A few weeks ago, I talked about the four things I say most often to academics who are considering leaving.

1. You have more skills than you think.
2. The best way to find out what jobs actually exist in the world is to ask people what they do and what they like about it.
3. Of course you’re exhausted and grieving, and that is as it should be.
4. Step one is always abundant, luxurious self-care, as much as you can possibly stand.

Last week, I talked about the skills you’ve probably not thought about. Today I want to talk about figuring out what jobs are actually out there.

There are more than you think

There’s a reason “what are you going to major in?” and “what are you going to do with that?” are such classic questions. Our cultural narrative around careers still believes the Boomer-era model of degree > entry level job in field > up the ladder > retirement is what should happen.

The problem is that most jobs these days don’t fit into a linear progression, much less emerge from a single degree.

Here are some jobs I know about, via colleagues and friends and lots of conversations:

• Helping a company figure out how to use SEO
• Managing a marketing roll-out
• Coordinating a project that has regular and irregular outputs
• Designing the straps for backpacks
• Supporting the brand on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
• Creating and managing a two-year-long training program
• Helping companies understand unconscious bias and how to combat it

There’s not a single one of them I could trace back to a single college degree.

Because higher education is cut into domains of knowledge, and because one of the functions of higher education is to prepare people for a certain segment of the working world, it makes sense that we implicitly assume that the one maps onto the other.

That’s only made worse because there are some fields that work that way. They tend to be the fields that require credentialing (think accounting, nursing, and law), and they tend to be the kinds of jobs we know about because they’re consumer-facing.

We don’t see all of the many jobs that don’t work that way, because they aren’t the jobs we come into contact with as consumers.

You don’t know what you don’t know

It can be really disheartening to think about leaving academia when it seems like there are no interesting jobs out there, because you don’t want to teach high school and you don’t know what else you could do.

So whether you’ve decided to leave or you’re still contemplating it, it’s helpful to start building an understanding of all of the various opportunities out there.

One way to do that is to browse job boards. This isn’t my favorite method, because it tends to get overwhelming and because it’s sometimes hard to see beneath the job title and description to figure out what the job actually does.

Another is to identify some companies you might be interested in and haunt their careers pages. This gives you insight into the company itself and the various roles people play.

My favorite method is to ask people about their work. Now, I’m an introvert, and small talk makes me want to pluck my eyeballs out with a dull spoon, but you’d be surprised how happy people are to talk about their work. The conversation goes beyond small talk really quickly when you bring curious questions to the table.

• Oh, interesting. What do you like about it?
• Huh, you know, I don’t know very much about X. What’s a typical day like?
• So what is the company’s overall mission? How does your job fit into that?
• Are most of the people you work with doing [same job] or are they doing different things? What are they doing?

The goal is to start internalizing the reality that most of the jobs out there aren’t ones you can name right now. As you start learning about jobs, you’ll also start recognizing your own reactions to them — Oh, that part sounds kind of interesting, but ick, that other part would make me want to cry. This is really important information. This gives you a starting point for identifying which kinds of jobs you want to learn more about and which you want to avoid.

The holiday season is perfect for this

Most of us will, within the next few weeks, end up at a party of some holiday description. Maybe it’s a spouse’s company’s holiday party. Maybe it’s a church potluck. Maybe it’s a PTA end-of-semester party. Maybe your mother-in-law throws an annual Boxing Day house party.

These are perfect situations for having a series of job conversations: You’re probably having to talk to some strangers, and you’re in a situation where it’s relatively easy to talk for 10 minutes and then excuse yourself.

But don’t assume you only need to talk to strangers. Your sister’s best friend, your brother-in-law, your son’s friend’s mother — each of these people probably has a lot to say about their own work and the work that happens around them.

Now, if you run into a Negative Nelly, just smile and thank them and change the subject. The last thing you need is a dissertation on why something sucks. Just know that most of the people you’ll talk to will have some good things to say about what they do.

At this stage, you aren’t asking anyone for a job. You aren’t asking anyone for introductions to someone else. You’re just gathering information you can use to figure out what else might be out there for you.

I posted recently about the four things I say over and over to leaving academics.

1. You have more skills than you think.
2. The best way to find out what jobs actually exist in the world is to ask people what they do and what they like about it.
3. Of course you’re exhausted and grieving, and that is as it should be.
4. Step one is always abundant, luxurious self-care, as much as you can possibly stand.

Today I want to focus on the first one, because no matter what you do in academia, you’re probably ignoring a good 90% of your skills.

There are good reasons academics can’t identify their skills

In most workplaces, you work with a variety of people who all do different things. Those different jobs throw skills into relief. You know that if you really want to figure out how to use Excel well, you go to Laura, but if you want data interpretation, Mark is your best bet. You can see those different skills around you all the time, and you have a sense of what people come to you for.

