Top 10 Non-Academic Jobs for Ph.D.s
by Kevin Tankersley
When Melissa Epstein was working on her
Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of
California, Los Angeles, she fostered aspirations of being a Congressional Fellow or working as a policy maker. Those
plans “didn’t work out,” she said, and
Ms. Epstein now works on the institutional review board at the
Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. She’s in charge
of overseeing the “protection of human subjects,” the “lab rats”
who volunteer to take part in medical testing.
Ms. Epstein earned a master’s degree in Jewish studies from
Oxford and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania is in linguistics and Japanese studies. She also conducted post-doctoral work at the University of Maryland Dental
School. At UCLA, Ms. Epstein completed half of her doctoral
research in head and neck surgery.
How does all this tie in to her current position at Mount Sinai?
“It doesn’t,” she said. “I had to sell myself as somebody new.
I had to be somebody different.”
But that normally isn’t a problem for one who possesses a
doctorate.
“Someone with a Ph.D. has mastered many skills,” said Dr.
Randall S. Hansen, marketing professor at Stetson University
in DeLand, Fla. “Ph.D.s develop and enhance numerous transferable skills: analytical thinking, reasoning, communications,
organizational and time management …so it is a matter of cataloging these skills and seeing the jobs for which they can be
used.”
The bad news is that not every newly-minted Ph.D. recipient
ends up with a teaching position, either by choice or by circumstance. The good new is that there are many opportunities available outside the classroom. Career counselors interviewed for
this piece pointed out that Ph.D. holders looking for work outside of academe have a leg up on the competition: their critical
thinking skills—the very skills they used to earn those doctorates—will impress an employer, especially one outside of
academia.
Finding Your Passion
“What drove you in this direction? What’s the passion that
kept you on the track to an advanced degree?” are two questions
Ph.D.s should ask of themselves, suggested Dr. Woody Catoe,
who works with the College of Humanities and Social Sciences
as the assistant director of the University Career Center at North
Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. “They can
often play off that in their options.”
Dr. Hansen echoed that sentiment: “I think the best bets for
Ph.D.s looking for work outside the academy is to first discover
what they are passionate about, the reasons why they went into
a Ph.D. program,” said Hansen, who also publishes the career
guidance website www.quintcareers.com and works with
Beyond.com, a network of more than 11,000 websites related
to numerous employment, networking, recruitment, certification, and training and issues.
But apart from zeroing in on your passion, what are some of
the non-teaching jobs that are out there for a humanities Ph.D.?
“There’s a wide, wide range,” explained Ms. Louma
Ghandour, associate director for Graduate Student and
Postdoctoral Services at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
This range includes jobs in government—local, state, and federal.
Mr. Ghandour pointed out that the city of Houston, Texas, for
example, employs workers with doctorates in history and law,
while the federal government’s Central Intelligence Agency regularly hires people with Ph.D.s in linguistics.
Government at all levels “is looking for people who can think
analytically but qualitatively and critically,” Ghandour said.
“Those are skills students in the humanities have.”
Dr. Woody Catoe of the University Career Center at North
Carolina State University recommended Ph.Ds in the humanities conduct job searches that include various government agencies. Positions might include responsibilities such as, “…research
or policy-making or doing policy analysis or impact studies.”
These types of government jobs are perfect for those with a
terminal degree in the social sciences, such as sociology or psychology. Said Catoe: “I’ve seen a lot of positions for policy analysts working for a government entity of some sort. These people
come in and examine proposals and legislation, and consult on
city operations.”
Dr. Catoe also said those who hold a Ph.D. in history and
political science are candidates for government jobs as well including, but not limited by any means to, the state department,
embassies, the United Nations, and international relief agencies.
A Ph.D. was a requirement for Alexandra Lord when she was
named acting historian at the United States Public Health Service. A trained medical historian, Dr. Lord wrote her dissertation on medical understanding of the female body during the
18th century to complete her doctoral work at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
“Everyone in our office has an advanced degree,” Dr. Lord
said. “Our program assistant is the only one without a doctorate. She has a master’s.”
The U.S. Public Health Service — which consists of many
different agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, and Indian Health Service – works with the Office
of the Surgeon General to provide background information on
the history of public health, Dr. Lord said.
“Our office not only provides background information [such
as] what happened in the U.S. during the influenza epidemic of
1918-19, but also the context for this information, why the epidemic was so severe, how medical science understood influenza in 1918 and what this meant for the spread of the pandemic
etc,” Dr. Lord said. “All of this means that I could not do my job
without a basic understanding of the development of bacteriology, the medical profession etc., all of which was a key component of my graduate training.”
Dr. Lord completed obtained her bachelor’s degree from
Vassar College; a master’s from the College of William and
Mary; and held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of
California, San Francisco.
Also, “international relief education for a non-profit [agency]
is a wonderful outlet for a Ph.D. in political science,” Dr. Catoe
said. “A lot of people think non-profit equals low salary, and
that’s not always true. There’s a whole world of non-profits that
do good work and pay very good salaries.”
At the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization, for example, a recent employment posting for the
position of program specialist in UNESCO’s Ghana office required a doctorate and offered a salary of just over $91,000.
And the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. had an
opening in its Rome, Italy, office for an interpretation group
chief. The qualified candidate needed “excellent knowledge” of
at least two languages and a working knowledge of a third. The
starting pay for that position was $108,165.
