Career Counseling
with Rebecca Bryant, Richard Kurz, and Jennifer Furlong
July 16-23, 2007
Introductions
Daily Duties & Entry-Level Positions
Teaching and Counseling
Finding Positions & Counseling Certification
Hiring at Colleges & Universities
Salary/Advancement & Faculty Appointments
Research & Publication
Types of Career Centers
Why Career Counseling? – The Attraction of this Occupation for Ph.D.s
Development of Interpersonal Skills
Effective Use of Career Counseling
Introductions
Rebecca Bryant
Assistant Dean & Director of the Graduate College Career Services Office
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
My name is Rebecca Bryant, and I am currently Assistant Dean & Director of the Graduate College Career Services Office at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Like many of you, I began my graduate study with the ultimate goal of becoming a tenured professor. I had always been attracted to a career in education, but with a narrow concept of the possibilities. I had little knowledge of career opportunities in higher education—except the professoriate, so that’s the course I charted. I have an undergraduate degree in music from Butler University, a master’s degree in music history from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and I completed my PhD in musicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
After an adjunct teaching experience at a small liberal arts college in spring 2000—the exact type of institution I had hoped to settle in—I realized that I didn’t enjoy classroom teaching as much as I thought I might. I grew depressed thinking about a long career teaching the same courses. I realized I wanted more variety in my work. But I was also at a loss as to what else I might do. I remember thinking, “What else can I do but musicology?” and wondering if I had any real skills.
In summer 2000, I began a graduate assistantship as the thesis reviewer in the University of Illinois Graduate College. Yes, that fabled person with the ruler who checks the margins on your dissertation and can make your life heaven or hell before you are allowed to deposit! As it turns out, it was a terrific opportunity for me to learn more about the things I enjoyed and to also develop a reputation and references. I really enjoyed the challenges, and I realized that I could sincerely enjoy a role in university administration. I decided to go for it. Career advising, specifically, was not yet on the horizon.
Probably the turning point of my entire career was when I went to the Graduate College Dean and expressed my enthusiasm for a career in higher education, my excitement for working in the Graduate College, and asked him if he would consider me for a permanent professional position in the college. The dean was pretty quiet, except to articulate that he didn’t have anything at that time. Until then, the Dean had no doubt assumed that my career plan had been to finish my degree and pursue a tenure-track position in musicology; he probably would not have given me much thought without additional assertiveness on my part, so it was very important to let him know that I was interested in a larger role in the organization.
After a few months, I got my break. The University of Illinois was just beginning a major technology project, the implementation of the Banner enterprise system across all three campuses, and project managers were keen to have representatives on the project team from a diversity of university units. I was hired to serve as the delegate to the project from the Graduate College, serving in a visiting (non-permanent) appointment. It was a tremendous opportunity to get my foot in the door. I worked hard and slowly earned the respect of my colleagues. After a year on the project, I was promoted to a team leader, managing seven technical and functional staff members on two campuses. I was also writing my dissertation on nights and weekends.
During the two years I was working on the University Banner project, the Graduate College had been exploring career advising resources for graduate students, and by 2003, it was ready to establish new services to serve graduate students at Illinois. I was very lucky to land the position as the founding director of the Graduate College Career Services Office, and to finally secure a position in academe that I was really excited about. This was really my dream job, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to build an office from the ground up.
I’ve been in my current position for over four years, and it’s never been dull. I thrive on the day-to-day variety in the work that I do, and my responsibilities continue to shift and grow. There are so many things I like about the work I do: the opportunity to know and learn about a broad diversity of topics; directly advising graduate students and seeing positive outcomes; creating new programs and services. But most of all, I enjoy having the ability to enact positive changes.
This is my brief story, and I want to emphasize that while making the transition from faculty to non-faculty path that I felt feelings of failure, worried about sharing my plans with my adviser, and had sincere doubts about my ability to transfer my skills to any setting outside of musicology. But I had mentors along the way (including one very special mentor, former Assistant Dean Nora Few), I worked hard to distinguish myself, and I acted assertively (something I would not have done without that mentor). There was some serendipity in there, too. . . but that's life.
Richard Kurz
Director of Graduate Student Career Development
Columbia University
I currently work as Director of Graduate Student Career Development at Columbia University. My office is part of the Center for Career Education, which, in addition to working with graduate students, is also responsible for undergraduate career education programming as well as our internship and entrepreneurial programming efforts.
Together with two immensely capable colleagues, I provide career education programming and counseling to a population of approximately 7,000 Masters and PhD candidates from 5 schools in the University – the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of the Arts, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and the School of Continuing Education. Needless to say, this population represents a very diverse group with a wide range of career objectives and needs – students who are pursuing both academic as well as expanded career tracks. And it’s the goal of meeting those disparate needs – through workshops, one-on-one counseling, speaker presentations, career fairs, and anything else we can think of – that is both the challenge and excitement, intellectually and creatively, of this position.
I arrived at Columbia after a two decade-long career on Wall Street – not the typical route for most university career counselors. While completing my undergraduate and master’s degrees, I had thought long and hard about moving into a PhD program but was advised against it. Even though I was strongly attracted to an academic career, my advisor counseled that the academic market for PhDs was very thin and not looking to improve any time soon. Mind you, this was nearly 30 (!) years ago. So, I changed direction and embarked on what turned out to be a great career in international finance. But, after 20+ years of traveling and working on often interesting but also abstract transactions, I felt the need for a career change. I refocused on my earlier objective of a PhD and teaching. Leaving Wall Street, I re-enrolled in graduate school and struggled to revive my rusty academic “muscles.” Over a sometimes rocky 5-year period, I completed the requirements for the PhD. My discipline is political science; my area is international political economy. While a PhD student, I was lucky enough to teach three graduate level courses, help revise an academic text, and attend my fair share of academic conferences. I was supported by a remarkable advisor who adroitly introduced me to academic career expectations while respecting my often more commercial perspectives. Also during this period, I discovered that I enjoyed teaching enormously, but – not surprisingly to many of you – also discovered that teaching was secondary to research; at least as far as getting jobs in many institutions was concerned. And research, while obviously interesting in its own right, was not what I wanted to do after so many years working in the for-profit world.
While finishing my thesis, I had volunteered as a “mock” interviewer at my old graduate school – giving practice interviews to master’s students. I had done a great deal of recruiting as a banker and found that I really enjoyed sharing my experience and observations about the job-search process with students who signed up for practice interviews. A leave taken by a full-time staff member led to a short-term position as a counselor and I discovered other aspects of career counseling: designing and delivering workshops, working with faculty and alumni, identifying student career development needs and the individuals who could help deliver programming. The work involved large scale and long-term project planning as well as individual counseling and, as I’ve discovered, I can continue to expand my theoretical and practical expertise – through classroom, outreach, and supervised work. Career counseling hit virtually all the reasons I’d been attracted to higher education in the first place. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture. Career counseling enables me to share my professional experience in a higher education setting, to teach and counsel, while continuously expanding my knowledge and, most importantly, making what I hope is a significant impact on students’ lives. I have also found a deep and supportive community of career counselors across the country – happy to share their insights, advice, and successes.
