in the outcome of their choices. (I don’t claim to be objective. I’m firmly on the side of my clients.)
As we talk, it becomes clear that there is something they’re passionate about, something they dream about doing, but it doesn’t fit a neat career path, and they don’t know how to turn it into a job, and they certainly don’t know how to explain it to the people who love them, who only want what’s best for them, dammit.
And so they’re stuck. They think they should want the practical option, but they almost never do.
Yes, paying the rent is important
It’s not that practical things don’t matter.
I’ve not talked to one client who wasn’t interested in paying the rent or buying groceries, and a fair number of clients have been more than happy to get a part-time or full-time “just for now” job to ease the pressure of financial necessity while they figure out what they really want to do and how to make it happen.
But let’s be honest here about work and how it fits into our life. We have this story that we work to pay the bills, and that that’s good enough.
If the work is reasonably challenging (i.e., not boring), pays well, with good coworkers, maybe that is good enough. It’s not boring, it’s not conflictual, it’s not undervaluing you, and it gives you the freedom to pursue the things you really care about in your free time. (Assuming there is any. A 40 hour a week job takes up about 35% of our waking weekly hours, and that doesn’t account for the commute, self-care like eating and showering, or life maintenance like laundry.)
But most of us got into academia precisely because that kind of job wasn’t something we wanted. We didn’t want good enough. We wanted vocation. We wanted engagement. We wanted to follow our own intellectual curiosity.
And that means that to get out of academia, a good enough job (which is different from the “for now” job) may not cut it. We may need that same sense of vocation, engagement, and curiosity in a different venue.
It just doesn’t look practical
Many of the clients in this predicament have a cluster of things they want to do.
Maybe they love teaching and want to keep 2 courses a semester as an adjunct. Maybe they just had twins and recognized that there’s nothing out there to help new moms of twins figure out how to, for example, sleep train two kids at the same time. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be a writer and they thought academia would scratch that itch and it so didn’t. Maybe they love making and selling things on Etsy. Maybe they’re passionate about ethics in adoption and want to help train prospective parents.
They get stuck because they can’t figure out how to make any one of them into a full-time, traditional job. And they get frustrated because they don’t necessarily want to choose only one.
The reality is that you don’t have to.
The goal is not a traditional full-time job, necessarily. The goal is doing meaningful work that helps you meet your family’s financial needs and goals. A traditional full-time job is one way to meet that goal. But there are others.
Let me say that again. The goal is doing meaningful work that helps you meet your family’s financial needs and goals.
Once you shift away from assuming a traditional job to recognizing that a traditional job is only one way to meet the real goal, you open yourself up to other possibilities.
Maybe it’s working two or three part-time, flexible, at-home gigs. Maybe it’s finding a traditional job that meets your needs. Maybe it’s moving back and forth between traditional jobs and non-traditional options.
Yes, part-time work can be low-paid and casual, the way adjuncting often is in academia. But it can also be incredibly lucractive and flexible, depending on your skills, your clients, and your goals.
Like everything else, work varies.
And so do you. You are a unique expression of life. What might work for someone else doesn’t have to work for you. You only have to figure out what you care about and where that might take you.
I say “only” like it’s easy, but it isn’t easy. If you want support figuring out what you bring to the table, check out Choosing Your Career Consciously, a course designed to help you figure out what else you could do. A new course starts in March.
When the eight months that marked finishing the dissertation, defending the dissertation, and being on the academic job market simultaneously finally ended with an accepted offer, all I could do was exhale. Well, exhale and lay on the couch blearily watching television, sick as a dog.
Once I recovered, I was in touch with the committee who hired me, letting them know when I planned to arrive in town (a month and a half before my contract started) and that I would get started program-planning once I got settled in.
I immediately received an email in return from one particular committee member, castigating me for working ahead of my contract and announcing (with plenty of cc:s), that clearly I wasn’t up on the most recent Marxist theory. (Thank goodness Marxist theory wasn’t my area of expertise.)
The rest of the committee, to their credit, swooped in to blunt the damage of that email and make me feel welcome.