Ph.D.s & Non-Government Jobs
Museums and libraries also hire people with Ph.Ds all the
time, pointed out Louma Ghandour, associate director for Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Services at Rice University. “Lots
of academic libraries within universities are very complex organizations in and of themselves,” she said. “Often, [for university librarians] a Ph.D. is required.
Library and museum work has become very, very sophisticated. Ms. Ghandour explained: “It’s not just cataloging. There
is a lot more research-related work, and [that’s why] a Ph.D. is
required for the job.”
And if cataloguing books isn’t your passion, how about creating them? Both Dr. Hansen and Ms. Ghandour pointed out that
there are many jobs available for people with doctorates in the
humanities in the world of publishing. From Pearson Education
to Houghton Miffin, a Ph.D. in the humanities can help you land
high-level editing (especially if you have prior book editing experience) positions.
“There is textbook editing, writing one’s own work or being a
ghostwriter,” Ms. Ghandour said. “A lot [of Ph.D. holders] have
a passion for writing. That’s what motivates them, and there are
a lot of openings.”
Suzanne Cloud Tapper is a part-time editor at Plexus Publishing in Medford, New Jersey, and has also written four non-fiction books aimed at young adults. Her career in the publishing
business began after eight years of adjunct teaching and an unsuccessful search for a fulltime position in academia.
Ms. Tapper secured “a few” interviews after finishing her
doctorate in American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, “but I never got a job.”
She partly attributes her fruitless pursuit to ageism – “I was
50 when I got my Ph.D.,” she said – and partly to her areas of
research interest: African-American history.
University administrators “assumed a black woman was coming for an interview,” Ms. Tapper said. “A lot of people don’t
want white people teaching African-American history.”
Besides her literary work, Ms. Tapper, who is also a jazz singer,
is the president and a founder of the Jazz Bridge Project, a non-profit foundation dedicated to providing emergency assistance
to fellow musicians, their families, and, often, their survivors.
“Sixty percent of jazz musicians make less than $7,000 a year,
and with no Social Security, you have major stars being penniless,” Tapper said.
The Hardest Sell
The most challenging aspect of finding employment is the
selling of oneself and one’s skills, especially if that self possesses a Ph.D., and is not applying for jobs within higher education. The job search may be more challenging for those who
hold a Ph.D. in the humanities rather than in academic disciplines such as engineering, technology, or business.
“…Someone with a Ph.D. has mastered many skills. It’s more
the type of job they would find fulfilling and that an employer
would be willing to hire,” said Dr. Hansen.
Dr. Catoe of North Carolina State: “They [Ph.D. holders] must
sell their value to a potential employer. I encourage them not to
just focus on their graduate degrees. Bring out the undergrad
degree. It will complement what was done in graduate work,
and employers will look at the whole package….That’s very
valuable to a potential employer.”
Rice’s Ghandour said the biggest struggle she often faces is
having potential employers acknowledge that what a Ph.D.
learned in graduate school can translate to jobs outside of higher
education. “The biggest struggle is not having them recognize
the degrees are in critical thinking,” she said. Ph.D.s “have a set
of skills and they need to recognize what those skills are and be
able to speak about those skills outside of academia.”
Human resource directors need to be willing to consider Ph.D.s
for jobs outside their primary source of study, said Dr. Robert
Weisbuch, president of Drew University and former president
of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Many jobs “you never would have thought of as available to
a humanities doctoral student,” he said. During Dr. Weisbuch’s
eight years at the foundation, he recalled an anthropology Ph.D.
from the University of Texas who gained employment at a home
for delinquent girls who had been sexually abused.
“She used writing and storytelling to improve the girls’ self-
esteem,” he said.
Others Dr. Weisbuch worked with during his time at the foundation include a Ph.D. from Columbia University who writes
pamphlets on anti-hate literature for a law group in Washington; a history graduate student from the University of North
Carolina who writes biographies of astronauts for the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration; and a historian at
Stanford University who worked with a large group of Filipino
immigrants to save a housing project and “created a lasting community” of Filipinos.
While there are non-teaching jobs out there, they can often be
difficult to locate. Traditional job search Web sites such as
Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com contain thousands upon
thousands of job postings, but there are other sites that are more
specialized.
The Web site of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars – www.ncis.org – contains career advice and links to numerous job-search sites.
The Chronicle of Higher Education – www.chronicle.com –
contains job listings for positions both within and outside of
academia.
Numerous sites offer job listings for positions within non-profit organizations. Among those:
The Chronicle of Philanthropy – www.philanthropy.com
The Council of Foundations – www.cof.org
The Foundation Center – www.fdncenter.org
The Federal government’s job site – www.usajobs.opm.gov –
allows job seekers to search for positions by location or within
any number of federal agencies.
Jobs in linguistics can be found at the Linguist List –
www.linguistlist.org – which is maintained by linguistic faculty
and graduate students at Eastern Michigan University and Wayne
State University.
The Sellout Web site – www.ironstring.com/sellout/ — describes itself as a “resource for Ph.D.s considering careers beyond the university and is operated by Mark Johnson. He holds
a doctorate in English literature and works in the software industry.
So while there are always positions in academia for those
holding Ph.D.s, there are also numerous opportunities for those
who seek employment outside the hallowed ivory towers of education. It often involves being creative in the job search, but the
work is there to be had.
