Week 5: Research Job Titles

This week’s action is for those considering leaving the academy.

At this stage, it’s easy think that you are being strategic when you say things like “I’m open to nonacademic work” or “I’ll look outside the university.” But as I have said in previous posts, vagueness is not a strategy (unless the goal is to be stopped in your tracks!). I get that in some ways, it is comforting because it delays accountability, but vagueness is mostly a great way to waste months that you likely do not have.

A career shift does not exist in the abstract. It exist in job titles.

If you do not know the actual names of the jobs you are targeting, you are not preparing for a job search. You are fantasizing about one.

This week’s task is both simple and the first step in your new research project: What Jobs?

You are going to discover job titles. Not fields. Not sectors. Not vibes. Titles. And you are going to find those job titles by searching job skills.

This week’s action: Set aside forty five minutes. Open a document. Title it “Job Titles That Actually Exist.” Then begin.

Start with LinkedIn or UKJobs or any other job board in the country where you want to live. Start searching by skills: research. teaching. project management.

If you feel energetic, you can skip the job boards and instead look at postings from companies, nonprofits, government agencies, research institutes, and foundations. Scroll. Read. Notice repetition. Write down every job title that even remotely aligns with the kind of work you named in Week 1.

DON’T try to discern whether you are qualified. That question comes later (and if asked far too will stop momentum in a big way!). Right now you are mapping the terrain, not comparing yourself.

As you collect titles, patterns will emerge. You will see that many roles doing work similar to yours do not use the language you have been trained to use. You will see that the word “researcher” is often replaced by analyst, strategist, specialist, manager, director, officer, consultant. You will see that teaching often translates into training, learning, facilitation, knowledge development. Writing becomes communications, content generation, outcome reports, grants, documentation.

This is the point.

PhDs routinely feel lost in the non-academic job market because they search for the wrong words. They type “academic” or “professor” into job boards and find a fraction of what is possible. They search “sociology” or “geography” and decide that industry does not value scholarship. What they are actually discovering is that they do not yet speak the language of the market they want to enter.

Learning job titles is learning the grammar of work.

By the end of your initial foray, you should have a list of at least ten concrete job titles. Fifteen is better. Twenty is excellent. These are not commitments. They are targets. They will eventually tell you what skills matter, what documents are required, and where your energy should go next.

If you feel resistance while doing this, pay attention. Resistance can show you where there is still the work of letting go of identity to do. Clinging to familiar labels happens because letting them go feels like erasure. But it’s not. Even in the exercise, you are not abandoning your training. You are making it legible. You are translating.

When you finish, read your list and notice which titles feel intriguing, which feel neutral, and which provoke an immediate no. All of that information is useful. None of it requires action yet.

Next week, we will take a small subset of these titles and examine what they actually ask for, not what you assume they want. That is where strategy replaces anxiety.

For now, name the jobs. Careers begin with accurate nouns.