Setting Conditions for Your Post Ac Career

6 min readJan 23, 2020

One of the most powerful exercises I used when figuring out work after leaving academia was a deceptively simple exercise on setting conditions by Steve August.

Make four lists:

1) What are my Must Have’s? — What you are going for? what you are trying to create for yourself?

2) What will I Not Tolerate? — What are your deal breakers? If you see this, you’re out.

3) What would be Nice to Have? — You’ll be fine without these things, but in a dream world, you’d love to have it.

4) What will I Accept? — This isn’t exactly what you want but you’ll make it work if it’s there.

Work Attributes

Thinking about the kind of work you might want next, make a list of the attributes that fit each category. You might consider the following work attributes you're setting conditions for:

The salary/money you will make.
Benefits such as health insurance or retirement.
Your work schedule (e.g. flexible scheduling versus a 9 to 5).
The geographic location (or remote) of the work you will be doing.
Travel (or lack of).
Career possibilities or future directions for this work.
Your needs with regard to family care giving.
Your needs with regard to self-care and personal well being.
How collaborative or individually focused will the work be.
Type of work you will do e.g. routinized work, creative work, analytical work.
What your workspace looks or feels like.
The collegiality of the people you will work with.

Notice if certain work attributes are easier for you to set certain kinds of conditions versus other kinds of conditions. For instance, maybe you find it easy to say I “Must Have” a job whose salary meets the basic needs for my budget, but you may find it more challenging to put a salary for yourself that would be "Nice to have".

Consider allowing yourself to ask for what you want while also accepting that you may not get everything you’re looking for. Maybe you’d “Like to Have” a job that’s remote but find yourself saying you “Will Accept” a job in one of three places where you could drive (even though that’s not ideal). This process asks you to put down on paper a first go at what you want and what you’re willing to accept.

If you’re realizing there are a number of paths you might go down for Post Ac work, consider other work attributes besides the job itself. Is one of your “Must Haves” primarily individually focused work? If so, consider what impact that might have on the different paths you’re considering. You might then reconsider industries that require a great deal of working with others or presenting material to groups of people.

If you’ve come from a particularly toxic work environment, I would strongly encourage you to spend significant time looking at which aspects of the toxic work environment you will put into your “I Will Not Tolerate” bucket. What specifically are your deal breakers? How will you know those things exist as you’re applying for a new work environment/working with a new client?

That said, if you're coming from a toxic environment it’s equally important to think through what you’d put in your “Must Have” and “Nice to Have” buckets with regard to collegiality. What does a good workplace look and feel like to you? How will you know it when you see it? Making sure you set conditions to be considered a valued and welcomed employee should be central to your search, particularly if you’ve faced difficult environments in the past.

Taking seriously your needs around family care giving and self-care and personal well being are vital in this exercise. You are encouraged to think about all of the aspects of your work life that will lead you towards success for you and your family.

It is absolutely OK to prioritize picking up your kid from school, going to a mid-day therapy appointment or being able to travel last minute to take care of aging parents.

These priorities may mean you need to move other things into your “Will Accept” list, but the conditions you set should reflect YOUR needs, not an organization’s needs.

This exercise is iterative and as you do it, you might try out different conditions while looking at job boards or potential consulting gigs. I encourage you to let yourself be surprised. Things can change. You might find some conditions changing categories or being omitted altogether.

When I left academia, I realized after doing a few consulting projects that I really liked collaborative work, even though it didn’t fit the stereotype I had about a researcher doing their analysis in an office. After some time, I moved “Collaborating with awesome people on work I enjoy” from my "Nice to Have" category into a "Must Have".

But why do Post Acs not know how to do this?

Most academics have had very little control over the job conditions in front of us when we are on the academic job market. We don’t often know what the salary will be, we’re shooting darts at the places we’re interested in geographically, we have no idea what our teaching schedule will look like or what kinds of work environment we might find ourselves in.

Indeed, it’s a sign of someone who DOESN’T know the academic job market that they’ll say something like “Oh you should just check out [nearby university] and see if they’re hiring.”

Uhhh. The Academic job market doesn’t work like that…

This lack of control means we don’t have much experience looking for a work life that we WANT.

We were taught in grad school to focus on what we could get instead of the conditions that might work best for us and encouraged to work around conditions others had set for us. That’s how many of us ended up in jobs in the middle of nowhere, in toxic departments or struggling to make ends meet. We were trained not to ask what would work best for us.

We are also deep thinkers and so we spun out a dozen scenarios for ourselves about what we might do if this job worked out or that job was available. We did this often without asking if it was what we wanted.

If I get this visiting gig, I can do it for a year, write that article to make myself more attractive to the school I really want where that one scholar might retire this year… Unless that other school has a position in which case I should really work on the book proposal… etc.

In the non academic market, there are far more options and they are less path dependent. It’s not always clear what we can do to make ourselves more appealing to this kind of work or that kind of work. Post Acs can struggle with this openness in part because it makes it harder to spin out the scenarios and we get quickly overwhelmed at all the options in front of us. There are too many different directions we can share our skills, were do we GO?

I could be try working in [Industry 1] but I don’t know if I want to do [Job A] or [Job B]. I could also do [Job B] In [Industry 2] and [Industry 3] but I have no idea if I would like those fields or even if there are jobs in my geographic area. Plus someone just said I might be good at [Job C].

In this overwhelm, it can be worthwhile to explore setting conditions for the work we want and see where each job and industry lines up as it helps to limit the pool and have a higher likelihood of finding work that we like.

This incidentally gives us concrete questions to ask folks in the industries we’re curious about. “I’m really interested in working in this field, but does your field meet my condition?”

Enjoy! I’d love to hear what you gain from doing this exercise.

Setting Conditions for Your Post Ac Career

Make four lists:

Work Attributes

It is absolutely OK to prioritize picking up your kid from school, going to a mid-day therapy appointment or being able to travel last minute to take care of aging parents.

But why do Post Acs not know how to do this?

Written by Beth M. Duckles