Will you have to start at the bottom?

There are lots of reasons why people who are unhappy in academia think they can’t jump. Lots of them are emotional (“but this is what I do!” “but I’ve worked so hard for this!” “What will my advisor think?”), but some of them are decidedly practical. Or so they seem.

Two of the most common practical reasons I hear are these: anything they would want to do would require either more schooling or it would require starting at the bottom.

So let’s take a look at that first one.

I have to admit that, after years and years of education, not to mention the debt and the lost wages, more schooling is hardly appealing. (Did I ever tell you about the time, late in my graduate school career, that I filled out a credit card application that asked how many years of schooling I’d had and I had to write 23? 23?!)

But there aren’t, actually, that many careers that require a professional to completely retool with a whole new round of degrees. In fact, I can only think of a handful: accountant, medical doctor (and all the variations thereof), therapist, lawyer — basically anything that requires a license. It’s true that these cover the vast majority of “aspirational” jobs, the ones you get special pats on the head for, but as we academics well know, those aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be.

And there are more — far more — jobs that require no licensure whatsoever, and because they require no licensure are both more flexible and more interesting because more flexible.

Artist. Writer. Policy analyst. Curator. Stock market commentator. Filmmaker. Human resources expert. Event planner. Researcher. They all require expertise, but not necessarily a degree. And if you’re interested in them, chances are you’re working on that expertise as we speak.

But as exhausting as more school sounds to most of us, I’d bet hard money that, at base, the real problem with more school is that it’s about starting over — at the bottom.

So let’s talk about that career ladder.

One of the myths of careers is that there’s only one way in to anything. Now, there may well be a standard way in, but given that there are tens of millions of job holders in this country alone, do you really think they all happened in standard ways, by starting at the bottom of the proverbial ladder and working their way up?

The standard ways in are meant for people who set their sights on a particular career from the beginning and went for it. Those standard ways provide a path, a set of guideposts, to help people get from here to there, and part of what they do is train people in the kind of professionalism college can’t convey.

You know, things like showing up on time, wearing clothes that don’t smell funny and don’t have cartoons on them, using Standard Written English in professional emails and documents, finding a tone that isn’t entirely impersonal but neither is it colloquial, meeting deadlines…. The list can go on and on.

But you’re not standard, and you’re not an overeducated equivalent to some 21 year old who can’t figure out that “because my family has a ski trip!” won’t excuse her from actual responsibilities. You’ve got this fabulous degree (which testifies to all kinds of advanced skills) and all of this specialized knowledge and all of this professional experience. And that means you won’t be starting at the bottom.

When I jumped ship, for instance, I jumped into grant writing. I had little to no experience in it, but I had excellent writing and organizational skills (proven not just in my job materials but in programs I had organized and run).

I didn’t start out managing the files of potential and current grants, keeping tabs on deadlines and writing first drafts of reports to be fixed by someone else. No, that was the job of a lovely young woman fresh out of college who still needed to figure out that she had to plan for the metro to be late rather than coming up with creative excuses for her tardiness — again.

I got to start out writing grant applications and doing final drafts of reports, managing the whole process and creating systems to make all of our different deadlines run smoothly. Because let’s face it. After eleven years of running my own classrooms and writing a dissertation, I didn’t have to prove that I could work independently or manage projects.

Now, the idea of grantwriting may make you want to pluck your eyeballs out with forks, but the point is not that you should be in grantwriting. The point is that you have, by dint of earning a PhD, lots of transferrable skills that will get you in somewhere closer to the middle if you enter a new career. There will still be lots of things you need to learn — hey, it’s a new career, after all! — and you’ll likely end up working for people who are younger than you are, but it won’t be filing and making copies and doing only the dirty work. And you’ll probably advance a lot faster than the people around you as well, as all of those years of focused learning help you … learn this new career efficiently and effectively.

There are many, many reasons I’d tell you to stay in academia. (If, for instance, you adored teaching and just couldn’t stand your colleagues or your institution.) But the fear of starting at the bottom is not one of them.