Jenny Furlong
Associate Director of Career Services
University of Pennsylvania
Like many members of the WRK4US listserv, my career path has been a rather circuitous one that sometimes requires a bit of explanation. By the time I was a senior at Northwestern, I had decided that I was going to pursue a Ph.D. in the field of French Literature. I was both encouraged and discouraged to do so by the junior faculty members with whom I had worked closely. I'll never forget my French Feminisms professor telling me, "Go to law school so that you can make real change for women." (Of course, anyone who knows anything about law school knows that it's not necessarily the best way or only to make change for women in this world, but I digress.) I took two years off from school, and worked some rather funny positions -- I sold copiers and fax machines (I was terrible at this), I was a nanny for a 3-year-old and a newborn, and I worked at the front desk of the Grand Hyatt hotel in New York City.
When I entered the Ph.D. program in Romance Languages in the fall of 1998, I knew well that I might end up not becoming a faculty member. Though I had focused more on 20th-century France as an undergraduate, I ended up specializing in 18th-century France, and wrote my dissertation on the evolution of the sentimental novel. I feel lucky in that though I had the typical ups and downs of graduate school (a demanding advisor, lack of money, personal and professional woes), my love for my subject of study still endures. When people ask me what it was like to get a Ph.D., I usually say that it was sometimes fun, sometimes difficult, but never, never an easy time.
In the fall of 2002 I went on the academic job market for the first time. It was a "good year" for my field. I applied fairly selectively, and had four MLA interviews. They went well in my opinion, and I went on one campus visit to a liberal arts college in the West, but received no subsequent offer. (I was overjoyed NOT to receive this offer, because I didn't see myself as a good fit for the department, and would have been pressured to accept any offer by my committee.) I remember faculty members from my department asking me (sometimes rather confrontationally), "What went wrong?" The answer was that nothing went wrong. In retrospect, I would say that I was probably not ready to go on the market, and that my heart really wasn't in it. I should have taken it as a sign right then and there because, generally speaking, I was relieved NOT to have to deal with accepting an academic offer.
I was adamant in my refusal to apply for one-year positions outside of the Philadelphia area, and spent the next year teaching at Penn and finishing my dissertation. When I went on the academic job market that fall (2003), I had one MLA interview with a top research university. I didn't get the campus visit with them. Was I relieved this time? I'm not so sure. But I know that if I had been offered that position, I would have accepted it, and would have spent the next six years terrified about getting tenure. At the time, a young junior faculty member at Penn whose work I really respected did not get tenure, even though it seemed like she had been doing everything right (publications in the PMLA and other good places, forthcoming book, engaging speaker and teaching, "sexy" subject of expertise). This was extremely discouraging to me, because I felt like if she couldn't do it, neither could I. (Incidentally, she did end up moving to another great place, and is doing extremely well.)
Once I graduated in December of 2003, I knew that I needed more work (i.e. income)-- and fast. I begged my friend who owns a clothing store to let me work in his store. I went to a women's networking event and managed to get a part-time clerical job at a local non-profit. Though it was easy work for me, the director of the non-profit was great and proved to be an amazingly helpful contact. I did an informational interview with a fellow Penn Ph.D. who works as a grant writer and found a position as a researcher for a small local museum. I talked to everyone I knew about my job search, and got really valuable advice from those around me.
Add this all to my teaching, and I was working six days a week, running around like crazy. It was fun at the time, but I was getting a bit tired, and knew that I would need to start looking for a full-time position. It was just about that time that I received through the graduate humanities job list here at Penn (a list that I now managing) for the position that I now have. Though I was unsure at first, I decided to apply, and received excellent advice from some of those who had been helping me with my job search. I didn't tailor my resume to the position too much, but spent a lot of time finding the right (and the fewest) words possible to talk about why I was interested in the position in my cover letter. What attracted me about the position was the chance to help Ph.D.'s in similar situations to my own. Additionally, I had always enjoyed my grad school peers' stories of their job searches, and had filed away that knowledge in my head. I also had good friends in other disciplines, especially one good friend who was a chemist, and was often surprised by the similarities in our emotional experience of graduate school, even though the fields we worked in had nothing in common (except demanding advisors).
My interview at Career Services was quick (one hour), and rather painless. When I was offered the job though, I hesitate before accepting because doing so meant that I was closing the door on the academic path. However, I knew it was a wonderful opportunity, and working with Julie Vick, Pat Rose (our director) and other colleagues has been great. The students and postdocs that we see are interesting in the diversity of both their goals and knowledge base. Moreover, most of them are genuinely lovely people. And, to loosely quote another WRK4US discussion participant, I've learned more about the university while working here than I ever learned in my years as a Ph.D. student. I also still love using Penn's library; this is a wonderful perk for me!
Julie and I actually wrote a Career Talk column for the Chronicle that sums up my search and the reasons why I was hired. What I said in the article is fairly similar to what I said here (there are only so many ways to tell one's story), but Julie's bit on why I was hired might be of interested to some readers--so here's a link to the article.
Daily Duties & Entry-Level Positions
Question from AC:
All three of you seem fairly senior. I was wondering if any (or all) of you could provide a more detailed picture of what you do on a day to day basis and what a typical day might be like for a more entry level person (if you know). Thank you.
Richard Kurz:
I actually don't think there's much of a difference between what I do and what an entry-level person might do on a typical day. That may, in part, reflect our non-hierarchical approach to organization. But I'm sure it also reflects the simple fact that we all pitch in on whatever we're doing – we need to as our resources are, as everywhere, stretched pretty tight. But, whether entry level or not, we all do much pretty much the same types of work (I just seem to attend more meetings). But more on that in moment.
There is no typical day; our schedules vary depending on the time of year and student needs. Yes, I know that's an unsatisfactory answer - but, nevertheless, an accurate one. A "typical" day for me might include 2 to 4 individual one-hour counseling appointments with masters or PhD students; a stint (usually 2 hours) handling walk-in appointments (10 to 15 minute meetings with students that do not require an appointment - usually to discuss a draft resume/CV or for interview prep); preparing or delivering a skills-based workshop or hosting a faculty, industry, or alumni panel; the usual administrative work and, of course, responding to e-mail. Somewhere in there, we have to make time for learning about new careers or job market developments, planning, employer and faculty outreach, and the organizational work that comes with larger scale or more complicated events such as career fairs. Right now we're spending a good deal of time on planning and coordinating programming for the fall semester - and on preparing workshops. Where I might focus more on planning and outreach (to potential employers and faculty/alumni), a more entry-level person might concentrate more on counseling and workshop development and delivery. But there are no hard and fast rules.