The problem is, he had a point
One of the problems of academia is that it has no boundaries. The vaunted flexibility that means we don’t have to be in an office between 9 and 5 every day also means there’s no container for our work.
Despite media and political claims to the contrary, academics work far more than 40 hours a week. In fact, you could argue that academics work all the damn time. They work evenings. They work weekends. They work holidays. There’s always more work to be done, more tasks that need to be squeezed in between classes and research and advising and all of the other commitments that constitute academic work at every level.
And yet despite working around the clock, on vacations, on holidays, (American) academics are typically paid for the nine months of the year that map onto the fall and spring semesters’ teaching. (Yes, some schools pay the 9 months’ salary out in 12 months, but that’s not the same as a 12 month salary.)
And that’s only if you’ve been lucky enough to get a tenure-track or post-doc position – adjuncts get paid by the course. The logic of the academic wage is made most explicit right there.
Forget overtime. There’s an immense amount of unpaid labor built in to the academic system under the rubric of vocation. You’re supposed to love it so much that you do it even though you aren’t getting paid. One might even argue that you’re structurally forced to do it, because it’s all that unpaid labor that gets you tenure or a promotion or a slim chance at a job that 400 other people are also applying for.
The unpaid labor is what is structurally rewarded. The less-valued labor is paid for.
This is some messed-up shit.
Straight to burnout
The most successful academics I know said no. They said no to committee work that didn’t serve them and wasn’t in line with what their colleagues were doing. They said no to being too flexible with teaching schedules. They said no to working all their waking hours.
And yet, the job market being what it is, graduate students are urged to take on more, do more, publish more, teach more, serve more, all in the name of trying to beat out peers to win that job that has, let’s face it, something like 400:1 odds.
Better departments protect assistant professors so they can achieve tenure, but the downsizing of the faculty means that assistant professors, more and more, are being burdened with too much work to do the work that gets them tenure.
This is unsustainable. It’s unsustainable personally, and its unsustainable institutionally.
I hear story after story of people who are burnt out, who have no enthusiasm or energy left for the work that they love or at least like, because they’ve had no time to recharge.
This does not make for happiness, and it’s unlikely to get better.
There are other options
There are options other than working crazy hours for not enough pay.
Set reasonable time boundaries, and triage your work. You know as well as I do that some work actually matters, and some doesn’t. Spend the bulk of your best time on the work that matters. Do the rest as well as you can given the time remaining.
Benchmark yourself against your colleagues. If you’re doing more than they are, either in teaching or in service, let some things go.
Know that there are non-academic options that really are 9-5, which leaves an unbelievable amount of time free for things that aren’t work. And they pay all year round, too.
Value your own time, work, and expertise. They’re worth a lot.
Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.
To a certain extent, a resume is a description of the things you’ve done. All the relevant jobs, volunteer positions, and even hobbies get summarized and bullet-pointed in order to prove your qualifications for a particular position.
Seen this way, a resume can be demoralizing. There are gaps. Not enough bullet points. Not enough evidence.
But there’s another way to see it.
Think strategically
Think about the job you’d really love to have. Think about what skills and qualifications you would need in order to land that job.
Leaving aside “going back to school and getting another degree,” what would your resume (not someone else’s, or your resume from a different, parallel life, but YOUR resume) need in order to demonstrate those skills and qualifications?
If you don’t already know how it would need to be different, an informational interview would be invaluable here. A knowledgeable insider would be able to describe all the ways people have come to this job, and thus all the ways you might do it.
And thus you have a plan.
Look for the shortest distance between two points
We academics generally default to “I need another degree” for any job we actually want. That’s because we came up in a system that was all about the right degree for the job.
But the rest of the world mostly doesn’t work that way. They want to see A degree, because it demonstrates things like persistence and the ability to finish tasks. But more than a degree, they want to see evidence that you can do what they need you to do.
That’s where sympathetic friends come in. Buy a bottle or two of wine, open a bag of something snacky, and invite your most inventive, positive, supportive friends over. Share with them what you have and what you need. Then ask for their help in brainstorming all the possible ways you could gain the skills and experience you need to get your foot in the door.
