Careers Café

Information on different career options is out there, just not all conveniently in one place.

Source: www.grammarcheck.net

A quick guide for those starting their PhD program this fall.

Maybe you’ve spent some time exploring career options. But, the deeper you dig, the less you like the options. It happens. My last post was about how to work around fears that new career paths are out of reach for you. But what do you do when your potential new career choices lose their lustre? […]

Working within academia has likely helped you develop a strong sense of skepticism. Can these results be replicated? What are the holes in this methodology? Where does this argument fall short? That’s good for the researcher, and bad for the job seeker or career explorer. Too much skepticism can lead to extremes at either end […]

Making yourself competitive for a new career and figuring out what that career might be are two peas in a pod, not two steps in a staircase. Instead of being done with one before moving onto the other, you might be best served by undertaking them both at the same time. A little reflection is […]

If you want to avoid the crowds – or just need a break – at this year’s Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, you are in luck! The University of Calgary is providing designated quiet spaces around campus which will be open for the duration of Congress. Education Tower – 202C Professional Faculties – […]

Anyone can be an alcoholic, even a PhD astronomer. – Women in Astronomy, anonymous author This line, from a blog post sent to me by a colleague sparked a discussion at the University Affairs office. How do academics who prefer to stay sober or are in recovery deal with alcohol at conferences? The Congress of […]

We are fast approaching conference season in academe. As academics everywhere put the finishing touches on their presentation notes and confirm hotel reservations, we at University Affairs  are collecting your advice on how to survive conference season. Some of these posts will be specific to the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, since a […]

These lists are not useful because they are built around a tiny part of what makes you a good job candidate.

This month, let’s try looking at the future through the lens of design thinking. While design thinking is certainly trendy, its popularity is at least partly due to its utility as a way to approach complex problems. Unsurprisingly, it has already been applied to career exploration, and is particularly useful when you reach points in […]

Exploring career options assumes that you have some. So, of course, people sometimes avoid exploring career options because they assume they don’t have any. Becoming very specialized, whether through career growth or very focused study, can exacerbate that sense of having few options. Facing family or peer pressure to follow a certain path can, too. […]

Thanks, survey respondents! It was interesting to find out what you’re looking for from Careers Café. In a few cases, I forwarded ideas to writers whose columns are better fits – specifically, to Melonie Fullick of Speculative Diction and Jennifer Polk of From PhD to Life. There was more interest than I expected in long-term […]

If you’re lucky enough to work for an organization you like, and unlucky enough to be frustrated by some of the work that doesn’t get done, you may be well positioned to propose a new position – for the organization and for yourself. It may sound audacious to propose an entirely new role, but it […]

It has been about five years since Careers Café started, and we’ve addressed a few before-and-after scenarios: how to explore career options and search for a job before you get one, and some tips for being in a job more happily once you’ve found work. So, why not talk about topics pertaining to the job […]

Networking still seems to be one of the best job search strategies out there. Maybe that’s bad news, since so many people hate networking. In the good news column, though, is this: the skills networking develops continue to help you when you’re employed and need to manage up. There are some false assumptions out there […]

My recent post on interview skills left me with a niggling irritation; it didn’t do enough to distinguish pattern identification from giving canned answers that “they” want to hear. So I’ll take this opportunity to say it more clearly: focusing on “what they want to hear” is among the worst interview mistakes. It’s an approach […]

My last post was on getting from blank screen to a draft of a cover letter, ideally without testing your computer’s aerodynamics. This post offers a few quick editing options to keep in your back pocket. First, have a look at the content. Have you picked the two or three most important things about your […]

When you get right down to it, the cover letter is not much different from any other piece of persuasive writing. In other words, it’s really tough to edit when it’s still a blank screen, and it’s almost as tough to get a draft started. Here are some suggestions for going from writer’s block to […]

That saying about how, “every time a door closes, a window opens” never struck me as compelling. I was far more likely to feel immobilized by the idea that looking out the window required closing a door. So it was a delight when a colleague reminded me of David Winter’s “Two Birds, One Stone” work […]