Silencing self-criticism & redefining ‘success’: maintaining mental health in your post-PhD job hunt

• Why would employers outside of academia ever want to hire me?
• Why does trying to navigate the application process make me feel… stupid?
• Should I feel like a failure?!?

Found yourself contemplating these questions when looking to job hunt beyond academia? Then read on…

A Tale of Two Mindsets

Fawzi Abou-Chahine’s opens his book A Jobseeker’s Diary with the confession that he never anticipated ever developing a mental health issue. Fast forward to months of fruitless job hunting post-postdoc and his mental health started to deteriorate, leading to low self-confidence and depression.

Hearing Fawzi talk about his struggles chimes with my memories of the time when I sobbed into my martini glass in a Birmingham cocktail bar convinced that no-one would employ me. I couldn’t afford an income ‘gap’ so had been applying for jobs with 5 months of PhD funding left, was getting nowhere, and was increasingly anxious.

So, I thought it was high time that I dedicated a post to acknowledging, validating, and attempting to answer back to some common mental health struggles of the post-PhD job hunt, with Fawzi’s help. I subtitle this post ‘A Tale of Two Mindsets’, as we’ll be looking at two common challenges of finding work beyond academia:

1. Default self-criticism; and
2. Narrow definitions of ‘success’.

Self criticism

When I catch up with Fawzi, he’s dealing with quite a different test to the the post-PhD job hunt; courtesy of his eleven-month-old daughter, there’s been a household spill requiring urgent attention. Spill covered, I ask what Fawzi felt most impacted his mental health after deciding that he’d have to look beyond academia for his next job.

The main thing that went round in my head was “why would anyone outside academia ever want to hire me?’

Ok, I hear you. Go on…

I think it’s part of an academic mindset, Fawzi explains. Part of academic training is to be hypercritical, to question everything, and that includes your work and yourself. Hence, you can become very dismissive of your own capabilities.

I found myself nodding in agreement here. When critique, ‘feedback’ (using the term loosely) and peer review dominate your working life, it’s easy to focus on what we’re doing WRONG rather than what we’re good at. Fawzi continues: This self-criticism, for me, led to a very pedantic mindset which made the ‘mechanics’ of applying for jobs difficult too.

We thought about this for a while, and how approaching the job market beyond academia is like going from a world where details and definitions really matter, to a confusing world of grey areas, where ‘essential requirements’ may not be so ‘essential’ after all. Here are some of the ways we found this mindset might impact mental health in the post-PhD job hunt:

• Difficulties filling in applications, and working out what the questions ‘really mean.’ Fawzi recalled one example: a form asked me to ‘describe my latest employment.’ Technically I didn’t have a job at the time, and I agonised for so long over whether I could describe my PREVIOUS employment instead. Of course now I know that using your most recent experience is totally fine – all they want to know is that you have relevant skills – but I didn’t know that at the time. It’s a great point… academia demands that we define our terms precisely, so when the meaning of even one word is unclear, this can cause anxiety.

• ‘Essential and desirable’ criteria. We can feel really disparaged if we don’t tick all the essential and desirable criteria for a job. Back then, I didn’t realise that this was a ‘wish-list’ rather than a set of absolutes, Fawzi explains. And in fairness… why would we realise this…? Essential means essential, right? Well… not necessarily. This really made me think… perhaps on this blog I should look at putting together a glossary maybe, demystifying the language of the job hunt…?!

CONCLUSION:

In conclusion, Fawzi summed up how the pedantic academic mindset, coupled with the obscure phrasing of job adverts, can sabotage our mental health: It makes you feel stupid, he said. You’ve just completed the highest degree possible… but you don’t know how to write an application form. It’s disheartening. So, what can we do about it?

Well, I’m very reluctant to put this on you, post-PhD job hunter. After all, job hunting beyond academia IS learning a whole new language and mindset, there’s no denying that. But… being open to learning this new language and mindset will inevitably help. Most importantly says Fawzi, familiarise yourself with an application process first so you know what it’s asking for. For example, spending hours on a CV only to find that an employer isn’t asking for a CV is only going to leave you feeling more frustrated.

I’d add to that… ASK FOR HELP. Not knowing how to do these applications isn’t a shameful thing. So whether it’s your institution’s careers service, someone you know who landed a job in industry, Fawzi’s book, or folks in a friendly group like Alt-Ac Careers UK… reach out.

And are there ways we can prevent this self-criticism from talking us out of going for jobs?

I don’t think I fully did, Fawzi admits. But what I did do was start to talk to a broader range of people: especially people working in industry. And I found that these people had a different perspective to me.

Crucially, these conversations showed Fawzi that people outside of academia weren’t holding him up to the hypercritical standards to which he was holding himself. In fact, many people in industry were actually crying out for smart, skilled people who could help their teams to achieve their goals. Where my hypercritical mindset said ‘why go for the job when there’s no chance you’ll get it,’ their more open approach said ‘why not try? If you go for it, you might get it… but if you don’t, then you definitely won’t!’

So, at the very least be reassured… the likelihood is that if you’re having these thoughts, then you’re holding yourself up to far more critical standards than many potential employers are. Don’t believe me? Chat to some people, test the hypothesis.

Defining ‘success’

Acknowledging that hindsight is a place of great privilege, the next thing I wanted to know from Fawzi was what he’d most like to go back in time to tell himself when he was at lowest point with job hunting. His response was pretty profound:

It would be that you set your own conditions for what success and failure are.

It’s such an important point, but in certain working cultures can be so difficult to recognise. In academia for example, getting a postdoc might be touted as ‘success,’ or making Professor might be held as the ultimate accomplishment. What’s difficult to recognise is that this only represents one single value system. When it comes down to it, getting a postdoc or making Professor are actually quite arbitrary measures of success.

Fawzi acknowledges that giving himself permission to take ownership of what ‘success’ meant for him would have relieved a lot of pressure in his post-PhD job hunt: The societal pressure of academia said ‘you can’t possibly leave a PhD and then not do something academic’ he explains. But now, it seems silly to consider that to be the only form of success. Success could be commercialising your research, it could be something else… as long as you’re enjoying it.

Perhaps this is a sign I’ve been in Higher Education for too long, but all this talk of ‘measures of success’ got me thinking about… METRICS. We hear so much about how metrics can negatively impact academic environments: Wellcome’s 2020 report What Researchers Think About the Culture They Work In shows that only 14% of respondents said they felt that current metrics had a positive impact on research culture. So, if ill-aligned metrics are ‘destroying’ research culture… are they also destroying our self-confidence and our mental health when it comes to job hunting beyond academia…??

Metrics are systems of measurement. Within any kind of system or institution, metrics often define not only what needs to be measured (and how), but they also determine what is rewarded within that system or institution (no surprises, that’s usually the things that the metrics are measuring). If this system we’ve been in for so long only rewards certain outcomes (like getting a postdoc or making professor), then is it any wonder that we struggle to conceive of other metrics beyond these? As Fawzi highlights, realising this and taking ownership over it could make a huge mental difference to our job hunt.

So, when it comes to defining ‘success’ in your job hunt:

• What are YOUR internal metrics?
• Where are they coming from?
• Do you consciously notice them?
• Are they useful to you…? Are they serving you and your own values… or are they serving someone or something else that never gave you a say in what mattered in the first place?

So, what does success mean to you? Is it using your skills and expertise for societal impact? Is it contributing to cause in your community? Is it organising your life so you can be at home to sit down and eat dinner with your kids every weeknight? Whatever your definition of success… it’s yours, it’s important… and it’s 120% valid to work towards.