Turning a life lived in academia into something else can feel overwhelming. But there are strategies that work, and more resources than you can begin to imagine. Want to see all of the ones I’ve talked about so far? Click here for the job-search archives.
What’s harder than “hard”?
Writing job applications, especially cover letters, is painful and hard precisely because we have to do the one thing most of us hate doing: Showing other people how awesome we are.
The resume, while bringing along dozens of difficult questions (do I include my publications? What about that job I had doing interviews for a researcher? How do I explain any gaps?) feels, even when we list accomplishments, somehow objective. (Which is not to say it doesn’t make people feel shy, because it does.)
But the cover letter is a whole other kettle of fish, because it’s not just presenting information. It’s explaining why that information should matter to the reader, the person who is trying to solve a problem.
The cover letter is personal
While no two resumes are ever going to be exactly alike, they’re also not often going to be hugely dissimilar. To a certain extent, the world of work can sound a lot alike from job to job, company to company.
But no two sets of work experiences will ever be even that much alike, because despite common job titles and common job descriptions, everyone is going to have different experiences to draw on.
You’ll talk about the time you were working at the homeless shelter and got to learn how to negotiate with people who maybe weren’t all that easy to negotiate with. You’ll talk about the research you did for your dissertation and what you learned and what it enables you to do. You’ll talk about how you managed to invent a program that solved a problem no one even realized was causing them pain.
Even more so than the resume, in the cover letter you’re setting out your life, the parts that make you different than the next person.
Fear of judgment, table for one
It’s so hard and scary because it’s us putting ourselves on the line. It’s us opening ourselves up for judgment. It’s us saying, hey, I’ve got all this stuff that would be great for you, and potentially hearing back, well, actually, no.
And the reality is, we aren’t going to get to the next stage of every job we apply for. That’s just reality. But the reality that we aren’t always going to get an interview for every application doesn’t mean anything other than we don’t always move forward.
It doesn’t mean that you aren’t a good candidate.
It doesn’t mean that you won’t get a different, often better job.
It doesn’t mean that you won’t succeed.
But we fear that it does mean those things and worse. And so we contract – we write short cover letters with no detail. We leave out key bits of the resume because we forget them altogether. All of which makes it more likely that … we won’t move on to the next stage.
Hard and scary is okay
Transitions are scary. And a job transition, especially when it feels like a do-or-die (or at least a do-or-figure-out-how-to-borrow-more-money) situation, is super duper plus scary.
As much as possible, tell yourself that it’s okay that it feels scary. That it’s a function of the situation, not your qualifications or your worth or your hireability. Let yourself be scared – it’s scary. But don’t let yourself not write the very best job application you can.
If you’d like help with your job applications, I offer a resume and cover letter writing service. Click here to check it out.
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