A principal role for us is student career counseling. As such, anyone starting in the field would, I think, want to concentrate initially on developing their counseling skills. This usually starts with teaching and advising on the basics of a job search and evolves into more complicated counseling areas ("what do I do with the rest of my life?") as your skills and experience grow. Working initially with a more seasoned person is typical. As your expertise develops you work more independently. This also ensures your development is consistent and supervised. For many of you I'm sure, the skills are familiar. Its growing and organizing your knowledge and experience around student questions - and knowing what to do with those periodic questions "out of left field" - that makes the work fun and challenging.
Rebecca Bryant:
I largely agree with Richard. Much of what I do is the same as what my Assistant Director does. We all pitch in to get the job done. In my position as the Director of an office, I have the additional responsibilities of determining office priorities and allocating resources. We're a small operation: myself and another full-time professional career advisor (the position is currently vacant-search closes this Friday!), plus secretarial support. We are located within the Graduate College, not within a central career services office, and we are one of more than twenty career services offices providing a variety of career advising and placement services to graduate students at the University of Illinois.
There really isn't a typical day. It very much depends upon the time of year. We have heavy student advising demands during some months, and there are other months when we see fewer students. We have workshops that we offer during the semesters, so there's the planning and facilitating of those. We also coordinate several all-campus events that take a lot of organization and planning. Being in the Graduate College, if you are not having your peak time, chances are someone else in the college is, so often we are all pinch-hitting for each other.
Summers are a little less busy for us, so we use that time to plan and to catch up. Right now, I'm busy planning the fall workshop series, finalizing publicity plans, and trying to manage the coordination of several other large all-campus events that our office coordinates.
I think that there are actually a lot of different skills necessary for this type of work. I have often that that my work environment here is reminiscent of a small business or non-profit. You often end up doing a lot of different things yourself: advising is a large part, of course, but beyond that there is also: organization and planning, event management, networking, marketing, web site creation, publicity, workshop development & facilitation, assessment, and report writing. It never gets dull, and it's nice to go to work each day and have the landscape look a little different.
Jenny Furlong:
In spite of my associate director title, my position is actually the junior position in our office. My direct supervisor, Julie Vick, has the title of senior associate director. I am pointing this out because it proves an interesting point -- in the world outside academia, titles can be tricky.
My day is probably quite similar to that of my colleagues Richard and Rebecca. I hold one hour of walk-in appointments per day, usually in the afternoon. In our office, student and postdoc appointments tend to last for half and hour. During the summer, when fewer students come into the office, we plan programs, brainstorm ways to improve our services and outreach, plan our fall biomedical career fair, make changes to our website, connect with colleagues across the university and many other things. I also spend a good deal of time on email, reaching out to/responding to students, alumni, postdocs and my colleagues in other offices at Penn. Come September, most of my time will be focused on meeting with students, giving presentations and moderating/attending speaker programs.
At Penn, I work out of a large, centralized career office where my colleagues see undergraduates from Penn's four undergraduate schools (Nursing, Wharton, Engineering, the College of Arts and Sciences), other colleagues work with students on applications to many, many types of graduate programs, and other colleagues work with graduate students in the Schools of Nursing, Social Policy and Practice (MSW's) and Education. My colleague Julie and I work with Ph.D. students in the Graduate Division of Arts and Sciences, Wharton, the Annenberg School for Communications, the School of Design, Biomedical Graduate Programs (in the Medical School) and the School of Engineering. We also work with master's degree students in these schools (except Engineering -- we have other colleagues who work with these students). Our office does not see Penn's MBA's (they have their own office) JD's, vets, dentists or MD's. I realize that these will be not-so-useful details to some WRK4US readers, but institutions vary widely in how they organize career services for graduate students -- an important thing to keep in mind for those interested in this field. This makes Rebecca's job similar to mine in many respects, but also quite different as she is working out of a graduate college office.
Because Julie and I see students, alumni and postdocs in so many different fields, I would say that the skills/knowledge that serve me well are as follows:
- a general understanding of the experience of obtaining a Ph.D., and the resources available at this institution
- comfortable dealing with ambiguities and new situations
- solid presentation skills gained through teaching
- a willingness to say, "I really don't know the answer to that questions. Let's think of some ways you could find that information."
Paula Foster Chambers:
Richard, I was intrigued by your answer to AC’s question because it seems like there is a lot in common that career counseling has with teaching: you are essentially facilitating the growth and development of others, just in a different way. Would you say that is true? Also, while most of the work is done one-on-one between you and the individual student, you also offer workshops, so there are moments when it feels a lot like classroom teaching, am I right?
Richard Kurz:
Yes and yes. Biggest difference is the most obvious - in teaching a conventional university course you are responsible for conveying a defined body of knowledge/information over a semester or year - career counseling workshops are often stand-alone presentations on a single topic or related set of topics. They're not typically presented as a "course." Having said which (I'll contradict myself here), over the last couple of years, we've increasingly structured our programming as short "courses" - sets of 3 or 4 workshops or panels - all addressing related topics ("Core career development skills for PhDs entering the academic job market" or a series of panels broken down by discipline entitled "Alternative Careers for PhDs"). The programming is scheduled similarly to a conventional course - same day, time, and location on sequential weeks.
Career education is often about conveying facts - how to do things. How to apply for a job, how to prepare for a job interview. The hard part comes from making the material responsive to individual student needs - in working with individuals to enable them to best present their case for employment. That's one big way, I think, where we make a meaningful impact and facilitate growth and development. Its part teaching and part being responsive to the individual student. That's often how workshops and counseling work together - one provides a body of information – the other helps to contextualize it for the individual.
More generally though, the skills I employed in teaching conventional courses are very much the same ones I use in running career workshops. The level of student engagement with career material is often very high, as is the interactivity of workshops. This may reflect students’ increasing recognition of the importance of career skills. But the variety of material we teach and the need to keep it fresh and up-to-date is a challenge. I also find the same satisfaction in running a good workshop that I did in completing a successful lecture or seminar section. They require the same type of preparation and research - and elicit similar intellectual demands - how to deal, for instance, with new perspectives students take on material and how to make it interesting, memorable, and relevant. Moreover, the information conveyed in a workshop, panel, or individual session can have an immediate impact on a student's life - in getting a job offer or deciding a direction to take in their career.
Finding Positions & Counseling Certification
Question from KQ:
It seems like most of the panelists have had relationships with the institutions where they were hired. Is this the norm? My sense is that it would difficult for an outsider (like someone who just moved to the area) to get their foot in the door.
Also, I was pleased to hear that no one needed to get a certificate or diploma in career counseling. But I've seen several academic career counseling job ads that ask for one. Can anyone speak to whether such a diploma is necessary?
Jenny Furlong:
I wouldn't say that I truly had a relationship with Penn's Career Services office when I applied for my position. I was familiar with the services this office offers, which was very important in my interview. Though my supervisor Julie had reviewed my resume in a counseling appointment about three months before I applied to this position, she didn't remember me until she saw me in person at the interview. I didn't know Julie, or any of my other future colleagues personally, nor had I ever done anything like an informational interview with any of them.