That’s it – your foot in the door. You don’t have to become an expert. You don’t have to experience every aspect of the job. You only need to get enough so that you can argue for your own ability to do this job successfully.
From all of the brainstorming you and your friends come up with, pick the one that takes the least amount of time and energy. For example, when I wanted to leave academia, I figured grant writing might be a good place for me. So I found a local non-profit that wanted to apply for a grant but didn’t have the time to do the work. I volunteered over spring break, write them a grant, and voila! One grant-writing reference and an example I could show prospective employers.
It may be that you’ll eventually need to also take on the next-least-amount of time and energy task. That’s okay. But always start with the shortest distance between you and your goal.
Don’t just describe — plan
As you’re thinking about things you can do, think about how they’ll translate to lines on your resume. Think about the lines you want on your resume. Then find a way to get them.
Your resume can be so much more than a summary. If you choose to use it as such, it’s a strategic document you can use to plan for that future you want to inhabit. And isn’t that more empowering?
Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.
Because we’ve spent so many years inside academia, when we decide it’s time to leave, we often run up against one teensy tiny little problem.
The people we’re applying with have no idea what going to graduate school and getting a PhD entails.
More often than not, they think that you’ve simply been taking classes for the last seven years.
Not even close
It means they don’t know that you’ve designed whole classes.
It means they don’t know that you can speak in front of groups as large as 100 or more.
It means they don’t know that you can facilitate conversations around challenging topics.
It means they don’t know that you can design research projects.
It means they don’t know that you can write – and win – grant proposals.
It means they don’t know that you can sustain multi-year projects.
It means they don’t know that you can solve problems through training programs.
It means they don’t know that you can organize whole conferences.
It means they don’t know that you can communicate in several different registers, as befits the situation.
It means they don’t know that you can problem-solve.
It means they don’t know that you can perform complex research.
That’s your job
They’re never going to know those things unless you tell them, because they can’t read your mind.
But if you can articulate these skills in terms of what they find valuable and important to the work they do every day, they understand what an asset you’d be to the organization.
And that’s the kind of thing that gets you an interview.
Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.
When you’re sitting down to write a resume, it’s hard enough to remember every job you’ve ever worked and everything you did in each one, the better to pick out the relevant information for whatever you’re applying for. But the hardest part – and the most important – is turning those responsibilities into accomplishments.
Responsibilities are not enough
It’s important to start with what you were responsible for. Those job duties are going to give a reader a sense of the scope of your position, and if you’re applying to a company big enough to run resumes through a key word search, those job duties will, properly described, light up with keywords.
But responsibilities alone aren’t going to convince someone to take you to the next stage of the application process, because nothing in a list of responsibilities will tell the reviewer if 1) you actually did what you were supposed to do, and 2) were any good at doing those things.
This is where accomplishments come in
Given all of your responsibilities, what did you get done? Did you streamline the technical process so website downtime dropped 10%? Did you win a $2m grant to research personality type at work? Did you grow the program from 5 minors to 100?
These are the kinds of things that tell a reviewer all about your strengths and skills – both your skills in the hard and your skills in the soft. If you successfully came up with, proposed, funded, and put on a brand new conference that has since become annual, then the reviewer knows you’re a visionary and you can make things happen. They know you can fundraise and make good arguments and coordinate lots of logistics.
And while you can tell them these things outright, it’s always helpful when a reviewer can see how all of your tasks added up to something important. That helps them envision what you might be able to do in this workplace. And that’s the kind of response that gets you an interview.
Working on applying to non-academic jobs? I have resume-writing superpowers that I’d love to use on your behalf.
Turning a life lived in academia into something else can feel overwhelming. But there are strategies that work, and more resources than you can begin to imagine. Want to see all of the ones I’ve talked about so far? Click here for the job-search archives.
What’s harder than “hard”?
Writing job applications, especially cover letters, is painful and hard precisely because we have to do the one thing most of us hate doing: Showing other people how awesome we are.
The resume, while bringing along dozens of difficult questions (do I include my publications? What about that job I had doing interviews for a researcher? How do I explain any gaps?) feels, even when we list accomplishments, somehow objective. (Which is not to say it doesn’t make people feel shy, because it does.)
