Considering a Non-Academic Career: Some Musing from a Scholar-Practitioner

Even before the pandemic, I received numerous requests from PhD students, postdocs and at times, junior faculty, for conversations about alternative careers for PhDs. In many respects, from the outside, my career looked ideal — I was able to do meaningful research without the pressure to publish or perish. And admittedly, there were many aspects of my career within a development agency that were a dream come true.

In these conversations, I would raise other aspects of leaving academia that people often hadn’t thought about; I was a bit of a reality check.

With the pandemic, I’m being asked to talk about alternative careers to academia more regularly, and see more conversations about this on Twitter, which I try to contribute to constructively. I thought it might be helpful to draw out some of my comments in long-form to help students or others thinking about a career change reflect on the process a bit more.

Two Paths

There are likely more than this, but I essentially see two paths for PhDs making the decision to leave:

A. A research job in a non-academic institution: you love research, but not sure you want an academic tenure track job for a host of reasons.

B. A non-research job: you realize that research isn’t for you. Instead, you see yourself in a career, perhaps, that uses research to do other things, but you do not generate research yourself.

I delineate these two types of career paths in the following way: generators of knowledge and consumers of knowledge.

Most people think I was on Path A. However, when I left academia, I was on Path B. Trained as a social psychologist, at a time when research was becoming more cognitive and lab based, I found it hard to motivate to do research. By the time I got the phenomenon I cared about into the lab, it no longer looked like the phenomenon I cared about. I had a prestigious postdoc, with tons of resources, and produced nothing. I remember saying to myself while waiting to hear from the one last academic job I was up for that if I didn’t get this job, I was leaving academia. Fortunately, I didn’t get it.

I was initially hired by Mercy Corps in 2006, not to do research, but to train staff and partners in interest-based negotiation. At this point, Mercy Corps hadn’t started to invest in rigorous research. That wouldn’t happen until 2010. When I joined Mercy Corps, I thought I wasn’t going to do another research project ever again. Instead, not until I had a supervisor who also had a PhD was I utilized to my full capacity. She knew the skills I developed as a PhD student were useful for designing programs grounded in evidence and evaluating them. It was only later did I return to doing research, at first gradually — spending time on both program design and research, and then in 2017, full time on research.

I share this because not all non-academic career paths are the same, and depending which path you see yourself on, the path is a bit different.

Generators of Knowledge

For those who think they want to continue conducting research and generating knowledge, the path, while not easy, is a bit more straightforward. You are likely looking for research and maybe analyst jobs. The people hiring you are looking for the skillset you developed during your PhD program; there is less of a need to figure out how to translate your skills. Moreover, the person hiring you is more likely to have a similar background. This, again, reduces the need to translate your skills.

A question that often arises is where should I look for jobs. This is the piece I did find challenging. Unlike academic jobs, which get posted largely in the summer or early fall, usually in a handful of places, jobs outside academia are posted all over the place. This can feel overwhelming. For international development positions, Devex is probably the most comprehensive place to look; I find Twitter more and more a good resource for jobs. But in general, there are the likely organizations that hire researchers: Think Tanks (Center for Global Development, Brookings, CSIS, Rand, ODI, etc), the World Bank and research organizations (IPA, JPAL, Ideas42, etc). USAID and FCDO (formerly DFID) are investing more in research. For example, the Democracy, Rights and Governance Center for Excellence or the Development Innovation Ventures unit within USAID are good examples of this. And agencies, like Mercy Corps and IRC, continue to invest in research and hire researchers. Others are starting to, like IRI. However, the growth within development agencies has been slower than I would have predicted.

The one question I often ask people who are thinking of taking this path is: how independently do you like to work? The degree to which you will be able to work independently will vary across organizations, but this is generally a big difference between an academic career and conducting research for an organization. You likely will not be determining your research agenda alone, but doing it with an organization that may have a point of view, and be committed to advocating that point of view. You may not have total control on who you collaborate with. And you likely will have a supervisor, who may want to have considerable influence over your research agenda. Even if you have nominal independence, you may have to build “buy-in” across the organization about what you are doing, and before publishing, you may have more reviewers than you ever dreamed of (or had nightmares about). More importantly, there may be people within the organization who have strong feelings about your results, and question whether to release them. These were some the hardest conversations I had in my previous position, and fortunately, due to strong leadership on top, we were always able to publish our results regardless of these concerns.

I raise this as it is something I struggled with throughout my career. I lasted thirteen years at Mercy Corps, so I managed it. But not always with grace and have some scars. But when I made the decision to leave academia, I had not even thought about these differences and what it would mean to have a “boss”. As you begin the process of exploring non-academic careers, it’s important to examine both your personal preferences for how you enjoy working (largely solo vs teams) as well as the organizational cultures of where you are applying.