Well, in academia, pretty much everyone around you is doing exactly the same job. Everyone is teaching. Everyone is doing research. Everyone is mentoring students. Everyone is serving on committees. The differences tend to show up in the content — what you’re teaching, what you’re researching, who you’re mentoring, what committees you’re serving on. It’s then really easy to conflate content with skills. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone tell me that the only thing they know how to do is be a Dickens scholar / historian of 14th century Britain / expert on Schopenhauer, and no one outside of academia needs those things.

Even if you can decouple content and skills, everyone around you is practicing pretty much the same skills you are, which means they don’t seem all that noteworthy. It’s easy to assume “everyone can do this — they don’t need me” when, in fact, everyone around you IS doing this. But academia is a rarefied little bubble, and the skills that are a given in academia are not remotely a given elsewhere.

This was driven home to me when a group of colleagues and I were presenting the results of some work to the leadership team. We had everything in powerpoint, and we were taking turns presenting slides. I happened to go last. Everyone before me read the powerpoint slide out loud, while staring at their paper, then turned it over to the next person. Having spent 11 years teaching, I riffed off of the powerpoint slide, assuming the leadership could read just fine, putting the results into context, drawing conclusions, etc. All the things you do. But leaving that meeting, I was suddenly surrounded by colleagues asking me in a wondering tone of voice how I learned to do that.

Now friends, I was never more than a competent teacher. It was not all Dead Poet’s Society up in my classroom. But what was competent, good-enough teaching in academia was “holy shit, that was amazing!” when I was surrounded by people who did not have a decade’s worth of experience teaching.

So when I say that academics frequently ignore the vast majority of their skills, I understand why. It makes sense. But if you’re considering leaving, you’ve got to dig in deeper.

How to identify all those glorious skills of yours

In order to figure out what skills you aren’t aware you have, you need to write down each and every thing you do for a given domain.

Let’s take teaching as one example. Here are all the pieces that come to mind immediately:

• Write a syllabus.
• Write a lecture.
• Present a lecture.
• Facilitate discussion.
• Design assignments.
• Design assessments.
• Work one-on-one with students.
• Evaluate assignments and assessments.
• Norm evaluations with other teachers.
• Research new topics/ideas/things in your given subject.
• Review textbook options.
• Calculate partial and full grades.
• Provide feedback.

Once you have this list, you dig into each bullet point.

What does it take to write a lecture? You have to break content down into lecture-sized chunks. You have to do research to fill out the chunk. You have to organize information within the lecture. You have to find examples and illustrations to help students grasp the ideas. You have to frame the information so students know where it fits into the broader arc of the semester/topic. You have to provide signposts in the lecture itself so students don’t get lost in the mass of information. Ideally you’re going to find ways to break up the lecture and get the students engaged.

Once you’re at this point, you’re starting to see all the skills in play. Being able to organize information into logical progressions is a skill. Being able to scaffold information is a skill. Being able to research is a skill. Hell, knowing how to learn is a skill.

For most academics who have trouble figuring out what their skills are, it’s because these skills are largely soft skills.

Soft skills are hard to hold on to

Soft skills are all of those capabilities that you can’t teach in a step-by-step way. Hard skills — knowing how to use a given software program, typing, math, knowing how to use a particular piece of equipment, etc. — are fairly obvious. Soft skills, on the other hand, are easy to dismiss because they can’t be easily broken down and because we falsely assume everyone is skilled that way.

Please, please believe me when I say that everyone does not have these skills. You’ve spent enough time teaching to know that while everyone can practice and improve, only a small group of people are really good at communicating, or problem-solving, or getting buy-in, or organizing people, or shepherding a project to completion. But these skills are foundational in the knowledge economy, and you’ve got them.

Here are some of the roles I’ve had and my friends have had in a medium-sized company over the past seven years:

• Editor of a particular kind of content: making sure the content was clear, had the right tone, and didn’t say anything ridiculous.
• Instructional designer and teacher: creating an internal training program and supervising the process and the trainees.
• Communications liaison to external writers: identifying what they needed to know and translating from grumpy colleagues into “most likely to get results.”
• Program designer and manager: figuring out how to use a particular resource and setting up the systems and processes to do it.
• Payments and systems manager: keeping on top of details, building routines, and solving the problems that show up.
• Internal communications expert: creating a repeatable communications plan that meets company goals and employee needs/desires.
• Marketing coordinator: getting all the many moving parts into line so a marketing campaign can happen smoothly.
• Managing editor: coordinating a stable of editors working on different kind of content and rethinking what content should happen and when.

Now, some of these may be entirely unappealing to you. But I doubt there’s a single one of these you couldn’t do.

Most of the jobs in the knowledge economy don’t flow from discrete degrees and linear careers. They’re messy, they’re connected to multiple other goals/teams/roles, and they’re based on a problem that needs to be solved right here and now.

And you can do them.