Escape the Ivory Tower

Does your CV need to become a resume?

If you listened to the interview I did with Daniel Mullin at The Unemployed Philosopher, you might already know this, but my next project is building what I’m calling a CV to Resume Translator.

One of the biggest psychological blocks to leaving academia is the belief that your experience doesn’t translate into the “outside world,” that you have nothing to offer. The CV, which of course only includes academic experience, becomes the symbol of that belief. After all, who outside of the academy needs a Dickens scholar?

Quite a few people, actually — but not necessarily for the knowledge of Dickens. When you start from that sense of not having anything to 0ffer, it’s really hard to translate your academic experience into non-academic language. It’s even harder to resurrect the non-academic experience you probably have, but have discounted or outright forgotten.

That’s where the Translator will come in. It’ll be a form that asks you to input all kinds of information, including but not limited to the stuff on your CV, and it will spit out a comprehensive resume draft you can then frame in all kinds of ways for different applications.

I’m really geeked out about this!

If you want to know when it goes live (and maybe be a beta tester!), you can sign up for the notify list by clicking here and filling out the handy-dandy little form.

You’re more qualified than you think you are

There’s a particular place a lot of leaving academics get tripped up: the idea of qualifications.

In academia, the goal is to become the absolute expert on a narrow slice of something. You’re the cutting edge of this research. Best-case scenario: You’re the acknowledged, world-renowned expert and everyone comes to you to understand it.

Most of the time, the question outside of academia isn’t “are you the absolute most expert, most skilled person at X?” It’s “do you have the skills and experience to do what we need done?

There’s a crucial difference there

We can always learn more. We can always experience more. That’s the whole basis of academia.

But there’s also the concept of good enough. You don’t have to have written grants and won money from every funding body in the world in order to be qualified to write grants for a non-profit. You don’t have to know everything there is to know about project management in order to coordinate volunteers. You don’t have to have a working knowledge of everything a company has ever produced in order to write their manuals effectively.

You only need to know enough. You only need to have enough experience to demonstrate your skills. That’s it.

Focus on the goal

Instead of comparing yourself to the mythical expert, look at what this position is trying to accomplish.

Can you translate complicated issues into clear and compelling reasons why your organization should be funded? Do you understand how grant proposals work? Have you written at least one? Congratulations! You’re qualified to write grants.

Can you put together a plan to meet a goal and coordinate all the moving parts to achieve it? That’s project management.

Can you translate tech-speak into something the user understands — and that answers their questions? You can write manuals.

You may not want to do any of these things, but the point still stands. All you have to do is be able to meet the goal they’ve set out — and convince them you have the requisite skills, experience, and knowledge to meet the goal.

That, of course, is the crux of the job application, but you can’t get there if you discount every opportunity because you don’t think you’re qualified.

Figure out the skills underneath your experience

Academia obscures a lot of the skills and experience we actually have, because it discounts it as service or writes it as something anyone can do. (Trust me — not everyone can write. The awful writing skills that have made you want to cry? They don’t get better.)

One way to unobscure them (reveal them?) is to map out everything you’ve done and ask yourself what skills and experience are already in there. You’re qualified for much more than you think you are — trust me.

After walking dozens of people through master resumes, I can only laugh at how many conversations I’ve had that began, “Well, you said you aren’t qualified for X, but actually you have Z, Q, and W.” And then they start laughing, too. It’s a nice thing, being able to help people see how awesome they are.

Don’t let the myths gaslight you

There’s an old movie called Gaslight. In it, the husband attempts to convince his wife and the people around them that she’s crazy by changing small things in her environment and then telling her she’s imagining them.

Gaslighting has become a colloquialism for any situation in which someone is attempting to manipulate someone else’s sense of what is really happening.

The more I work with people who are unhappy in academia, the more I’m convinced that academic culture gaslights us as a matter of course.

A few examples

Jo Van Every and I cover some of this in our free Myths and Mismatches e-course, but there are a lot of stories academia tells itself that aren’t necessarily reflected in reality.

It’s about the Life of the Mind — but you’ll spend most of your time wrangling undergraduates and fighting with colleagues over very small things.

It provides an unparalleled opportunity for work / life balance — so long as “balance” means “you work at all hours and most holidays,” even if you can take your car in for an oil change at 2pm on a Thursday.

It’s a meritocracy — but who you know matters and thousands of qualified, passionate, excellent scholars can’t find work.

I’m overworked and miserable — but this is the best possible job in the whole world.

There are so many places where the story is different from the reality and calling out the reality is tantamount to saying the Emperor is showing his backside.

This isn’t deliberate

I’m not arguing that academia is deliberatly trying to make people insane. That would be going too far. But like every other relational system, it regulates itself by ensuring that everyone plays their role. Part of that includes people who are committed to academia defending it and justifying it to those of you who are unhappy or for whom the job just hasn’t materialized.

Sometimes we can see the gap between the story and the reality and, without discounting the reality, live inside the contradiction.

But when we’re in conflict with the system for whatever reason, we tend to doubt our own experience of reality.

I’m miserable, but maybe I’m just paying my dues and it will get better. There don’t seem to be any jobs, but maybe that’s just me being defeatist and I need to keep applying. I don’t think I like the work of being a professor, but what if this really is the best job in the world and everything else will suck even more?

When we hit that space of doubting our lived experience, it can feel impossible to get out of. We’re so trained to rely on experts — and we so rarely feel like an expert ourselves — that we can believe the stories are true.

This, right here, is one of the hardest parts about leaving: legitimizing your own experience and judgment and seeing the stories for what they are.

No one knows better than you do

No one knows your values better than you do. No one knows your limits better than you do. No one knows your preferences and desires better than you do. No one knows your satisfactions better than you do. No one knows your bottom line needs better than you do.

No one knows what you should do better than you do. And no one knows what you are and have been experiencing better than you do. It’s just not possible.

If you’re feeling really muddled and unsure, try articulating your experience without judgment. This happened and then this happened and then this happened. Write it down. Seeing it written down can give you enough distance to believe it, in a sense. And that makes it easier to see the stories as stories that may or may not explain your experience.

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