What do you do?
Identify the skills you developed while earning your PhD
- Hiring from the Employer’s Perspective
- Hiring from the Job Candidate’s Perspective
- Why your Skills Matter
- What do you do? How to Begin Identifying your Skills
- The Three Types of Skills Employers Value
- Examples of Skills Developed While Teaching
- Examples of Skills Developed Through Research
About this lesson
Academia is a world that is organized around subject matter expertise: anthropology, ecology, biochemistry, art history, etc. We don’t often talk about HOW we go about our work in academia. We focus on the outputs, like our publication records or the courses we design and teach.
Non-academic employers will be much more interested in your skills. They’ll want to hear how you go about problem-solving, collaborating with teams, communicating with stakeholders, and navigating conflict in a work environment.
Most PhDs will end up working in careers that have very little to do with their subject-matter expertise. But the skills they developed as they became experts in their field will serve them well in a wide variety of professional careers.
This lesson is the first step in identifying your transferable skills. You’ll create an inventory of all the things you did teaching, researching, publishing, and performing service to the profession. From there, you’ll be able to identify your most marketable skills. This lesson is the foundation for writing a resume, building your LinkedIn profile, and evaluating career options where you can be paid for your education and training.
Workbook Activities
This lesson covers pages 10-18 in the Know Your Options Workbook. You can also use the Take Notes widget to complete these activities.
- For each section of your CV, outline all your projects and deliverables. For each project or deliverable, list all the tasks you had to complete, the skills you had to use, and your achievements.
- Use the downloadable spreadsheet provided to list and organize all your transferable skills. In the previous exercise, you would have already identified skills, which you can now organize into your spreadsheet under the appropriate transferable skill heading.
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