“LinkedIn is ‘where the magic is happening,’ because you can start to become known more widely and also get in contact with a lot of people you might never meet in real life.” – Elena Hoffer: Co-Founder and CEO of Alma.Me **This post is a follow up to the June 2023 post focusing specifically on using LinkedIn to explore career options beyond academia** My first chat with Elena Hoffer was late on a Friday afternoon. It had been a long week, I was tired, and I could almost smell the espresso martini* that was going to welcome me into the weekend (*other drinks are available). Five minutes into ..read more

‘Your research skills are by no means limited to a particular subject area. You can – and should – apply research skills to the job search itself.’ – Katina Rogers, Putting the Humanities PhD to Work (p.106) Picture the scene. It’s a Monday afternoon and you’re having lunch/coffee/PhD moral support chats with a pal. You’re preoccupied because you think you’ve found a connection between a couple of texts that could help you to form a pivotal thesis argument, but you can’t work out if this connection has been identified already. Your friend looks up from their coffee/tuna sandwich/Instagram scr ..read more

‘Your research skills are by no means limited to a particular subject area. You can – and should – apply research skills to the job search itself.’ – Katina Rogers, Putting the Humanities PhD to Work (p.106) Picture the scene. It’s a Monday afternoon and you’re having lunch/coffee/PhD moral support chats with a pal. You’re preoccupied because you think you’ve found a connection between a couple of texts that could help you to form a pivotal thesis argument, but you can’t work out if this connection has been identified already. Your friend looks up from their coffee/tuna sandwich/Instagram scr ..read more

In my experience, I’ve only been able to reflect that I’ve got a certain skill once I’ve used it in a different environment.’ – Katrina Roberts SPERM BIOLOGY! Did that distract you?! Well, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about distractions… more specifically, about the things we might feel guilty about giving time to during our PhD because people (supervisors, peers, even ourselves) consider them a ‘distraction.’ One of my big PhD ‘distractions’ – that I loved, but sometimes gave myself a hard time for because I felt like I should’ve been writing/ publishing/ doing other things instead – wa ..read more

‘You don’t realise the value of (and the extent to which you have) these skills as a humanities PhD, until you’re in an environment when not everyone has them.‘ – Cat Quine: career changer from academia to tech You know how career guidance appointments rarely go? ‘So, you’re looking to leave your lectureship in Biblical Studies? In that case, you should definitely move to working for a software company that supports highly regulated industries…! But that’s exactly the route that Cat Quine took when, three and a half years into a permanent lectureship, she took the leap to leave academia for ..read more

‘The most compelling common denominator among people who have adopted the “alt-academic” moniker is that they tend to […] incorporate scholarly methods into the way that work is done. They engage in work with the same intellectual curiosity that fuelled the desire to go to graduate school in the first place.” – Katina L. Rogers, Putting the Humanities PhD to Work (2020: 13) If we’re going to have a competition for a winner in the ‘most-commonly-asked-PhD-careers-question-in-Holly’s-guidance-practice’ category… this question about the possibility of ‘coming back’ after ‘leaving’ academia would ..read more

“CVs are not just passive records of things that you happen to do. […] The [academic] CV is a document that you grow with intention and deliberate effort” – Karen Kelsky: The Professor Is In (2016), p.94 This post originally appeared on ‘The PhD Place’ (17th June 2023). Over the past 6 years in my role as Careers Adviser for Postgraduate Researchers, it’s safe to say that I’ve checked my fair share of CVs. That’s why The PhD Place invited me to put together 5 key tips to help avoid the most common academic CV mistakes that I come across day-to ..read more

‘I ‘m on LinkedIn, but… I’m not sure what to do with it” – said by more PhD & Postdoc Researchers than I can count LinkedIn. It’s a single word, yet it provokes so many responses from researchers I work with who are exploring their next steps. Some of the most popular go like: LinkedIn? You mean, that nauseating den of iniquity where people inflate their achievements and boast about themselves? No thanks. Using LinkedIn? As in… professional stalking? Hmmm… not sure Well I HAVE a LinkedIn profile… but I’m not sure what to DO WITH IT. The third response at least gives me something to work ..read more

“It never sat very comfortably that during my PhD I became so specialised that only a handful of people really understood my work. I wanted to expand my mind, not focus it. So a research-adjacent career has fed my curiosity and my soul in a way I now see research never could.“ – Sarah McLusky, creator of ‘Research Adjacent’ blog and podcast As a former English Literature PhD, I can’t deny that I love a good compound adjective. It’s just as well, as since I started my ‘career in careers’ nearly 10 years ago a whole host of compound adjectives have cropped up to describe different types of care ..read more

You’ve done a PhD… that means you’re already a project manager! I hear this A LOT. I *may* even have said it at some point. But the more I’ve heard it, the more I’ve started to doubt it… or at least critique it. For example, back in October I had the pleasure of working with Matteo Tardelli on a post about professional ‘culture shock’ when moving from academia to industry. In that post, Matteo said: ‘We’re told that project management is something we acquire in our PhD… but it’s not the same! Managing one single PhD project over several years can be very different from managing several proj ..read more