To answer your question about diplomas in career counselor as a prerequisite, I would say this really depends on the office to which you are applying. In my office, we have hired Ph.D.'s not only to work with Ph.D.'s, but also to work with undergraduates in the College of Arts and Sciences and in our pre-grad unit. What often counts is interest in working with students on career issues (or experience working with students in teaching or other academic roles) and knowledge of/an interest in the working world in general. We recently hired a half-time counselor to work with me and Julie, and this person also has graduate-level training in the humanities. Some offices/institutions are interested in hiring those with a counseling background (MSW, M.Ed. Ed.D, etc.) Some (like our office) are interested in both backgrounds. I'm sure Rebecca and Richard have thoughts on this as well.
Rebecca Bryant:
I definitely benefited from "getting in from the inside" and paying my dues. I had the opportunity to establish demonstrate that I was a hard worker with some broad skills. Employers very often also like to hire from the inside or promote from within. It's safe, because they already have confidence in the hire.
Is that the norm? I'm not sure that I can say. But networking ALWAYS helps. Even if you are the outsider--someone who has just moved to the area--you can do things to rapidly familiarize yourself with the employment landscape. For someone wanting to work at the University of Illinois, I would recommend that they start looking at the Illinois web site and identifying potential offices that might be relevant. Identify individuals in interesting positions and contact them, asking them if you can arrange an informational interview. I have a colleague who did just this when she was looking to shift from a career in non-profits to working at the University. She networked and learned a great deal of information about the employment landscape. By the time job postings came around, many people already knew her and (I assume) admired her initiative. She soon landed a University position, and she's now been here for several years.
Some career counseling employers will require specific training in career counseling. Obviously others don't. I think it may be more likely that specialized career counseling training is required for positions working generally with undergraduates. For more specialized positions--those working with graduate students or in decentralized placement offices (that's how my campus works--we have a number of separate placement offices such as Chemical Sciences, Biotechnology, Business)--it is much less likely that a student affairs/education degree is required, but it may be more important that the individual hails from the specific area in question or perhaps has doctoral training.
BU:
If you're concerned about being an "outsider" to your city's university/ies, you might consider career counselling outside of the university. If you're in Canada, be aware that college career centres sometimes pay their career counsellors better than universities do, as some colleges recognize counsellors as "non-teaching faculty."
Non-profit employment agencies might also help you get your foot in the door, and if you like working with young people, there are certainly employment agencies that target youth. Further, you might find that nonprofits will respect your intention to get a degree or diploma in career counselling; I was hired for a career counselling position with only two courses under my belt. If you do pursue non-profit employers, just make sure you familiarize yourself with your community's service provider database or referral service, whatever that may be. If you're new in town, any non-profit employer will want to know that you'll be able to refer clients to other services as appropriate.
Hiring at Colleges & Universities
Question from MW:
I am looking for some general advice about how to break into a position in career counseling. Briefly, here's my story: About 6 months after finishing my Ph.D. and doing some soul searching, I did some informational interviews on career counseling at the University. I quickly realized that it would be a great fit for me in many ways, but I fell short of finding a position --as many of the places I applied required a MS in social work or counseling. Feeling discouraged, I redirected my energies into writing and volunteering. In my volunteer work, I helped to start a job assistance program at a local community resource center, and have since gone on to start a Job's Council, bringing together local agencies to advocate for low-income, multiple-barrier job seekers. I spend a lot of my time doing direct service work, creating resumes, conducting mock interviews, doing referrals, etc. And for roughly 8 months, I also led a bi-monthly job club. I also spend a lot of time doing program development, creating assessment tools for my team, etc. I love that I get to wear many different hats, with all of them revolving around my passion: helping other people find the information they need for personal development/advancement.
If the truth be told, however, I miss being around a campus. Ideally, I would like to see myself working in career counseling at a University or at a Community College. I am currently not seeking employment ( I am pregnant and plan to just keep up my volunteer work for a few years), but what I was wondering is what I could do in the meantime to prepare myself to break into a job in career counseling. Would taking classes in CC benefit me? Furthermore, is there anything I could be doing to prove that I like to work with a college age population? I think I would have an easier time transitioning into working at a CC given that the population I currently work with is very similar, but do you have any suggestions (besides building a network) that might make it easier for me to find a job in career counseling when the time comes? I was also wondering if my current work in workforce development is at all relevant. How would a hiring team view my volunteer work?
Richard Kurz:
1. General advice about how to break into a position
MW - you've already taken the route that I recommend to others - volunteering. If you have the time and can handle it financially, it’s a great way to demonstrate your interest and commitment while learning the vocabulary, skills, and day-to-day work. It obviously a powerful tool for networking and honing your counseling skills as well. There are other approaches – offering to sit on a panel – or to run a workshop on a topic where you have distinctive expertise. The objective is to enable you to demonstrate both your interest and your particular expertise to those who do the hiring.
2. What to do when they throw up the "we want to see training or a degree in counseling" argument?
There's probably very little you can do if they are adamant about hiring someone with a counseling degree. You can discuss your relevant experience till you're blue in the face, but if they feel they need more counseling experience on their staff, that's a hard one to counter. And this does vary greatly by institution. Having said that - this points to an argument you can use - that I used for instance (as I do not have formal counseling training in my academic background) - in arguing your case; where do you add value to a department, where or how do you make their ability to counsel or advise students better? If, for instance, you have extensive not-for-profit experience, or have worked in the for-profit sector, or are a very powerful speaker/workshop leader/developer, or have been engaged in managing people - these experiences may represent skills or knowledge that will be useful in designing programming, bringing speakers on to campus or in advising students on career choices. But you have to put these skills into a career counseling context for your potential employer. Simply saying that I worked for a long time in a particular sector and counseled staff, for instance, doesn't mean I would be a good counselor to students. Know the “business” you want to enter as well as you can and use that knowledge to identify what the employer is looking for and craft your application to their needs.
3. Would taking classes in CC benefit me?
Yes. That goes to the issue raised immediately above --demonstrating interest and expertise.
4. Furthermore, is there anything I could be doing to prove that I like to work with a college age population? I think I would have an easier time transitioning into working at a CC given that the population I currently work with is very similar, but do you have any suggestions (besides building a network) that might make it easier for me to find a job in career counseling when the time comes? I was also wondering if my current work in workforce development is at all relevant. How would a hiring team view my volunteer work?
I think that volunteering demonstrates serious interest - and anything you could indicate in a cover letter or conversation that supports your understanding and engagement with student issues would be helpful in making the case for you. It sounds from your description that your workforce development work is analogous (from a skills perspective) to working with students - the difference might arise simply from the fact that students are very different from (even just slightly older) adults - their experience and expectations differ significantly. I'd ensure your resume and cover letter both explicitly relate your extensive volunteer experience (outside an academic setting) to working with students. Discuss during informational or other interviews how you can relate your experience to the issues confronting students - major selection, parental pressure, pursuing graduate degrees versus pursuing a job, and the whole range of issues surrounding self-assessment and career selection.