But the cover letter is a whole other kettle of fish, because it’s not just presenting information. It’s explaining why that information should matter to the reader, the person who is trying to solve a problem.
The cover letter is personal
While no two resumes are ever going to be exactly alike, they’re also not often going to be hugely dissimilar. To a certain extent, the world of work can sound a lot alike from job to job, company to company.
But no two sets of work experiences will ever be even that much alike, because despite common job titles and common job descriptions, everyone is going to have different experiences to draw on.
You’ll talk about the time you were working at the homeless shelter and got to learn how to negotiate with people who maybe weren’t all that easy to negotiate with. You’ll talk about the research you did for your dissertation and what you learned and what it enables you to do. You’ll talk about how you managed to invent a program that solved a problem no one even realized was causing them pain.
Even more so than the resume, in the cover letter you’re setting out your life, the parts that make you different than the next person.
Fear of judgment, table for one
It’s so hard and scary because it’s us putting ourselves on the line. It’s us opening ourselves up for judgment. It’s us saying, hey, I’ve got all this stuff that would be great for you, and potentially hearing back, well, actually, no.
And the reality is, we aren’t going to get to the next stage of every job we apply for. That’s just reality. But the reality that we aren’t always going to get an interview for every application doesn’t mean anything other than we don’t always move forward.
It doesn’t mean that you aren’t a good candidate.
It doesn’t mean that you won’t get a different, often better job.
It doesn’t mean that you won’t succeed.
But we fear that it does mean those things and worse. And so we contract – we write short cover letters with no detail. We leave out key bits of the resume because we forget them altogether. All of which makes it more likely that … we won’t move on to the next stage.
Hard and scary is okay
Transitions are scary. And a job transition, especially when it feels like a do-or-die (or at least a do-or-figure-out-how-to-borrow-more-money) situation, is super duper plus scary.
As much as possible, tell yourself that it’s okay that it feels scary. That it’s a function of the situation, not your qualifications or your worth or your hireability. Let yourself be scared – it’s scary. But don’t let yourself not write the very best job application you can.
If you’d like help with your job applications, I offer a resume and cover letter writing service. Click here to check it out.
 Turning a life lived in academia into something else can feel overwhelming. But there are strategies that work, and more resources than you can begin to imagine. Want to see all of the ones I’ve talked about so far? Click here for the job-search archives.
Hiring equals solving a problem
No one hires anyone just because hiring is a good and nice thing for the economy. Companies hire people because something needs to happen to meet some goal they have and it can’t happen with the existing skills or headcount.
But more than that, they want to find someone they actually want to work with, and that’s at least as important. You can have all the skills in the world, but if the reader can’t imagine you fitting in with the company or with the team, then you won’t be getting an interview.
So you have to do two things
First, you have to explain why your particular portfolio of skills and experiences solves their main problem: getting something done. As I talked about in this post, your cover letter should be making an explicit argument.
But second, you have to give the reader the impression that you’re a good fit for the company, and that’s a more subtle task.
You accomplish it by mirroring the tone, formality, and culture of the company as best you can.
Clues to what that will be like
Your first clue is going to be in the job application itself. What kind of language is it written in? What kind of tone or formality does it have? I once answered a job ad that said the company was looking for the human equivalent of a spork or a Prius – and you can bet your bippy that my cover letter was irreverent and playful at the same time that it explained why my crazy worklife would be a plus for them.
Your second clue will come from the company’s website. What does it sound like? How does it present itself relative to other companies doing what it’s doing?
And you’ll find other clues by searching online for “[company name] + culture,” trolling sites like Glassdoor.com, and asking around.
Don’t cross the line
That being said, it’s always better to err on the side of less crazy, more formal. I’ve read cover letters that boasted about the writer’s ability to chug a keg, and while that particular workplace wasn’t offended by beer drinking, it also wasn’t exactly the job description.
It’s also important to make sure that, as you’re extolling your skills and the ways you could help the company in question, you stay firmly on the side of modesty and good cheer. I’ve read cover letters that told us we needed the writer because we were clueless schmucks, and that doesn’t exactly make the reader think you’d be a great addition to the 40 hours a week he or she spends in the office.
