What I learned after transitioning from academia to industry in 7 months: strategy
Seven months ago, I decided to leave academia and start looking for an industry job. Six months later, I found (a really good) one. I had to figure out a lot for myself, so I hope writing about my experience here (as well as stories and advice from others) will help someone in the same situation. My experience is specific to a Psychology PhD looking for work in tech, but I hope there are valuable lessons for everyone here and there.
In this post, I will discuss my experience and lessons for (listed here for easy skipping if you need to): how to pick a career, timeline of the process, and application strategy.
How to pick a career
As someone who already planned out their whole academic and professional life since before college (yup, I was one of those!), this whole “what do I want to do for a job?” thing was a completely novel experience for me. There were too many choices, and at once none (when you’ve been single-minded running in one track for 10 years, it’s really, really hard to see if there’s anything else you could do equally well). I have a whole other rant about the whole “Do What You Love” philosophy (which, if you think about it, is entirely capitalistic and not at all idealistic), so what I settled on was: I wanted to do something that still aligns with my values (my job should help people in some ways, and not take advantage of them), that I could be good at, that utilizes the variety of skill sets I’ve accumulated (programming, research, analytics), and that I enjoy. My approach was:
- Search on LinkedIn “Psychology PhD” and see where these people ended up.
- Search on Indeed jobs that contain the keywords “psychology”, and play around with combinations of keywords that contain my other skills.
- Search Indeed job trend graphs to see what’s in demand (I don’t plan to go from one bad market to another).
- Talk to people in my network.
As a result, I explored people analytics analyst, data scientist, programmer (which explains my other medium post for admission at the Holberton school, an engineering school whose mission I really believe in; I got in after going through a long coding challenge, and finally declined to try out a job first). I also applied for a few jobs with these titles (except programmer), and actually got interviews for people analytics. I finally settled on UX, a path I know about long ago, but did not consider seriously until talking more with friends and acquaintances in the field. I’ll write another post advocating for why UX Research is an exciting field to be in right now for those who are interested in studying behaviors (Psych PhDs!)
Timeline
- March-June: I was still working full time in Hong Kong as a postdoc then, but had slowed down my pace a little and started to research seriously into my options, read a lot of job descriptions, tried to decide what I wanted for a career, reached out to a few people who were also ex-academics to ask about their experience, took online classes, searched and applied to a wide range of jobs.
- July-mid October: I resigned from my job, moved back to the States, took a short break, signed up for a few volunteering opportunities, networked A LOT, searched and applied for jobs. Interviews then came (each job had multiple rounds), and mid-October, I accepted an offer!
Lessons
- Start early! Those who got a job right after grad school already did their networking, hackathons, internships, volunteering, etc. during grad school. I can’t recall anyone I networked with who had a full time job right away without having done *any* networking, researching, or gaining industry experience.
- Job hunting is a full time job (or a really long-term part time job). Like any other task, the longer you do it, the more efficient you become, but it will take time. Just be prepared that if you haven’t done anything to prepare yourself for industry jobs (I was very underprepared), it will take you at least a few months.
- It takes time, and it’s ok. If we don’t count the months I was just simply trying to decide what to do, my job search took about 3–4 months. It seems typical for most people I talked to, or for the people whose LinkedIn I stalked excessively for research ^_^(some even took as long as 6 months, especially if they were not in the Bay area — for tech). The time it takes for one to get a job does not seem to predict their success, although if it has been taking a while and you’re hitting a wall, it helps to change up your strategies.
- Some fun analysis (from real polling data!) about how long it takes for academics to find a job (though it wasn’t discriminating academic vs industry jobs):
Application Strategy
There are 2 schools of thoughts, both non-empirical: have a few resume templates that you could change up quickly, and apply to as many jobs as possible, OR, customize your resume for *every* job you apply to, even if it means you apply to fewer jobs.
I did both.
At the beginning, I was really dumping my resume everywhere. Job applications range the whole gamut, from “super easy and low effort” to “I have to submit research samples?”, so it took a lot of time to apply to as many as I did. I burnt out, and for a short while only applied to jobs that I was excited about. Some stats — this includes all positions that I tried for, beyond UX Researcher:
Rough estimate:
- Total application number: ~150
- Practice: 30 (i.e. didn’t know jack about applying or industry)
- Not really interested, just wanted to give it a try: 50
- Genuinely invested: 30
- Cover letters written (because of interest/required): 10
- Position scrapped (as opposed to rejection): 5
Exact number: (I documented these only)
- Heard back (first round): 17
- On-site/final round (video call): 6
- Among the final rounds, was rejected from 1, withdrew from 2
- Offers: 3
These stats were roughly the same for another friend of mine who had the same background and was applying to similar roles. She had a better success rate however, which I would attribute to her having more industry experience (worked at a small startup for 9 months in a very prominent role), being very smart and confident, and especially strategic with her job search (I got a lot of advice from her).
Lessons
- Neither strategy described above worked well(judging from response rate, but who knows, there could be other factors at play). What seemed to work best was to give applications different priorities, and allocate efforts accordingly (in fact, I have a friend who had a whole spreadsheet, with color-coded priority levels for the jobs applied). For the jobs you really like, customize as much as you can. For jobs that you are so-so with (because the job description is vague, or you don’t have any particular opinion about the company), you can do the resume dumping.
- This does mean that you should not apply indiscriminately, but you shouldn’t be too selective either. In my experience, job descriptions don’t always match up to what they eventually tell you, so don’t put too much stock in those. It’s definitely a very subjective call — in this case, networking could help.
Next: re-framing your experience (resume writing), finding the right resources, recruiters, networking, interviewing, and how to pick an offer.