5. General Advice – If you run into a wall of silence, despite what you feel is a powerful case (at least on paper), for hiring you, it’s probably time to look for another avenue to making your case heard. It may be something as simple as looking at another, more open-minded institution, or it may be looking for a way to make your case directly. That is, making the case that you will add explicit value to an existing team. And that means, of course, identifying where and how you will add value. And then figuring out a way to make your case (there's volunteering and informational interviewing again, as well as looking for introductions from others). Like most of us, I'm not a fan of hitting my head against a wall. If they don't want to hire me, even though I think I'd be great in the position, I eventually get tired of the headaches and move on. I ran into more than one instance in my job search where I had everything going for me -- qualifications, connections (I was an alum and endorsed by a senior administrator) and was still refused even the courtesy of an interview. They lost my alumni donation, but I also didn’t get the job.
As for the 30 second rule on reading resumes. Well, if you have to read 100 resumes, you'll want to get through them fairly quickly as they tend to blur together after a while. So you look for markers that cause you to put a resume aside for further review after you've gone through the whole pile. You can make your resume stand out by aligning it to the job description in the position listing - word choice, etc. This is pretty obvious, but it works in getting your resume read more carefully. But, having been on both sides of the resume debate, I counsel carefully crafting your resume to the position (and yes, this does mean having several versions of your resume) and identifying what you think are the critical determinants in getting someone considered -- educational background, a specific skill or accomplishment? This is where your background research – before you send in your resume -- kicks in. And speaking for myself – I read the resumes, not HR. And so do my colleagues. This is the pattern followed in most departments. And I look at them pretty carefully as I might be hiring someone whose job description includes reviewing resumes.
As for departmental protectionism - turf issues and the like - between faculty and staff - or with staff feeling intimidated by faculty:
My experience has actually been the other way around. Faculty are concerned that we might tread on their pedagogical turf (and no, I don't try to teach chemistry or political science, but I am responsive to student career questions, whether about academic careers or otherwise). We head off potential conflicts by checking our facts and advice with faculty, by using faculty on career panels, and by keeping our advice (certainly when it comes to the academic job search) fairly generic. When it comes to an expanded job search, we usually have more experience than do faculty whose only work experience may have been in higher education.
Faculty have their areas of expertise, professionalism, and experience and staff have theirs. Personally, I don't think it’s a no-brainer that a faculty member would be a good career counselor. Aside from the fact that they may know little about working outside the academy, there is a difference in approach taken by a counselor in teasing out a student's motivation or concerns about possible career choices - or in helping them identify possible career choices - or in developing a plan to pursue a career option - and what a faculty member does in teaching students how to learn. They are related subjects, of course, but the subject matter itself differs significantly.
Having said all that, I go back to my earlier comment about the parallels between teaching and counseling Both are demanding, both require subject matter expertise, both require responsiveness to the moment - to the situation or question - and both demand practice and study to perfect.
Salary/Advancement & Faculty Appointments
Question from NP:
First, what has become a usual question that I like to pose, realizing that it was something I perhaps did not give enough thought to early on in my own process: How would you characterize the salaries in university career counseling? Where would entry-level positions tend to lie, salary-wise, and what prospects for advancement (both in terms of salary and responsibilities) might one have? What would people at the top of the career counseling field in universities tend to make?
I'm not asking anyone to divulge their own salary, but if you could give some general ranges, that would be helpful.
Second, do any of you have faculty appointments in addition to your staff positions? If you do not, is it due to the presence of administrative or other barriers or due to your personal preference? Have you been encouraged to seek this kind of appointment? Or discouraged from seeking it? If you do have some kind of adjunct faculty appointment, do you get to teach? Do you do research and write in your original fields? In other words, what prospects have you experienced for having a "hybrid" career that combines attributes of more usual scholarly work with your career counseling work?
Rebecca Bryant:
I think there can be a great deal of range within the profession, depending upon experience, institution, geographic location, level of responsibility, and area of expertise (i.e., business, law, engineering placement offices > than others). I am unfortunately at a rural location now with only dial-up access (remember that?), so I'm not going to check now, but I think that for those of you with an interest in this, tools like salary.com may provide more specific ranges for geographic areas, etc. My colleagues may have more suggestions here, too.
It’s not uncommon to observe career professionals promoted within a career services organization on a campus, from a title such as Assistant Director to Associate Director or perhaps Senior Assistant Director. I have had some terrific colleagues who have done much the same work for many years and who have been rewarded in this way.
Like many positions within a University--or outside a University for that matter--advancement can mean assuming managerial and administrative roles. I think that this can be exciting professionally, exposing you to new challenges. A down side, though, is that it obviously comes with more responsibility and can take you away from the contact time you have with student--which is often one of the principal reasons you might have been attracted to this career path in the first place. Certainly individuals in positions with this type of responsibility draw higher salaries. How much higher? Oh, I think that can vary widely!
For your second question, I do not hold any type of faculty appointment. I think I would enjoy teaching a music class occasionally, but probably not on a very frequent basis. My work and personal life are very full and busy already! :)
Since completing my PhD in 2003, I have not remained very active with my musicological research. I have continued to write, though, sometimes just for my own personal enjoyment and occasionally for publication in the Chronicle of Higher Education. One of my personal frustrations with my own discipline has been that whereas music is a topic with wide interest, musicological research often just gathers dust on a shelf. I needed to feel as though my work had a broader impact, and I think many of you may understand me when I say that it was very exciting to finally write something that I knew people were reading! :) I think it would be difficult in my current position to remain active in musicological research or to teach, if those were important to me. I think there are positions where I might be able to teach. Finding time for research--that might be harder. Mostly I think you need to make a decision to carve that out of your personal time--I finished a dissertation that way, so I KNOW it can be done. But today I enjoy the opportunity to cultivate my other interests in my spare time.
FB:
Regarding salaries, in March the Chronicle published the average figures for staff positions from a survey done by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The articles can be found here:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i26/26a03001.htm
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i28/28a04001.htm
The articles list salaries by institution type rather than by geography or other factors that also influence compensation. Here's what they list as median salaries for the positions of Director of Career Development and Career Counselor.
|
Institution Type |
Director |
Career Counselor |
These are averages, and from personal experience, I know there is a lot of variation. A starting salary in the low-to-mid 30s is pretty typical even in a big city. Also, I have heard that some career counselors work 10-month positions and have summers off. That's far from common but it'd free up time to write, travel, or take another job.
