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In academia, entering the job market is often seen as a daunting ordeal that PhDs must pass on their way to postdocs and professorships. Surprisingly, it’s also one for which many students are remarkably underprepared.
Colleges and universities typically hire for academic positions on an annual cycle. In my area of management, positions are posted in July, candidates are screened at conferences in August, interviews and departures happen in September through January, and offers can go out anywhere from November through March. This means that the process itself can take more than seven months – often an exhausting experience on top of the long work of a PhD. myself.
Entering the job market is not only an inevitable step on the path to an academic career, it is also the penultimate, building-on years of work as a Ph.D. Thus, it can feel as if these years of our past efforts and decades of future potential are hanging on the whims of unknown committees and an opaque process.
In a field already struggling with mental health, all of this makes the process a recipe for disaster. Our counselors and mentors help us with methods, not mental health, and they’re often among the ingredients we need to court to succeed in our careers—so there’s no room for weakness or assumptions. Meanwhile, friends and family outside the academy often don’t understand his various challenges. Thus, we are often cut off from our most important support networks just when we need them most.
In my own experience, written materials offering guidance are also lacking. We can find a lot of information on how to succeed in finding a job, but much less on how to manage the emotional challenges associated with the process.
So what can we do? My perspective on this is based on my personal experience. I am a non-tenured academic in the business school of a major research university. I previously held the same position at a business school at another major research institution. I’ve been on the market twice and worked with dozens of students and peers as they went through the job search process.
Through our collective successes and failures, I have seen how difficult it is to manage the emotional aspects of the job market. I’ve also identified some of the common challenges, as well as tools to help overcome them.
Process management
First, the process. The focus of this article is not how to find your dream job. Instead, it’s how to stay healthy and balanced while finding that dream job. The challenge, however, is that it is much easier to stay healthy and balanced when things are going well than when they are not.
My first piece of advice is to set yourself up for success. Hitting the market with a portfolio you’re excited about and good work under your belt can turn a grueling ordeal into a fun opportunity to strut your stuff. The thing to remember is the 2.5 rule: expect any project or document to take two and a half times longer than you originally expect. So start early.
My second recommendation is to take care of yourself physically. The job market feels like a sprint, but it runs from August to February and even our conferences are five days long. During this time period, it is often counterproductive to try to push yourself too hard and too fast. Instead, the only winning strategy for such a marathon is to eat, sleep, exercise, and do whatever it takes to stay fit and healthy.
The third thing I suggest is to recognize the importance of community. Research can be lonely, and at worst the job market seems to pit friends and classmates against each other. But the truth is that communication and sympathy doesn’t really give anyone an edge. Rather, it can help us prepare and make the process feel much less lonely. I have forged many of my closest academic friendships and most valuable collaborations in the crucible of the job market search with peers who would otherwise be rivals. My advice is to reach out, connect and celebrate collective successes. The road is hard when you walk alone.
Results management
When we imagine the process, many students stop there. But understanding and dealing with the results of going to market can be just as difficult as managing the process itself.
The first problem is the role of noise. Job offers are binary, but they’re also very noisy—meaning whether you get an interview, how well it goes, or whether an institution even hires depends on a whole bunch of factors you’ll never know about (ie. f. Dean for breakfast or of butterflies flapping their wings in another hemisphere). This means that the outcome of the process ultimately says very little about you or the quality of your work. If you find the job you want, that’s great. And if you don’t, it might not affect you negatively at all.
It’s also very easy to get sucked in and feel that if we don’t get a job – any job – all those years of effort we’ve put in will be for naught. This is a fallacy. Our reasons for wanting to be academics vary, but usually it’s because we’re nerdy in our field or attracted to the lifestyle. What we often forget along the way is that there is a lot ways to be nerdy and have a good life. Ignoring this can leave us feeling hopeless if we don’t get the job we want — or making location or compensation compromises we shouldn’t.
A useful concept here is BATNA or “best alternative to negotiated agreement” from negotiation research. BATNA highlights how well you are doing in negotiations are shaped in part by the options you have outside the negotiations. From this perspective, the job market itself is a negotiation with your field to find the job and lifestyle you want. And that means the more you research and know about other paths you could take, and the more attractive those options are, the better off you’ll be.
This is true even if you end up staying on the academic track. It’s much more enjoyable to walk a trail if you do it because you want of, not because you must to. As Tina Solvik explains in an excellent article, “Framing career exploration as another research project to undertake while pursuing your Ph.D. … requires information gathering and evaluation, may have unexpected findings, and is a long-term process.” Unfortunately, it is too often treated as an afterthought or a sign of lack of commitment to the path. This is not true.
Managing your feelings
Almost everyone I know who has found a great job, myself included, has questioned whether they deserved it and could keep it. Imposter syndrome affects everyone, but it can be worse than normal for academics who are expected to be confident masters of their fields. You can find a lot of good advice on how to deal with imposter syndrome, but the most important thing is to just be ready for it and know that everything your colleagues are asking (or have asked) the exact same questions.
After all, getting an academic position isn’t the only job market outcome you should be thinking about. Your health and well-being matter too, and it’s not worth sacrificing that along the way. If you can effectively manage the process, the results, and your own feelings, you will have much more success in the long run.
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