A Career Option Humanities Ph.D.s Should Consider

Finding a job in the postacademic world as a humanities Ph.D. can often be frustrating. The theory-intensive coursework of humanities doctoral programs does not directly lead to developing the specific hard skills employers usually seek, and the soft skills humanities that Ph.D.s hone through such programs are difficult to highlight in a data-focused document like a résumé. A quick search of an online support group with the keyword “humanities” yields many posts about humanities Ph.D.s’ continuing career struggles to build careers outside the faculty track.

As a Ph.D. trained in English, when I finally decided to leave my college faculty position to seek a nonacademic career, I felt that same frustration. But I am not writing this essay to discuss how humanities Ph.D.s can develop more transferable skills, nor do I plan to argue for the reformation of humanities Ph.D. programs. A good number of articles and books on such topics are already out there. Rather, I would like to introduce a career option that I found and dove into immediately—an opportunity that calls on the natural skills of humanities Ph.D.s and is both fulfilling and, somewhat ironically, increasingly in demand: career advising specifically for graduate students.

Having spent about eight months in this new field, I find the skills that I honed through my humanities Ph.D. training are directly relevant to my daily responsibilities of graduate student career advising and programming. I can confidently say that humanities Ph.D.s make great career advisers for graduate students, and I would like to share a few examples why.

A recent article calls the collaboration between writing experts and career development professionals a “dream team” in supporting graduate student job seekers. If that’s the case, graduate student career advisers with humanities Ph.D.s are dream teams on our own. Indeed, some of the major transferable skills that people think of when it comes to humanities Ph.D.s are strong writing skills. In addition to planning and writing a book-length dissertation that takes years to complete, many humanities Ph.D.s teach writing in classrooms or at university writing centers. In doing so, we develop our abilities to critically read someone else’s writing and thoughtfully comment on it.

Such skills translate directly to reading different types of employment application documents and discussing their subtle nuances or making careful suggestions for graduate student job seekers. Moreover, humanities Ph.D.s’ firsthand experience of writing teaching philosophies and research proposals can be particularly beneficial for academic job seekers in providing an attentive second eye.

The rhetorical strategy that accompanies humanities Ph.D.s’ writing skills is another asset. Rhetoric plays an important role in providing graduate student job seekers with motivational speeches, which is a fundamental part of career advising. We often serve as the cheerleaders who boost our student advisees’ confidence through their journey of career exploration. Studies have shown that graduate students have felt high anxiety when facing the job market, especially since the pandemic, to the extent that some have changed their career plans. Thus, it is essential to fully acknowledge that anxiety, understand each student’s idiosyncratic needs and offer individualized support.

In fact, we humanities Ph.D.s are well versed in finding different rhetorical approaches for different individuals. Many of us have not only gained years of experience in motivating struggling students while teaching or tutoring, but we have also motivated colleagues and ourselves throughout our graduate programs while facing shrinking academic and overwhelming postacademic job markets—similar to what the graduate student job seekers we now advise are confronting. Accordingly, we have an empathy-based motivational rhetoric that helps create a safe space for graduate students to comfortably share and process their emotions and work with us to explore meaningful career pathways for them.

That said, not all graduate students come to their university’s career development center with their employment application documents ready—which is a popular misconception of university career development centers. In fact, a surprising number of students visit the center as they are just beginning to explore career options inside or outside academia. In such cases, as a career adviser, I conduct the initial intake interview and assess the student’s values, interests and knowledge/skills in the following meetings before we clarify and establish goals together—in other words, the student and their life narrative become my texts to read and analyze.

Again, this fits humanities Ph.D.’s skill sets in exceptional ways. Throughout our research as humanities Ph.D.s, we are trained to collect fragments of evidence to construct a coherent analysis and find meaning in what is unsaid or only implied. In the same way, as graduate student career advisers, we can eagerly collect fragments of a student’s life story to construct a narrative and analyze it to help the student clarify their thoughts. That practice is similar to a well-known theory in the career development field: Mark Savickas’s career construction theory, which views one’s life and career holistically to construct a narrative.

Finally, humanities Ph.D.s can be especially effective graduate student career advisers because a central part of our training is practicing metacognition—which is to think about one’s own thinking. That is how I approached my own postacademic job search, yet this process of metacognition is not just limited to critically reflecting on one’s perspectives and practices. It leads us as humanities researchers to recognizing that our perspectives are shaped by our backgrounds, values and experiences; studying others’ points of view and the ways they are shaped; and inevitably realizing that our perception of truth is only subjective.

Likewise, career advising is a career that constantly examines other careers. For that reason, humanities Ph.D.s can dive into this metacareer with a researcher’s attitude, to not only study the field of career advising but also continuously analyze and better our own practices as advisers.

Moreover, we can approach graduate students and their careers with a democratic and empathetic mind. Humanities Ph.D.s’ empathy for graduate student job seekers does not just come from the simplified likening of “I know how you feel, because I have been there.” Instead, it is based on the metacognitive acknowledgment that one’s contexts are different from another’s, despite many similarities, and that embracing diversity is a prerequisite in graduate student career advising. Metacognition thus adds flexibility to how humanities Ph.D.s advise graduate students, further ensuring that all graduate students’ voices will be heard and valued.

The news of humanities departments being eliminated from colleges and universities nationwide makes headlines almost every month. Yet despite that, most newly admitted humanities Ph.D. graduate students are probably working toward their degrees because they just love studying the subject—they find the many facets of human lives fascinating and want to explore them.

Graduate student career advising, similarly, is about approaching the diverse aspects of human lives based on the humanistic understanding and appreciation of the world and helping graduate students make important life decisions about finding meaningful and enjoyable careers. Graduate student career advising is a fascinating career in itself, and I hope to see more fellow humanities Ph.D.s in this field.