(Also? If you tell us how many typos you found on our website, don’t spell your last name two different ways in the application, i.e., misspelling your own name at least once. Just sayin’.)
You are a wonderful applicant, and you can present yourself as a wonderful applicant without going overboard.
This is where friends and family come in
Having friendly, open readers who are willing to tell it to you like it is can make the difference between an okay cover letter and a great one. And it can also make the difference between a cover letter with serious tone problems and one that gets the job done.
Whatever else it’s doing, the cover letter should show you as confident without being arrogant, friendly without being unprofessional, and knowledgeable without being a know-it-all. We know the difference when we read it, but it’s hard to parse out how the line gets crossed.
So swap cover letter readings with friends. Find a relative who knows enough and loves you enough not to just tell you you’re fabulous (although you are). Put it away and read it through after a day or two. Read it out loud. Do whatever you have to do to get an accurate reading of the tone, and then do it again until you get it to a place you’re comfortable with.
The cover letter is your emissary into the application, your chance to frame all of your experience and skills and talents. Don’t waste it.
If you’d like help with your job applications, I offer a resume and cover letter writing service. Click here to check it out.
 Turning a life lived in academia into something else can feel overwhelming. But there are strategies that work, and more resources than you can begin to imagine. Want to see all of the ones I’ve talked about so far? Click here for the job-search archives.
It’s easier than you think
Cover letters, structurally, are much simpler than they appear.
They appear complicated because they’re terrifying, because we have to talk about ourselves and our strengths to a complete stranger, which is right up there with public speaking in the modern annals of fears.
We’ll talk about the emotional component of cover letters another day, but for now, let’s talk about what they should look like.
You know how to do this
The cover letter is the only place I’ve ever seen the infamous 5-paragraph essay in the wild. The good news is that you know how to write 5-paragraph essays.
The first paragraph has an introduction, a way into the subject, and contains a thesis. Paragraphs 2 through 4 have topic sentences that support the thesis and evidence that supports the topic sentences. The last paragraph ties it all together and restates the thesis.
That means that the first paragraph of the cover letter tells people what you’re applying for and why you would rock this job. Paragraphs 2 through 4 elaborate on why you would rock this job, complete with evidence drawn from your past experience. (Mostly the evidence is narrative, but it can sometimes be quantitative.) The final paragraph restates the qualities you’d bring to this job, thanks them for their time, and makes it clear how you can be contacted.
That’s it.
Yeah, I know it’s not quite that simple
There are two places people get stuck: explaining why they’d be good at this job and providing the evidence to persuade someone of the truth of that statement.
The first is solved by doing some brainstorming, freewriting, mindmapping, or anything else that takes you away from the computer screen (and thus the scary cover letter) to answer the following question: Why do I think I can do this job?
This question is not meant to be spoken in monster-tones. That is, it’s not an accusation, and it’s not sarcastic. Given that you’re applying for this job, the question is simply curious – why do you think you could do it? What would you bring to this job? When you’ve got a few reasons, you’ve got a thesis.
The second is solved by drawing on the details that surely ran through your mind when you solved for the thesis. Anything that came with the phrase “like the time that” should be written down and at least put into the first draft.
If all of those incidents have escaped your brain, go back and brainstorm, freewrite, or mindmap each bit of your thesis. How do you know you’ve got good communication skills? How do you know you’re an excellent teacher? Tell mini-stories. Put them in your draft.
A few last cover letter tips
You will, of course, revise and polish your cover letter, but getting the argument and the evidence right is the crucial first step.
As you revise and polish, keep these things in mind:
- Make sure you write it as a business letter, complete with address blocks.
- You’re trying to persuade people that they need you – so focus on how you’re helping them rather than on how much you’d like the job or how great this job would be for you.
- If you can address it to a human being, do.
- Unless it’s really, really obvious, don’t assume a gender of the addressee, and whatever you do, don’t address it to “Dear Sir.”
- Match the tone of your cover letter to the corporate tone of the company you’re applying to. If they’re very formal, be formal. If they’re more laid back, loosen up a little while still being professional.