Richard Kurz:
I can’t take issue with FB’s salary chart or comments – both conform pretty closely with my (albeit limited) experience. As for promotions – I think they follow the same pattern as you’d expect elsewhere - need, performance, and opportunity all have a significant influence on promotions. What’s confusing, but perhaps not unexpected, is the simple observation that titles for the same position vary so widely between institutions. A “Director” in one institution is the same as an “Associate” or “Assistant” Director in another – and so on. More interesting perhaps is the notion of a hybrid faculty/staff appointment. I’ve seen instances where career services staff were given “Lecturer” appointments along with their staff titles as they were teaching a professional development course for academic credit (same thing as an adjunct). But I think that is the exception. Do I think this is because of administrative barriers or personal preference? Honest answer is that I don’t know. If you could demonstrate the appropriate credentials for a faculty appointment and clarify where you’re going to find the time to prepare, give the class, and provide student hours (on top of your already very full schedule) and demonstrate you are a good teacher to boot, you could make the argument for consideration. But, we’re talking one course here. If you’re looking for tenure consideration and treatment otherwise as a FT faculty member -- alongside your role as a career counselor -- you’d have to convince me you could find the time and energy to do two full-time jobs, and you’d never convince anyone else either. One of them has to be part-time/adjunct. One of my personal goals (ambitions?) is to investigate teaching in Columbia’s core curriculum. But knowing what a demanding job that is and knowing my current schedule, that’s not something I’ll be looking into immediately.
Jenny Furlong:
To answer your second question, I don't have a joint faculty appointment. I did teach an upper-level undergraduate course in French -- Discourses of the Feminine in the French 18th Century -- in the Fall of 2005. It was amazingly fun to have an excuse to read some of these books again, but it was exhausting to work a full-time job and teach a course. I've since had a couple of less demanding teaching roles in Philadelphia through the connections I had made while working at the American Philosophical Society. However, even this extra work was challenging, and I've passed the position on to a good friend who is a historian of 19th century Philadelphia.
As to my own research, well, I haven't really touched it -- though I have the intention of someday doing so. I am still a proud member of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies but have found that my personal life, my love for reading all sorts of things, and my love for sewing and knitting tends to interfere with my after-hours research activities. (It's hard to knit and read a challenging article at the same time.) This is not to say that it would be impossible for me to do some independent work in my field in my current position. One former colleague researched and published a book about newspapers in the Civil War while working in our pre-grad unit; another continued to have an active role in archaeological research in Guatemala. My own research feels like one of those things I'd like to get around again to at some point, but that might not happen tomorrow.
Question from DI:
I have thought for some time about possibly trying to enter career counseling at a school because I really enjoy engaging and equipping students. My one concern about this is that I currently work at a school as a software developer and I know, for better or for worse, and that I'm definitely on the high end of salaries for individual contributors. Is there any way to make the switch to career counseling without taking a massive pay cut? Or, do I need to move to Montana for this so the pay cut does not hurt so much?
Jenny Furlong:
At Penn, and I believe at many other institutions, salaries are organized by grade, a bit like the federal government. Penn's salary chart can be found here.
When a position is posted on the Penn HR database, it is always associated with a grade. So, though you may not know exactly what you personally would make if offered the position, you at least know the minimum and maximum that you might earn.
You might take a look at some of the institutions where you might be interested in working to see if they organize their salaries in a similar way. If so, take a look at a few sample positions (even if they are not in career counseling) and see what salary grades are associated with them.
Rebecca Bryant:
The information Jenny gave about salary grades at Penn is great. We don't have anything quite that clear at Illinois, but salaries are public knowledge and easily accessible at the library. Different institutions release this information in different ways--just contact a reference librarian at the institution. As Richard mentioned earlier, titles can be confusing, but it is nonetheless a very useful tool.
Research & Publication
Question from Paula Foster Chambers:
Rebecca said:
I think many of you may understand me when I say that it was very exciting to finally write something that I knew people were reading!
I SO understand that! That was a major part of the reason I left academe--I felt that the farther I progressed in my career, the smaller my reading audience became and the less impact my writing had on the world.
Your statement excites me also because it implies that career counselors write and publish, and that people actually read their stuff. That is fantastic to hear. Can you and the other speakers please say a little more about that? What are the most prominent journals that you guys read and/or publish in, and is it primarily other career counselors who read them (nothing wrong with that) or do they also have wider audiences?
If you are not talking about articles in professional journals, what else are you talking about?
Where are the opportunities for a university-based career counselor to enjoy that wonderful feeling of writing something important and having people actually read it?
Jenny Furlong:
Writing is a large part of the work that I do (and not only because Julie Vick and I write for the Chronicle). Almost every day, I write and edit messages that go out to our student listservs. This can mean everything from the rather mundane task of making sure a job positing is complete and correct before sending it out to writing longer messages that publicize our programs, discuss resources for a particular career field, or inform students of our services. Students and postdocs read these everyday, so they must be clear, concise and useful. Our lists reach hundreds of people, so, in a sense, it's a wonderful forum for my work.
Moreover, I am in regular communication with students and postdocs by email. I can not stress how much this calls upon my writing skills. Often someone will send me their resume or other job search materials by email, and, if I give them feedback over email (rather than in person), I take care to craft meaningful comments. Though only one person will be on the receiving end of this piece of writing, this personalized feedback is ideally more helpful to him or her than any article I could write.
As to professional forums, I would guess that my colleagues across the country and I read The Chronicle of Higher Education regularly and a few of us sometimes write articles for it. Professional conferences like those of the Graduate Career Consortium (GCC), the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the American College Student Personnel Association, the Council of Graduate Schools and many others could certainly be appropriate forums for career counselors working with Ph.D.'s to present their work. Along with a colleague from the University of Michigan, Tom Lekher, I wrote an article entitled "Career Services for Graduate and Professional Students" which appeared in a publication entitled Supporting Graduate and Professional Students: The Role of Student Affairs (eds. Guentzel and Nesheim). This was something I did mostly in my spare time. Though there are clearly many interesting issues to research in Ph.D. career development, this is not really a large part of my job.
Do I miss “academic” research, lecturing, and writing? No -- because I still do it -- just in a different context. As Rebecca and Jenny have said, we probably do more writing, and have it read by more people, and it has a greater impact, now than we ever did when we were writing academically. I thought my dissertation was brilliant – but I’m not rushing to check how many people have cited it or checked it out of the library. The writing I do now, in e-mails, newsletters, booklets, workshop materials, and the like is stimulating and challenging and, I think, read by thousands (our list serves total about 7,000 students). At some point, I would like to get back to writing longer set pieces of the 8-12,000 word academic article variety -- but that awaits a really compelling topic -- and, perhaps, better time management. I read the Chronicle religiously (both HE and Philanthropy), still follow a few academic journals (though I don’t read them as closely as I once did; helpfully, in my field, the line between academic and non-academic writing is pretty fuzzy) and follow the output of several professional organizations (as indicated earlier – CGS, NCDA, NACE) and research studies such as the Responsive PhD. But I have a new discipline to stay on top of now-- new techniques, information, and skills to master. Preparing for a conference presentation or a new workshop series is demanding. It requires research, writing, rehearsal/prep, and delivery -- all the things that “academic” lecturing entails. It also requires contextualization -- itself pretty challenging for students with such diverse interests and backgrounds. Is it the same as my academic work? It requires the same skills, just applied to new information.
