It’s not news to say that much of academic work is invisible.
The parts that are visible – publications, classroom teaching – are often thought to be all there is, which gives rise not only to the “you only work 9 hours a week and no summers” accusations from well-meaning family members but also to the political attacks on higher ed we’re seeing in places like Texas.
All the rest of the work is invisible. Planning classes. Grading papers. Doing the research to design courses. The long hours in the library or the lab, gathering the materials that make for those publications. The long hours of writing and revising. Advising. Serving on promotion and tenure committees. Serving on governance committees. Supporting student organizations. Orienting new students and new teachers. Directing student research.
It’s this very invisibility of so much academic work that makes it so hard for academics to grok that we have a lot of skills and a lot of experience to offer.
Silence and invisibility
I’ve said this before, but so many of the skills academics have are invisible because they aren’t explicitly taught or rewarded. Because they aren’t explicitly taught or rewarded, we often don’t realize we have them.
Public speaking, for instance. Pretty much everyone you come into contact with in higher ed teaches, for obvious reasons. It’s what we do. But that means that everyone around you has experience with and various levels of skill in public speaking.
Leave academia, though, and you’ll find out soon enough that there are plenty of very smart people who can’t really present information orally. They don’t know how to organize information for listening, they don’t know how to extrapolate from notes instead of reading, and they don’t know how to make eye contact and use their voices.
If you’ve been in the classroom, you’ve had to learn that skill even if no one taught it to you.
Or how about research? Again, if you’ve been in graduate school, earning a PhD, you’ve done research. That means you know how to frame a question. You know how to search for relevant information. You know how to put information together to create the current landscape. You know how to identify what we don’t know. You know how to fill in a gap in the knowledge. You know how to present that research.
This is not something most people know how to do. However painful your dissertation was or is, you’ve got a skill there that’s not all that common.
But let’s not leave out service
Since service is always the poor country cousin to research and teaching, we tend to ignore it as something distasteful that has to get done.
There’s a lot of experience and skills that get obscured by that distaste.
Collaboration. Setting mutual goals. Program management and evaluation. Program design. Event planning and management. Personnel management. Long-term planning. Grant-writing. Reporting. Negotiation.
And you know what? There are even academics who actually like service work. They like the collaboration, they like the negotiation, they like the debate. They like planning and programs and people.
Recognize what you have
I’m reminded of these truths over and over when I work with people to craft their Master Resumes. They come to me telling me they don’t have any experience or skills, and then I get their filled-out forms all full of this committee and that project and wouldn’t you know it? There are a lot of skills and experiences built in there.
You, too, have a lot of skills and experiences that can serve you inside or outside of academia.
The challenge is finding them behind our assumptions and our fears and our doubts.
Uncovering our skills and experiences – not to mention our penchants and our wants – is one of the things the Choosing Your Career Consciously course does. If you’ve thought about leaving academia but aren’t sure what else you could do, or if you simply want to consider academia as one possible choice among others, consider joining our next round, which begins October 6. You can click here to find out more.
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