Job Market: Academic vs Non-Academic Jobs

I had teaching jobs--full-time, part-time, all non-tenure-track.

I've now been staff in higher ed for about five years.

Your advisors do not know about non-academic jobs, because they don't have them.  It wouldn't be right for them to talk about things they don't know about. It's up to you to find someone on the faculty who's worked outside higher ed.

It's not that faculty try to present themselves as experts on subjects about which they know little--such as getting a non-teaching job--it's just that they tacitly assume that the only meaningful conversation is about tenure-track jobs.

There are so many great jobs for smart people outside higher ed that you wouldn't believe it. You need to know how to describe your skills and strengths in terms besides writing scholarly prose. 

The best advice is that given in What Color Is Your Parachute? Namely, you do not know what kinds of jobs there are until you ask lots of people what they do, what they like and don't like about their jobs, and who else to talk to.

I was lucky, because when I was getting my Ph.D. there were people who wrote for Cosmo, documentary filmmakers, archivists, and all sorts of people in and around my grad program. So I got a sense of other job tracks very quickly--even though it took me years to retool myself.

It can be done. You can do it. Keep an open mind. Ask questions. Talk to people. Be a curious person. Get out into the world. Interact with people. Don't just do a lit review.

Statistically speaking, unless a department experiences significant growth, there will be approximately 1 full-time job opening in your advisor's specialty during his lifetime. It will be his job when he retires. Over the course of his academic life, he will have mentored dozens of students; at an R1 university (I attended one too), the unspoken assumption was that we would all somehow find positions at R1 universities, but would find it acceptable to take academic teaching positions at four-year colleges and other academic institutions. Even so, the number of students who will receive PhDs in a year usually exceeds the number of academic positions. As academia becomes increasingly comfortable with adjunct instruction for large numbers of courses, the pool of full-time jobs shrinks. 

Psychology has done an excellent job of defining non-academic applications of the discipline - not only clinical, but a variety of areas in industry, management and the like.  The Occupational Outlook Handbook foresees a 26% growth in I/O psychology jobs in the next 10 years.  For many of those jobs, an applied sociologist would be equally or better qualified. However, the same critical stance of the discipline that might make people effective workers also inhibits them from considering those jobs.  Few programs even have an applied sociology area, and it's not as clearly defined. 

There is a lot of good and interesting work to be done, including research initiatives outside of the academy.  But those who have risen to the top in an R1 institution are less likely to know about it, or to know how to find one's way into it.

Since my program is in Higher Ed, I'm at a unique advantage because a lot of what I do focuses on non-academic job.  Interestingly, I kind of wish we'd focus a little more on research/professor career tracks, but since it is a part-time program, I completely understand why they don't. 

There was an interesting article in the Chron the other day on this: "More Universities Break the Taboo and Talk to PhD's About Jobs Outside Academe (http://chronicle.com.ezproxy.lib.uh.edu/article/More-Universities-Break-the/129647/?key=SWIhJ1NhZSJBN3pnZzhFYG4DaH1gNkNwNnZKbnwkblBTEw%3D%3D)

Great points, Sister Edith! This is already one of the best places to have a thoughtful discussion on the internet.