Pathfinder Career Narratives is an ongoing series tracking the career choices and experiences of doctoral graduates. You can see all of the posts in the series here. You can find all the Pathfinder resources and opportunities here. Today’s blog is written by Dr Jonathan McGuire, Director of Evaluation and Effectiveness at the Department of Education, New South Wales, Australia. You can find Dr McGuire’s LinkedIn profile here, and his work on Beyond Academia with Sequitur Consulting here.
Name: Dr Jonathan McGuire
Doctorate subject area and year of completion: Cognitive Science, 2013
Role and Employer: Director, NSW Department of Education
Approximate Salary bracket of this type of role: $AUD 200,000-250,000 p.a.
After completing my PhD in cognitive science, researching the cognitive processes underpinning moral cognition, I undertook a postdoc looking at moral cognition in people with schizophrenia. This was the first step toward the academic career path I’d intended. Towards the end of my postdoc, though, I’d applied for a few grants and I hadn’t been successful. I was trying to cobble together part-time work from other people’s funding, but I didn’t like the insecurity of it. I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with academia, and I started looking for roles in other sectors.
I started my search using some ‘data’ keywords on various job sites, and found a job as a data analyst in a small government agency focused on mental health. Key to getting this role were my statistics knowledge, combined with my experience working with people with schizophrenia in my postdoc (I’d also worked with people with schizophrenia in a Research Assistant role during my PhD). Over the next ten years I continued working in data, moving first into the private sector as a data scientist, then back to government in leadership roles first in data and analytics and then in program evaluation.
I now head up the evaluation capability of a government agency. My unit undertakes applied research into programs my agency rolls out, looking at how these programs were implemented and what their outcomes were. PhD skills are hugely transferable to this work, but there are important methodological differences: for example we’re often using quasi-experimental designs that utilise extant data rather than running randomised control trials. There are other differences between this workplace and academia too, like having stricter deadlines and more accountability to our stakeholders, but our core values include impartiality and robustness, which dovetails well with my research training.
A key aspect of my role is leadership: building my team, and its strategy and culture, as well as driving a vision for evaluation more broadly in the organisation. Another element of the job is ensuring delivery of the evaluations we undertake. This might include giving feedback on an evaluation plan, running a meeting with executive stakeholders, or diving into the details of how to interpret a particular result. We’re a big team with lots of simultaneous projects, making it easy for me to end up in meetings all day, so it’s important for me to consciously reserve time for deep thinking.
One of my fears when I transitioned out of academia was that I would find the work boring. While every job (academic roles included!) has its boring moments, I’ve found the work outside of academia to be varied, challenging, and interesting. In particular, I think that there is sometimes a stereotype that everyone in the corporate sector is entirely motivated by money, which I didn’t find to be the case at all. I’ve had a lot of colleagues who were just really interested in solving particular kinds of problems and a corporate role provided the opportunity to solve those problems (e.g., one colleague was developing a programming meta-language to facilitate collaboration between teams using different software). But of course there are trade-offs between academic and non-academic work, the main one being that outside of academia you have less free rein and your ability to pursue passion projects is more dependent on your role and the attitude of your manager.
I had a bit of a rough time making the decision to move into a non-academic role. I felt like I’d let myself and my supervisors down, and worried that my peers would think I’d ‘sold out’. I was quickly disabused of these notions when I secured non-academic employment – my supervisors were very supportive and many of my peers wanted tips on how to follow suit. I’ve maintained a relationship with my alma mater, coming back to teach students and PhD candidates about non-academic careers, and my colleague Sam and I have recently started doing more work in this area under the moniker of Sequitur Consulting.
One of the things that I’ve noticed in doing this work is how often people will have trouble understanding how their PhD skills can translate to non-academic contexts, so they try to look for jobs related to the topic area of their research rather than related to their skills. Of course in some cases you might be able to find a role related to both and that might be a good fit. But I researched moral cognition which isn’t exactly a booming industry, so I needed to think more broadly.
One of the things I did to prepare was to learn how to code in R, but another part of my prep was to figure out how to articulate the other skills that my PhD had given me – stats, research design, writing, presenting, decomposing a complex problem, self-management, a forward-focused mindset… it turns out the list is quite long.
So, if we tend to conflate expertise in a particular topic area with the skills that are required to develop and deploy that expertise, I think it’s a useful exercise to try to disentangle the two. That means instead of saying ‘I know how to do research into moral cognition’, it’s ‘In order to do research into moral cognition, I need to be able to synthesise complex and conflicting evidence, to write successful grant proposals, to design experiments, to do statistical analysis…’
I encourage you to give it a try, whether you’re considering a move beyond academia or not. Pick an academic achievement (finishing the PhD, getting a paper published, running a conference, whatever it might be), and spend some time writing down all the tasks that had to be done to achieve this goal, then all the skills that were required in order to do those tasks. I’ll hazard a guess that you’ll be surprised at how long that list of skills becomes – and that, right there, is the value of a PhD.
The Auditorium: a research culture and researcher development blog 