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.

One of the things that gets in the way of our moving full-heartedly to another job or career is our own lack of imagination. We just can’t imagine what else we could do.

Part of it stems from the likelihood that we’re surrounded by other academics, who also have no idea what else they might do.

Part of it stems from patterns many families have about what kinds of work you do. (Mine is all accountants and engineers and medical professionals. And me.)

And part of it stems from primarily knowing about non-academic jobs from the point of view of the consumer.

Butcher, baker, candlestick maker

As consumers, we interact with a broad cross-section of jobs: sales people, nurses, doctors, lawyers, therapists, social workers, teachers, bus drivers, traffic officers. So when we’re thinking about what else we could do, our minds tend to turn towards these.

We never think about – because we might not even know about – all the other jobs that have nothing to do with consumers directly.

Project management. Marketing. Scrum master. Human resources. Product buyer. Business strategist. Fundraiser. Program designer. Corporate trainer. Doggie daycare owner. Backpack designer. Gear tester. Forensic accountant. Golf course manager. Hospital ethics committee. Consultant. And thousands of others you may never have even heard of.

You want to think more broadly

Most of the jobs we think of easily require more schooling – much more schooling – before we could even begin to move into them. The rest of them don’t require a degree, but also probably don’t feel like careers. (They may be great careers if you love that work, actually, but we don’t assume they can be careers.)

At this point, more schooling might sound comforting and familiar, but let’s face it. At some point, we all have to leave school. Why not now?

Most of the jobs in the for-profit and non-profit world don’t necessarily need a particular degree to get you in the door. Relevant experience, yes, but you can get that any number of ways.

That means your options are a lot broader when you’re looking outside of the narrow band of professions that need a graduate degree. And it means that, right now, just as you are, you’ve got a lot of possibilities.

Go out and find them

Talk to people. Ask what they do. Ask what happens at the company or the organization they work for. Ask what kind of jobs exist there. Ask what their friends do.

Look up companies that sound interesting. Read their websites. See if you can find a list of staff or departments. Extrapolate.

Browse the Occupational Outlook Handbook to immerse yourself in the full range of what’s out there. Notice what makes you sit up and take notice. Notice what makes you get a little bit more excited.

Doing this kind of work is crucial to finding the Next Right Step in your life and career. It’s why Jo Van Every and I teach our Choosing Your Career Consciously course.

But we also teach it because we know just how brilliant, inventive, and curious academics are. We know just how valuable those skills are outside of academia, and we know that the world needs your particular perspective and smarts.

So if you need the support of a community as you work through finding that Next Right Step, consider joining our next round, starting October 6.

The Monday Roundup hasn’t gone away, but I’m going to do it monthly rather than weekly. Catch it on October 3^rd!

Mark Silver, who is both a long-time Sufi practitioner and an entrepreneur, makes the argument that instead of focusing on jobs or careers, it’s helpful to focus on what he calls your Jewel – that essence of what you bring to the world.

So long as you’re living from your Jewel, he says, there are any number of jobs or careers that you’ll find satisfying.

So what is this Jewel anyway?

In Silver’s definition, our Jewels are essential qualities. (For him, they’re essential qualities of the divine working through us, but we don’t need to go there in this conversation unless you want to.)

More importantly, our Jewel is something that emanates from us, that other people get from their interactions with us. It’s something central to who we are, rather than what we think or believe.

Here are a few qualities that might underlie your Jewel:

Strength Love Safety Radiance Beauty

Widsom Insight Joy Peace

So how is this helpful again?

We tend to focus on jobs and careers because they’re obvious – we have job titles, we work for companies or institutions, we have responses when someone asks us at a party what we do.

But those jobs and careers have likely come out of something else, a felt sense of something that was meaningful to you.

One question I often ask people is what drew them to academia in the first place, because in the answer lies something very important: what this person wanted, deep down, from this experience.

Another, related, question I often ask people is how they want to change the world. (Yeah, I’m fun at parties.) Of all the injustices and problems in the world, what are the ones you can’t let go of, the ones that rub against you? (This doesn’t mean they have to be Mother Teresa-level problems.)

The meaning at the center

What you wanted to get from academia and the ways you want to change the world are both central to the ways you are your own unique person, related to but different from your family and your fellow academic travelers.

Understanding both of those will tell you something about where you might want to look next.

If you were drawn to academia because you wanted to explore the edges of our knowledge and you want desperately to cure illness, your next step is likely to be different from the person who was drawn to academia because they wanted to immerse themselves in conversation that they found interesting and who wants the world to be more beautiful.

So ask yourself these two questions to help get at the chewy center of your own life and self.

Why was I drawn to academia in the first place? And how do I want to remake the world?