Question from Paula Foster Chambers:
It seems as though there are many similarities between your departments. Could you elaborate on the organizational structure of career centers and the types of services offered?
Jenny Furlong:
Once you start working in higher education and talking to colleagues at other institutions, you realize that every institution is organized in a very different way.
As I mentioned, I work in a centralized office that sees students (at every degrees level) in nine out of Penn's twelve schools. An advantage to this is having colleagues who know about a *wide* range of career fields. Another advantage is having a centralized source of job and recruiting functions.
Other universities do this differently. I often find that there is a fair amount of similarity between my office and Richard's at Columbia (and Richard, please feel free to comment on this). However, one difference even between these similar offices is that we see Wharton Ph.D. students, and I don't believe that Richard works with Ph.D. students from Columbia's business school. (Please correct me if I am wrong, Richard).
Some of our colleagues work in an office that sees students at all levels from one school (usually a school/college of arts and sciences).
Some of our colleagues work directly out of a graduate student center.
Some work out of a graduate dean's office.
Some work exclusively with postdocs in the sciences and are affiliated with a postdoc office.
Richard Kurz:
Types of career centers. Jenny’s right -- lots of different combinations-- each institution seems to have its own structural approach although Columbia’s and Penn’s Career Centers are very similar in their organization and coverage. Our Center works with all degree categories as well as alums and the occasional post-doc. Mind you -- within the Center itself we specialize by degree and, to a certain extent, by school. Several schools at Columbia -- business, law, journalism, international and public affairs, social work-- have their own career services offices. Others, as I indicated in an earlier note, work under our Center’s umbrella. We’ve all seen other organizational formulations work well -- stand-alone undergraduate and graduate career services -- centralized and decentralized organizations -- and so on.
Rebecca Bryant:
I agree with Richard and Jenny-there is no single formula for how career centers are structured at institutions across the United States. So as you explore, apply, and interview for positions, I'd advise you to become knowledgeable about the structure of things at the institution to which you are applying. Here at Illinois, we are very decentralized. There is a central career center, which primarily serves undergrads. In addition to that there are another 20 or so college/department/discipline-specific career/placement offices, which often work directly with employers to arrange on-campus interviews. My office is in the Graduate College and offers services to all graduate students on campus, with a focus on providing services to students in the humanities and social sciences, who aren't being served by other career offices on campus.
Why Career Counseling? – The Attraction of this Occupation for Ph.D.s
Question from Paula Foster Chambers:
Many thanks for the speakers' helpful responses to the questions that have been asked so far, but I'd like to ask a deeper one. Why career counseling? What would each of you say are the real major most meaningful payoffs for you in the career counseling profession? Obviously you're not doing it for the money, the fame, or the prestige. Why do some PhDs (and non-PhDs, for that matter) stay happy in this field for literally decades at a stretch? I know it's true, having met several "lifers" in my day, and I tell you, they are some of the happiest campers I know. Why is that???
Other career counselors (I know you are there!) please feel free to jump in with your own responses to any and all of the questions that have been asked this week, but especially this last one. Why do you love what you do?
Richard Kurz:
Why career counseling? Several reasons:
1. I get to work with students (and alums) on really important questions -- a real privilege.
2. I get to share my life experience individually and with groups and see it make a positive impact.
3. I get a chance to grow every day-- intellectually, socially, personally -- as I work to address student questions.
4. I get to work in a university setting. Can you believe the number of interesting events going on around here and the number of interesting people here all the time?
5. My job is different every day. The questions and situations change all the time. It would be really tough to find this job boring.
6. You can always get better at what you do. You get pushed and stretched in this job.
7. The people I work with are remarkably supportive. I’m really very lucky.
EL:
I work in a general career center at a large school. I work primarily with our population of 7500 grad students in a wide array of disciplines. Here are some of the things I most love about my job (not in any particular order). As you read these, keep in mind that I considered becoming a mental health counselor and a professor before deciding on my current career track.
1. Learning about interesting degree fields, research projects, career trends, and people
2. Being humbled and awed by the amazing things our students are doing
3. Teaching and instructing – but not grading papers
4. Counseling -- but not doing detailed case notes or worrying about hospitalizing patients
5. Writing -- but not waiting five years for an article to get published
6. Developing / creating lots of neat stuff (handouts, workshops, website, etc)
7. Bringing others together (students, staff, faculty, alumni, deans, etc)
8. Helping students make important decisions; achieve their goals; and develop into productive scholars, employees, and individuals
9. Interacting with other career counselors -- in my office, around the state, and across the nation
10. Having a life outside of work
Jenny Furlong:
My colleague Julie Vick often points out that no one grows up thinking "I want to be a career counselor when I grow up." I think this is a very funny statement, but I also think it reflects that I and so many of my colleagues came into this field rather serendipitously and then found our positions to be very satisfying.
When I interviewed at Career Services, I was considering several options. When I accepted my current position, I thought "well, in a worst case scenario, if I don't like the actual job, at least I'll learn about many other career options while doing it." As it turns out, I did like the job, for all of the reasons mentioned by Richard and EL in previous posts.
As to opportunities for advancement, colleagues in my office have both moved up to higher-level positions in our office and have also moved on to some interesting positions. One Ph.D. now directs an undergraduate program at Penn, another now works for the State Department on cultural heritage issues, still another was promoted to the Senior Assistant Director position in our pre-Grad unit.
Paula Foster Chambers:
To throw in my own $.02, although I am not a career counselor myself per se, in creating this list I have served a quasi career-counseling function to the WRK4US population at large, not so much providing direct advice myself (although I have done some of that) as by simply creating and facilitating a forum where humanities PhDs can "counsel" each other, pooling their knowledge and helping each other through the stages, phases, highs and lows of getting off the "traditional academic employment" track.
My own interest in helping people find the right work to suit their needs, interests and highest talents is profound. I feel there is more pain (not physical pain, but daily, drip-drip, joy-killing pain) caused in this world by a poor match between the job and the worker than by almost any other cause. Call me a bleeding heart liberal, but it bothers me a LOT that so many people are slaving away in jobs that they hate. I think about it almost every day because most of my friends are not nearly as happily employed as I am*, so I hear about their struggles and their pain all the time. I also see a definite relationship between education, opportunity and socioeconomic status. It kills me to see a talented choral composer scrubbing toilets for a living. Or, equally, a gifted mechanic giving talks and grading papers, which bores him, when he'd really rather be fixing my car or designing a cabinet. So, because of the "career dissonance" that I see all around me, I want to reach down to the center of the Earth’s core and MAKE whatever adjustment needs to be made so that everyone can have work for which they are well-suited. It is just such a huge BUMMER to me that work has to be so very painful for so many people.
For that reason, I see career counseling as a social justice profession and hold it dear to my heart as one of my secret fantasy careers (along with essayist, dancer and stand-up comic). If only I could live in parallel worlds and have more than one life!!
