Navigating the Path to Industry: A Hiring Manager's Advice for Academics Looking for a Job in Industry

Part I: Prepare Yourself to Apply for Jobs

You may think that the most important thing to do in a non-academic job search is to find job postings and reply to them. This is not true. Your search is likely to be successful in less time if you do some preparatory work before you start. This section describes that work.

1. Lay the foundation

Set up your software and systems

The first thing to do is to make sure you have a neutral email address. It should not be tied to your university, because the hardest work in a job search is making new contacts, and you want those contacts to persist after you get your first job. If you are searching for a job in the United States, it should have a US domain name (e.g., .com and not .co.uk). Even if you have permanent residency, a non-US domain name may make potential employers and other contacts think you will require sponsorship. If you do need sponsorship, it is better to postpone that discussion until the other person has met you and formed some idea of how valuable your skills would be to his or her company.

The email address you use for your job search should be completely professional. Avoid using jokes or informal nicknames in the address. In general, it is best to try to get some version of your full name or first initial and last name. You do not need to move all of your correspondence to this email address; you can just forward the address to your main one, and log into your account only when you have emails to send.

The next thing to do is to decide what software you’ll use to produce your key documents, such as your resumes and cover letters. If you are aiming at a field that requires giving a seminar or other presentation as part of the interview, you also need to consider how you will create your presentation materials (i.e., your slides). You should always send your resume to people as a PDF file, so that the formatting will be preserved and you can be certain they will be able to open it with software they already have. It does not matter what software you use to produce your resume, as long as that software is capable of doing basic formatting and can export the document as a PDF file. If you need to create presentation slides and are going to use anything other than the presentation software standard in your field (in most cases, Microsoft PowerPoint), then be sure that you can export to a PDF file and that you are comfortable running your presentation from a PDF file. In many cases, you can bring your own laptop and run your presentation from it, but sometimes you will be required to use the company’s computer.

Next, you need to decide how you want to organize your job search information. You will make many new contacts, so decide upfront where you will store information about them. You certainly need to store contact information and a job title for each person you talk to about your career. You may also want to store a few notes about them so that you do not need to ask the same questions again when you reconnect with them in the future.

As you will see later, you will also generate a lot of resumes and cover letters — one for each job for which you apply. You absolutely must keep these organized, because accidentally sending the wrong cover letter to a company will almost certainly end your chances for that job. I personally have a set of folders on my computer for my cover letters and resumes, with one folder for each job for which I apply. I also have a notebook in which I keep a list of people I need to contact and other specific tasks for my job search. I use LinkedIn to maintain my list of contacts. I will discuss LinkedIn in more detail later in this book.

Prepare yourself mentally

The final piece of preparation is to make sure you are approaching the search with a strong and resilient mindset. This is the easiest preparation step to skip, but in many ways the most important to complete. Searching for a job is difficult even in the best of economic times, and these are not the best of economic times. There is no set script I can give you to prepare your mindset, but the following points might be helpful.

First, remember that you are only trying to find your first job. Your first job is not your forever job. It does not have to be the perfect manifestation of all your hopes and dreams. It just has to be interesting and rewarding enough for you to feel confident you’ll stay at least a couple of years, and it should provide you with skills and experiences upon which you can continue to build. As unfair as it seems from your current position in academia, industry experience really does matter. Even if it doesn’t matter from an "able