Consumers of Knowledge

This path is more complicated, for various reasons. For one, what can be complicated is knowing what positions to look for. The second, and what I think is the harder piece, which I couldn’t articulate when I was searching for work, is how to translate my skills in a way someone without a PhD could understand. It’s only after years at Mercy Corps, and having a supervisor who had a PhD herself, did I figure it out.

What role/position do I look for?

What types of jobs “consume” knowledge? Specific to development, where I see this most clearly, are positions in program and policy design. An advantage for people with a PhD in the “evidence revolution” is the need for people who can understand scientific papers and think through how the findings can be incorporated into policies and programs. I spent the majority of my career at Mercy Corps designing peacebuilding programs. One of the reasons I believe I was successful is that I could bring in the evidence-base, and assure our donors that what we were proposing was grounded in what we knew.

More and more, I see this on the part of donors, too. Besides knowing a number of people with PhDs that held relatively senior positions inside the State Department (of course, my sample may be biased), as my career evolved, I spent more and more time with donors in DC, the UK and Europe, sharing the evidence base, not just what Mercy Corps was producing, but the broader field too. The Global Fragility Act, which I helped launch, started with me and a colleague going up to the Hill to brief staffers on the evidence. The US government knowing that it needs to incorporate science into policy has a program geared towards people with PhDs who want to go the non-academic route (the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship, is inclusive of the social sciences and does place people in the State Department).

Additionally, there are roles within Think Tanks and research organizations that aren’t about generating knowledge, but are focused on disseminating knowledge. These are likely to be in the policy offices within these organizations.

However, what makes this more complicated, different sectors or even organizations within a sector, may title similar jobs differently. And the titles sometime mean little to people outside of the sector. My first title was Senior Program Officer. I had no idea what that meant. As a result, job searches can take more time as you need to read the positions. I wish I had more concrete advice here.

Translating skills

As you think about applying for jobs, you will need to figure out how to communicate what skills you bring to the organization. When applying for a non-research role, the person interviewing and hiring you will likely not have a PhD, and will not know intuitively what you skills you bring. In fact, they actually may have stereotypes about academics, and question whether you are practical enough for the position. To help both the recruiter, who is sifting through way too many resumes, and the hiring manger get over this barrier, you need to describe how the PhD provided you with transferable skills that you would bring to the position.

What are these transferable skills? Below I share some of these skills I believe I developed during my PhD:

· Ability to synthesize and organize huge amounts of data and evidence — both quantitative and qualitative. For example, in many proposals, I would have to give a history of a conflict in 1.5 pages. I would quickly read a ton of information and synthesize it for others (usually donors). I was more familiar with the existing evidence, and was also able to absorb, use and integrate new studies quickly.

· Use evidence to advocate a position or strategy. Over the course of my PhD, I learned what information was essential for making an argument, and always had a couple of studies or data points in my back pocket to help me make a point. I later would do this at Mercy Corps and with donors. I also used these skills as the director of the peace and conflict unit to design various agency strategies. My ability to do this was recognized publicly by the Mercy Corps CEO as a skill we needed more of in the organization. (I do think general exams, in particular, prepare you for this.)

· Detailed-oriented, but able to connect to the bigger picture. We learn through the PhD process that our piece of research is part of bigger whole. To conduct that piece of research requires a significant amount of attention to details. But in writing it up, you need to connect it to the wider relevant literature. That’s similar to what is needed in the design of development programs. One program is only going to address a small piece of the overall puzzle. You need to be detailed in how you design the program, but also communicate how it fits in with addressing larger development challenges.

· Construct evidence-based “theories of change”: This is, perhaps, more specific for program design positions. In all programs there is at least an implicit theory, if not an explicit theory, on how the program would lead to change. This is just another term for hypotheses, and as part of the PhD process you learned how to construct testable theories. My training helped me be more comfortable with stating what these hypotheses were, and identifying them when they weren’t explicitly stated in any program documents. My training also helped me use the available evidence to inform what theories of change we should propose.

· Ability to evaluate evidence: Because of my comfort with research methods and quantitative analyses, I could more easily evaluate the quality of evidence being used. This was both for designing programs and figuring out what evidence to use, but also to review what others inside the organization were producing, and help them improve the quality of our evidence.

I also used my research methods and statistical background to help with monitoring and evaluation of programs. This included survey design, indicator development and evaluation designs. However, because the skill sets for monitoring and evaluation overlap with many research jobs, I won’t go into detail here.

For any position, you may have to adjust how you describe these various transferrable skills. The larger point is that as part of a PhD program, you do develop some. You just need to learn how to communicate what they are since they are less likely to be transparent to those hiring you.

Conclusion

I hope these thoughts are helpful as you think about the next steps in your career — whether you stay in academia, or look elsewhere. I was often asked if I regretted getting a PhD, particularly when I was more focused on program design and it was not a requirement for the position. While maybe it wasn’t necessary, I believe whole-heartedly that my success in my program design role, and later as director of the peace and conflict unit, was due to my PhD. But I could only say that once I understood what a PhD gave me beyond research skills.