When I was in high school, two friends of mine cracked up one day reading the Help Wanted section of the local newspaper, because a company was advertising the position of sausage handler.
What did a sausage handler do? They had no idea. But the very opacity of the position led to years of jokes.
You probably don’t want to be a sausage handler
One of the things we miss, being in academia, is the wide variety of jobs it takes to accomplish even the simplest of corporate, non-profit, or government missions.
Because we live in a world dominated by disciplinarity, we don’t see the ways those disciplines get combined, sliced, blended, and superceded out there in the working world. We don’t see the sausage handlers, or the market researchers, or the non-IT project managers, or the organizational trainers, or the strategy captains, or the investigators, or the user design experts, or the inventors.
Because we live in a world of strict credentialing and clear pathing, we don’t see the various serendipitous ways that people get and become qualified for jobs. We don’t see the ways jobs are more about skills and fit than they are about degrees.
But outside of academia, jobs are being invented daily that don’t have paths or credentials, because the jobs themselves didn’t even exist yesterday. But something changed and now we need someone to do this particular set of things. Voila – job.
Finding out what’s out there can be fun
You probably won’t run across sausage handling jobs very often (at least I hope you don’t!), but one of the best ways to explore your options is to actually go out and scan job boards, company job postings, and anywhere else you see jobs listed.
What jobs are out there that you didn’t even know existed? What jobs look interesting even though you’ve never even considered it?
One of the biggest challenges people have when they’re considering leaving academia is expanding their sense of the possible. There are far more opportunities out there for you than you know about, but until you go looking, you won’t know what they are.
Starting June 12, Jo VanEvery and I are leading a class designed to help you find out more about your own career possibilities. You can find out more by clicking here.
Leave a Reply