I have shed some of my more naïve beliefs about careers over the years. For example, I used to believe that each person had only one "true calling" that once found, would satisfy them for life. Not so. There is no "one true calling" any more than there is only "one true love," and moreover, we change during our lives (duh!), so what thrilled us in our 20s can become boring in our 30s. I now believe there is a range of options available to each of us at each time in our lives, and our job is to discover that range and make the best possible choices based on what we know at the time.
Anyway, I could talk about this absolutely all day, but I hope the postings this week have helped some of you understand why on earth I would include career counseling as an option for people like us.
TR:
I’m not exactly a lifer, but I’ve very much enjoyed my 3rd career as a counselor to grad students on career-related issues because
1. Becoming an expert on a 19th century British poet seemed too small a world to me. I have especially enjoyed learning about the sciences and engineering and so many other nooks and crannies of the known world through exposure to what all our advanced students are working on.
2. Classroom teachers in the humanities tend to be sole practitioners. Interacting as a counselor with colleagues and support staff on team projects that require good relationship and time management skills has been challenging and fun.
3. Working with young adults who want and need support at crucial turning points during graduate school is more satisfying than persuading a classroom of freshman that writing well developed paragraphs is an essential academic skill.
4. I like encouraging grad students to use their problem-solving skills and to brainstorm with them on how to approach their transition to employment. When a more direct approach seems warranted, I also like telling other people what to do without having to do it myself!
Rebecca Bryant:
I really like Julie Vick's quote. As I mentioned in my introduction, as I shifted from a faculty career path to a non-faculty career path, career counseling wasn't specifically in my planning. But many of the reasons that Richard and EL listed were also among the list of things I was seeking for my career and life. Being part of a stimulating university community; interacting with our students and colleagues and having the privilege to learn about the exciting things they are doing; constantly learning about new things-career related, graduate education related, and also about what our students are researching; serving others; writing-these are things I enjoy immensely. On top of that, I also enjoy many of the organizational and managerial responsibilities within my position, including things like strategic planning, initiating new programs, and leading and managing new projects.
Development of Interpersonal Skills
Question from GK:
From all that I have heard thus far, it seems as though career counseling is one of the more “people-oriented” fields out there and that the panelists gain a great deal of satisfaction from that. It clearly takes many interpersonal skills and an inclination toward being sociable.
That this is a source of job satisfaction is quite understandable. Think of the career beginner or student who says “I want to work with people”: he or she hits on a common (if not universal) aspiration. Helping people, making a difference in their lives, being part of a team, and the sheer spontaneity and variety of interactions are all things many job seekers want. This is all relevant to this list, I believe, because corporations and many other types of organizations explicitly seek interpersonal skills along with “content” expertise. Job descriptions say so, and I think it indicates that they realize that all people do not necessarily have “people skills” (deliberate use of a business buzz word here).
It’s interesting, then, that academic training does not automatically provide any training or background in these skills. There is surely a great need for them, and those academics who just happen to have interpersonal or communication skills can succeed handily in their field (given they are strong in scholarship itself, of course). But there is traditionally no (or rarely any) formal part in academic apprenticeship to prepare one for the many ways communication, empathy, presentation, and diplomacy are needed other than simply diving into the melee. And, at the risk of perpetuating a stereotype, academics are known to be introverted at times.
It might be interesting, then, to hear panelists discuss whether they think the bundle of attributes I have labeled “people” skills are innate, acquired, how and when they acquired them, etc.
For my part, I feel I really had to work to gain them, or certain ones, in making the transition from academia to corporate work. I have in mind, for example, diplomacy: having to present inconvenient facts, often to superiors, in a way that they can accept and will act on. I simply did not have to think this way in my academic experience.
By the way, I got valuable coaching in these skills from—career counselors. (I am not one myself but have benefited from their services immensely, having changed careers more than once.)
Rebecca Bryant:
I agree that there's usually no formal thought given to skills development in graduate school. But I believe that graduate students end up developing strong skills nonetheless. However, I think that it's often very challenging to identify these in oneself, especially when you're still in graduate school or really close to academe. As you mentioned, coaching from career counselors can really help in this regard. Graduate school can be a tough environment in that we end up surrounded by brilliant people: other graduate students as well as faculty. It's easy to lose sight of what your strengths are, and how they might fit into other careers.
Sometimes the skills that you develop in graduate school are things you wouldn't have planned on. While diplomacy was not a skill you had an opportunity to develop, GK, it's actually something I did have a chance to work on (a great deal). My relationship with my adviser was sometimes difficult, and I needed to exercise a great deal of diplomacy and tact in order to successfully manage our relationship and to complete my degree. Another skill that I think I developed during my graduate education—and that probably most of the people on this list have achieved some mastery of--is the ability to rapidly read, absorb, and synthesize large amounts of information. We've all survived those gruelling graduate seminars, with hundreds of pages of incredibly dense reading to complete in one week, usually with a paper due, too.
Effective Use of Career Counseling
Question from CV:
After the discussion last week on working in career counseling, I was very impressed to read about all the various ways our guest experts helped grad students. I was wondering if any of those in working in counseling could suggest ways for those of us seeking help at career services to most effectively work with career counselors.
I have found it difficult to find the help I'm looking for at my university's career services. Our graduate school does not have career services specifically for grads (the professional schools do and I have found the one that matches my interests to be a good source of job postings though I can't use them for other services). Our university-wide career services center seems more geared for undergrads. They did offer a workshop about identity issues when you're a Ph.D. thinking of going a non-academic route -- while encouraging, it wasn't helpful in terms of specific, “what can I do to find a job” sort of ways. I have identified a few specific fields I'd like to work in and geographic areas (all far from where my university is which may be part of the problem) but can't seem to get advice beyond “take interest assessment tests, do info interviewing, consider an internship, and we can review your resume” -- which is frustrating.
If you work as a career counselor, what can students do to most effectively benefit from your services? Or if you have benefited from meeting with a counselor or using a university's career services, what did you find to be the most helpful? Or how did you get what you needed, even when what you need isn't entirely clear to yourself?
YW:
I would try going to career counseling agencies that can offer their services for free. Most are non-profit agencies that exist for marginal populations like youth or immigrants. But if you're a grad student (i.e. poor ) or under-employed, that might qualify as marginal enough to use their services. You can also try the YMCA or YWCA. Your university career centre may be able to refer you to a free agency, too.
I started using a career counselor a year ago. He was vital in shifting my job search from 1st gear to 5th and I credit him for the interviews I've gotten. What helped is that he had some of the same interests as I did -- history, politics, the need for an urban environment etc., meaning he was better attuned to my personal goals and sensibilities. He also gave me time lines by which I had to achieve certain projects: do 5 info interviews by next month; reformat your resume in 2 months, etc. It was also important that he worked with adult career changers rather than students. This meant that I could see myself as one of a million high-achieving professionals going through a normal life process, rather than as a lost grad student.