‘Your research skills are by no means limited to a particular subject area. You can – and should – apply research skills to the job search itself.’
– Katina Rogers, Putting the Humanities PhD to Work (p.106)
Picture the scene.
It’s a Monday afternoon and you’re having lunch/coffee/PhD moral support chats with a pal. You’re preoccupied because you think you’ve found a connection between a couple of texts that could help you to form a pivotal thesis argument, but you can’t work out if this connection has been identified already.
Your friend looks up from their coffee/tuna sandwich/Instagram scrolling and says ‘Google it. Yep, that’s sure to find you a useful, definitive answer.’
You don’t remember this scenario? Well, that’s probably because… it didn’t happen.
Whacking the research-related questions that are plaguing us into a search engine and trusting it to offer a conclusion isn’t a research methodology. As researchers, we know this. However, after devising robust research designs and sound methodologies within their PhD work, when it comes to researching potential career options, many doctoral researchers’ main strategy is ‘Googling it.’
Career options after PhD? Google it. What jobs can I get with my background? Google it.
In my experience of working with researchers, this Googling often has one of two effects. Either people get a random rag-bag of job adverts and articles that don’t seem relevant to them, so panic thinking that they have few options. Or, they get a barrage of disordered results that feel broad and overwhelming, and hence, yep, more panic.
One of the best ways to avoid this ‘problem-Googling’ is, instead, to switch on your researcher brain. If the career conundrums facing you were research questions, how would you frame them and approach them? To get you started, here are three thesis-related ‘hacks’ that served me well in my PhD days that are transferable to helping you work out your next steps.
1) The ‘master document’
Thesis version: keeping an ‘ideas file‘
As I was reading – be it theory, literary criticism, or the novels I used as case studies – I would note down key quotes and connections that supported my argumentation. This was a way of ‘gathering my evidence’ so I didn’t forget anything that might help me to build my case when I started to write my thesis.
Job hunt version: a ‘master CV’
As well as keeping track of ‘evidence’ for your thesis, keeping track of ‘evidence’ that shows your skills, values, and experience can be a huge help when you come to think about what’s next.
In the push to get experiments finished or to get the thesis written, it’s easy to forget things you’ve done that demonstrate useful qualities, values, and skills. Things outside of your research like work with societies, enterprise challenges and other projects, mentoring, and so on, are easy to overlook. So are the things you just sucked up because you were ‘expected’ to do them. Keeping a working ‘master document’ of everything you’ve done not only helps you to build your bank of skills and evidence; it can also help you to reflect on what you really enjoyed and what that tells you about what you want (and don’t want) from your next job post-PhD.
Warning! I dislike calling this document a ‘master CV’ because a CV is *not* a list of things you’ve done! It’s a marketing document, promoting you to a specific audience according to that audience’s needs. So whilst this master document is useful for keeping track of your achievements and activities, it should not be something that you send out to employers!
2) Using one good example to find others
Thesis version: Using reference lists as ‘databases’
It might seem old fashioned next to today’s AI tools like Scite.Ai and Research Rabbit, but during my PhD (and still now when I do research work) I use reference lists at the end of journal articles to generate ideas for further reading. I almost treat references as a kind of rudimentary algorithm: ‘if you like this, then you might also like these related works.’
If you’re on board with using AI tools to manage your literature searching, then a tool like Research Rabbit can help you do a similar thing more speedily. Identifying one relevant paper can then snowball into building up a more comprehensive picture of existing work in the field and what you need to read next.
Job hunt version: using one company or role idea to find more
This little strategy of growing ideas from a single relevant example is one that you can also translate across to identifying potential future employers or roles.
For example, if you know one company or organisation that aligns with your interests, then find the LinkedIn page for that organisation. On the right hand side is a section called ‘pages people also viewed’: a way to identify other organisations that might do similar things, which could be your next targets to investigate. Alternatively, taking a look at the LinkedIn profiles of people currently working in that organisation to see where they worked before could also throw out similar suggestions. It’s like using LinkedIn as an ‘index’ to help expand your awareness of what’s out there, just as reference lists or AI tools can help you expand your awareness of other work in your field.
3) Reflecting on the ‘why’
Thesis version: Reflecting on your research decisions (for viva prep)
There’s a reason why, in a number of countries, the PhD viva is called a ‘defence.’ You’re expected to ‘defend’ your work: why you chose one methodology or theoretical approach over others, and so on. For me in English Literature, this felt daunting. A lot of the time I didn’t feel like I had a ‘methodology’; I felt like I just focused on certain novels and theories because they ‘made sense.’
In my viva preparation, however, I knew I had to justify the approach I’d taken, so I spent some time reflecting on why I did my research in the way I did it. It was a process of making the unconscious conscious. For example, I didn’t just decide to apply affect theory to the representation of abandoned spaces in contemporary fiction because it felt good. I chose that approach because, after much analysis and consideration, it offered the best account of how spaces could take on their own ‘agency’, whilst also providing a fitting contrast to previous readings of ruins.
Job hunt version: Reflecting on your extra-curricular decisions (for career prep)
It’s not just in your research where you make seemingly unconscious choices that are worth bringing to light. Throughout your PhD, what have you said yes and no to? Have you gladly thrown yourself into some tasks, but actively avoided others? Have you given more energy to some activities over others? Just as there are reasons for choosing certain methods or approaches in your research, there are reasons for these kinds of choices, too.
Perhaps there are fundamental reasons such as having to focus on taking the opportunities that gave you the income to support yourself. Beyond that however, what have you consistently said ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to throughout your PhD experience, and what does this tell you about what really energises you? Identifying what made you say yes to things, or made you take your energy from certain activities, can give you big clues about what you want to be taking up most of your working day post-PhD.
A last word: The trouble with ‘plans’
I hope these three examples start to show how your ‘researcher brain’ can be applied to managing career research and job hunting. To end, here’s a more general reflection on the nature of research and the nature of career ‘plans.’
Ultimately, research is dynamic. The further you get into it, the more you come across new ideas and techniques that might make you adapt your ideas or pose different research questions. Equally, the focus of your research may change because of circumstances beyond your control, be those staffing changes, social/cultural/political changes, a global pandemic (stranger things have happened…), and so on.
Similarly, career ‘plans’ are dynamic. Just as it’s totally normal for your research ideas to change from your initial proposal, it’s also totally normal… and ok… for your career ideas to change. Just like research ideas, career ideas evolve according to both learning and circumstances beyond our control. Just as I look back on my original PhD proposal and have a bit of a ‘LOL’ at how different my thesis turned out, when I think back to the academic career aspirations I had pre-PhD, I now look back with the confidence that I found something more suited to my ‘best bits.’
So, ask yourself… when circumstances or ideas changed in your research, how did you adapt? How did you make things work? And are there ways you can ‘translate’ those strategies to adapting your career ideas, should the want or need arise?
And in the spirit of sharing, to any of you who are further along: are there other strategies, methods, or ‘hacks’ that you used in your research that you applied, consciously or not, to your career transition? Let’s build a ‘bank’ of them so that when other researchers ask ‘but how do I apply my research skills to working out my next steps?’ we can give them some real, tangible answers.