It’s more Friday good news — the updates version! Here’s an update from someone who shared good news here in the past.
Those of you who guessed that I was a librarian are correct. Not saying where, given the context, but my experience is pretty common. The Vocational Awe piece by Fobazi Ettarh that many people cited was the beginning of a major shift for me. Several of you asked what I do now. I am currently an instructional designer at a major company that you have definitely heard of. What that means is that essentially I design and deliver corporate training. The draw for me was that I still get to be a teacher, design curriculum, and be a part of that journey for someone from needing something to having something. That kind of teaching and bridging of knowledge was what took me to academia in the first place. I get to do more of it now than I expected.
That said, there are a lot of possibilities out there for academics. Are you good at analyzing big, disorganized sets of text-based data (humanists, I’m lookin’ at you)? You might be perfect for knowledge management. Do you feel good when you take a giant mess of a project, whip it into shape, convince a bunch of faculty to go along, and make the whole thing work? You’d probably be a killer project manager. There’s a lot of stuff out there that uses the same skill sets we develop in academia. The story academia tells you, that you are not qualified to do anything except (insert your particular research niche), is a lie. Just like the other stuff I talked about in my letter, like honor and job security.
I did several things that made my job search successful in the end, though I can’t say for certain which pieces were the most influential. Obviously, taking Alison’s advice was a critical piece. Other things I did that I’m pretty sure really mattered: taught myself to use a few of the most common kinds of software that are used in my new field, including paying for an asynchronous course for one of them that was a financial and time sacrifice, but resulted in me being really good at that software now. I started a side hustle offering trainings for adults to do things that I was already good at. And then I listed my side hustle first on my resume, applications, LinkedIn, etc. I was clear in all those places that it was part-time contract work, but I think it really mattered in getting onto the desks of the hiring managers. Since it was my side hustle, I could call myself whatever I wanted to, and the title I gave myself was “instructional designer,” both because that was true, and because it would help me get into the top pool in job applications. I built a pretty good portfolio of projects, both real and stuff I just invented to practice, to demonstrate my skills. I spent time learning from experts for free (for example, there’s an ex-academic on LinkedIn that I follow, from whom I learned a ton about framing this journey, and some recruiters who had some outstanding advice for what to do with my resume). I paid a lot of money to my counselor, who helped me find ways to keep going even though it took me a year to find something. Getting another job was a second job — I was doing something toward my job search for about 5-10 hours per week for a year — and I was so exhausted from the one I had, that it felt really really hard. But it was worth it in the end.
A few responses to the other comments on my post:
• It’s absolutely correct that a lot of for-profit jobs also suck and don’t give you raises, and I don’t at all mean to convey that academia is always terrible and industry is always awesome. Anyone who reads this blog knows otherwise on both counts. What is true is that the job I had was terrible for me, and that the job I got is awesome for me. It’s possible it won’t stay that way, or I’ll never get a raise, or whatever. But all of a sudden I have all this freedom. Like, I can just leave. Since I started, I’ve been getting contacted out of the blue by recruiters who are asking me to apply for instructional design jobs at their company, because they’re impressed by the job I’m doing now. I feel like I have options I didn’t have a few months ago if everything goes south here.
• In my decades-long experience in academia, administrative bloat and athletic programs aren’t actually the biggest sources of the problem. They’re easy to point fingers at, and as someone pointed out, those arguments line up with talking points of political groups who object to the whole concept of public education at every level. Many athletic programs are supported mostly or entirely by donations. Is that a messed-up measure of where people give money? Yes. But that’s not the same thing as assuming schools could use those same dollars elsewhere. What I have observed at my former workplace and many others is that the first-order culprit is the systematic de-funding of public education that is happening all over the country. One of the political parties actually states officially that “universities are the enemy,” and makes demonizing higher education a centerpiece of their strategy. In my university and, I’m sure, many others, inflation-adjusted per-student spending is down, inflation-adjusted salaries have tanked, and the reason is primarily (not entirely) because public funding has evaporated. My state now pays less than 1% of the budget of my former workplace, and continues to decrease, and will eventually be zero, thanks to the mathematically unavoidable situation created by our tax laws. States that used to provide 70-80% of their higher ed funding are down to 10% and falling. So yeah, administrative bloat, football, etc. etc., but the much much bigger source of the problem is that state governments, the vast majority of which are run by a party that objects to the existence of many of these institutions, have been spending the last 30 years removing as much money from higher education as they can. And succeeding.
• One of the hardest things about this transition was the necessity of shifting my identity away from “librarian.” It wasn’t just what I did, it’s who I was. Side note: that is not healthy. So re-organizing my sense of self was a pretty important step, and was much easier with professional help. But I feel like in relinquishing that piece of myself, I have rediscovered the person who went into that career in the first place — I hadn’t seen that person for quite a while, and it’s nice to have her back.
The update-y part of the update is that I’m not quite five months into my new job and new career, and I am So. Much. Happier. Every day I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, like any moment I’m going to discover that actually I hate this, but every week I get to Friday and think, wow, that was a great week. I definitely hit the jackpot with a fantastic manager, and I’m lucky that the work I do is fun and fulfilling. It has changed everything about how I feel about life, work, and myself.
#update #Manager