Above all, keep breathing.
If you’d like help with your job applications, I offer a resume and cover letter writing service. Click here to check it out.
One of the big differences between CVs and resumes is that CVs are expected to be a complete documentation of everything you’ve ever done in academia, while resumes are expected to be a carefully selected and shaped collection of the relevant bits of your work history.
That’s not to say that recruiters or hiring managers won’t look askance at a resume that has obvious and unexplained holes in that history, but it is to say that I’ve seen perfectly good 25-page CVs, and if your resume goes over two, well, there’s probably a problem.
External memory is your friend
One of the great things about the CV is that it serves as a kind of external memory, capturing every conference presentation, publication, and course you’ve ever done time with. Many academics build “update CV” into their end-of-semester routines, because it helps keeps everything tidy for the promotion files.
And really, thank heavens for external memories, because without them I certainly wouldn’t remember that I once gave a conference presentation on John Steinbeck. (I would still be asking myself WHY I did such a thing, but that’s another story.)
When people use resumes instead of CVs, however, that external memory gets lost. People tend to update the last one they used, which means that they’re restricted to whatever selective information they included last time they applied for jobs. That’s great if they’re applying to the next job up the career ladder, but it shoots them in the foot if they’re trying to change careers.
Starting anew requires you to think outside your box
Whenever we’ve been in a career for a while, our assumptions about “what counts” get shaped by that career. I’ve seen a lot of academics write resumes that include a publication section but leave out that office job they did the summer between the MA and the PhD. There are very few jobs out there that care about your publications, but they very much might care that you spent your internship semester creating a database from scratch.
In order to think outside of those assumptions, we’ve got to get everything on the table. And that’s where the Master Resume comes in.
What is a master resume, anyway?
A master resume is like the CV of the non-academic world. It’s a resume that includes absolutely every job you’ve ever held and all the things you did and accomplishments you achieved in that job, whether you think right now they’ll be relevant or not. It includes all your volunteer gigs. It includes all your training. And it puts it in the format of a resume.
Your master resume is likely to be long — much longer than anything you’ll send out. But that’s okay. It isn’t designed to be something you send out. It’s designed to be the raw material you draw from when it’s time to write a resume for a particular job or career.
When everything is set out there in black and white, it’s much easier to recognize that you’ve got some relevant skills and experiences. And it’s also easier to pull the pieces together to make the argument that you’ve got something to offer your prospective employer.
A step by step guide to writing a master resume
Writing a master resume isn’t hard, but it can be time-consuming, so give your self plenty of space.
- Start by writing down every job you’ve ever been paid for, from the 14-year-old bus-boy job or babysitting practice on up. Include every academic gig you’ve ever done.
- For each of them, write down where you did it (geographic location), the dates you held that job, your official job title, and the company’s name.
- For each of them, write down everything you did, everything you accomplished, and everything that told you you had done a good job. (Did the boss want to promote you? Did you get asked to do things outside your official job description?)
- Go back and add numbers as much as possible in your lists of what you did. How many people did you do payroll for? How much money were you responsible for bringing in when you worked retail? How many people did you supervise?
- Write down all of your volunteer and service work, including conferences you put on or managed, events you threw, etc.
- Write down the location, dates, and titles of anything in that list.
- Write down everything you did, everything you accomplished, and everything that told you you had done well.
- Write down every award you’ve gotten from college on up.
- Write down every school you attended, the degrees you earned, and the dates you earned them. (Don’t bother with high school.)
- Type all of this up in a basic resume format.
- Ask a curious and close-reading friend to read it over and ask you questions that might pull out more details.
Once you’ve used this master resume to write the targeted resume and cover letter that gets you in the door of a new job, come back and update it! Put a note in your calendar to update it quarterly, because in many jobs, your duties and your accomplishments will change rapidly, and you don’t want to lose anything.
Master resumes in short
Basically, master resumes are the foundation upon which any good job search stands, because they collect all of the bits of information you might be able to use to make a case for yourself — and you want your case to be as strong as possible.
So it’s worth starting there and creating a really comprehensive document for yourself. You never know when working as a temp in an insurance company will come in handy.
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