If there’s something I hear over and over again in working with people leaving academia, it’s that people don’t think they have any skills: “Nobody needs a Dickens scholar / expert in German philosophy / curriculum specialist outside of academia!”
In all of these cases, people are confusing what they know with what they know how to do.
What you know how to do
In the course of gaining all that expert knowledge, you learned a lot of things no one explicitly taught you.
Research. Writing. Project management. Public speaking. Teaching. Assessment. Curriculum design. Training. Time management. Argument. Program assessment. Curriculum review. Employee evaluation. Editing. Grant writing. Proposal writing. Hiring.
And that’s only if you’ve never done anything else outside of academia — no hobbies, no previous jobs, no nothing.
These skills are valuable
When you’re in academia, you’re surrounded by people who have, by and large, the exact same skills you do. So they don’t seem like skills that matter, because everyone can do them.
Except everyone can’t. People outside of academia often have no experience in or comfort with public speaking. They can’t break down information and figure out how to sequence and scaffold it in order to help someone else understand or learn it. They can’t assess writing quickly and comprehensively.
You have a lot to offer a prospective employer, but it isn’t your content knowledge. It’s all the stuff you did to gain that content knowledge, and all the stuff you did to support yourself and serve the university while gaining that content knowledge.
It all counts.
This is a great point to make… However, I think I one of the reasons people are afraid to leave academia is that many still love the content that they have developed expertise in, even if they have grown to hate the academic environment. I remember when I first thought about non-academic work, I feared that my higher intellectual faculties just wouldn’t engage if I was, say, developing training modules or writing web content on some corporate topic that ultimately bored me. I imagined a lifetime of faking interest in order to get a paycheck.
So, for me, a necessary aspect of the transition away from academia has been realizing that there are other things, other content areas that I would like to be engaged in and developing knowledge about. Its not just about recognizing and translating/transferring my skills — its about finding a new field that excites me. Only this time, I will engage the new content area in a more pragmatic, results-oriented way, rather than just seeking to study it. I’m ready to learn-by-doing.
Related to this: Julie, I appreciated in your 90 min teleclass, the discussion of “5 misunderstandings” and, esp., your comments on how academics should realize that there is legitimate knowledge-making outside of academia: really a key point! We former-academics do have to change ourselves to leave academia — and that’s not a bad thing.