Erik Marshall

I am looking for a job. An academic job. A nonacademic job. Something in the middle.  Everyone in academia knows the academic job market is very tight, and this is more or less off-season for a job search anyway. But still, I scour the appropriate boards and listings, looking for, ideally, a tenure-track position, or perhaps a nice post-doc in media or cinema studies. In the meantime, I am also beginning to look for nonacademic jobs (jobs that do not consist mainly of teaching and writing at the college level), and this latter task is proving to be difficult, mainly because I having trouble figuring out where to start. Like most recent Ph.D. graduates, I have a skillset that many employers should find quite desirable, such as :

• Excellent organizational skills obtained through years of teaching, as well as through writing a massive document, as well as juggling publications, departmental service
• Superb writing skills, if I do say so myself
• Tech skills that likely surpass those of other applicants. Word processing, social networking, database searching, blogging, educational software-ing…I can do all that, and have been for many years.
• Ability to use bullet points
• Great communication skills. Years of academic conferences, committee work, teaching and publishing have honed remarkable written and oral communication skills in a variety of contexts.

But, also like many recent graduates, I have little experience in the corporate world. I fear that I am perceived as having the deadly combination of being over-qualified (a term I absolutely despise) and under-experienced. I also am not as familiar with corporate lingo as those who entered that culture out of college, which makes it hard to recognize jobs for which I may be qualified. I am not looking at nonacademic jobs only as Plan B, nor am I bailing out of academia, but trying to explore my options on both sides of the fence (as well as those that are firmly on the fence).  What can I do? Freelance writing of any sort, teaching/training, editing, proofreading, tech writing, software implementation…the list goes on. Perhaps I should, as this article suggests, start with my passions instead of skills, but that’s easy – writing and teaching are truly my dual passions, and anything that incorporates either or both should make both me and an employer quite happy.