When I decided to quit my fulltime job and go out on my own as a consultant, I wanted to do something with what I’d learned about job searches during my 10+ years as a hiring manager. Over the years, I’d watched many people make the transition from academia to industry. I’d even helped a few do it.
I had also seen the same mistakes made over and over and over again. As a hiring manager in an applied field, I’d received uncustomized CVs with no cover letters or generic, uninformative cover letters. These applicants hurt their chances because they had not done the work to help me understand how their past experience prepared them for the job for which I was hiring. In many cases, it wasn’t even clear they knew (or cared) what job they were applying for. In a few cases, their cover letter actually spoke about a long-standing interest in a field related to mine… but not mine.
At networking events, I would run into people so bitter about their experiences in academia that they couldn’t talk about their future career goals in anything but defeatist terms. These people were doing themselves more harm than good at these networking events. They would have been better served to work through their unhappiness about their changed career plans before they went out networking.
At these same events, I met many, many people who had put off networking until the last minute and had therefore lost the opportunity to do it in a more natural manner. They were urgently looking for job leads, but networking is most successful when you have time to allow relationships to form before you need a job.
I realized that most academic programs don’t really prepare their students for leaving academia, and so people’s understanding of how to navigate their way into the business world is determined by luck: whether or not they have someone in their family who can guide them, and whether or not they have come across information such as how to convert a CV into a resume.
I decided to write a short book about what I had learned, with a goal of making this information more universally available, and so Navigating the Path to Industry came to be. Almost immediately, I started to get invitations to give a seminar based on my book. I’ve done several such seminars now, sometimes tailored to focus more on the mental preparation and networking that should happen before a job search, sometimes tailored to focus more on the nuts and bolts of a job search (like turning a CV into a resume).
I’ve enjoyed giving those seminars, and would like to give more people a chance to hear one, if they are interested. So I’ve decided to take the version of my seminar that covers the widest range of topics and offer an online version. This two-hour seminar covers both the mental preparation and networking before a job search AND the nuts and bolts of applying for non-academic jobs. Navigate the Path to Industry is enrolling now. The live session will be September 20, from 10 a.m. – noon PDT.
I am not an employment expert, but I am a former hiring manager talking about what I learned in more than 10 years of involvement in hiring decisions. I don’t pretend to have all the answers for how to get a job, but I do think I know something about how to approach a job search in a way that increases your chance for success. Because my original goal was to make this information available more widely, I’ve kept the price of the seminar low: just $25 for the two hour seminar if you sign up by September 6, and $30 after that. And as with all my seminars, there is a no-hassle money back guarantee. If you take the class and aren’t satisfied, just tell me why and I’ll refund your money, no hassles.
If you’re considering a career outside of academia, sign up for this seminar now. If you have any questions or want to arrange for a group to watch the seminar together, email me.
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