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 of the Pathfinder resources and opportunities here. Today’s blog is written by Dr Holly Prescott, Careers Adviser for Postgraduate Researchers at the University of Birmingham. You can find Dr Prescott on LinkedIn here and at her PhD Careers Blog here.
Name: Dr Holly Prescott
Doctorate subject area and year of completion: English Literature and Cultural Geography, 2011
Role and employer: Careers Adviser for Postgraduate Researchers, University of Birmingham
Approximate salary bracket of this type of role: £33-40,000 per annum
Hi all, I’m Holly and I now work as a Careers Adviser for Postgraduate Researchers, leading on careers support for PGRs at the University of Birmingham (UK). My work comprises running 1:1 guidance appointments with PGRs, running webinars and workshops and creating resources to help PGRs with their next steps, training PGR supervisors in how to best support their PGRs, and exploring how we can build, and raise the profile of, careers support for PGRs across the institution.
How I found my way to my current role touches on my first tip for working out your own career move away from academia, which is “pay attention to your distractions”.
Let me elaborate. I enjoyed my PhD, but… I’d consistently find myself ‘putting off’ research to take up more ‘people-facing’ opportunities, especially anything teaching- or mentoring-related. At the time I felt guilty as if this made me a ‘bad researcher’. What it was really telling me was that I found academic research in my field quite isolating, and I was more drawn to activities that I felt had a longer lasting impact on students’ futures.
Having come to this realisation in the final year of my PhD, I made the most of being in a university environment to start to ‘suss out’ what other career areas might also involve teaching and supporting/advising students, but without the pressures to publish and bring in grants. That was what led me to the area of career guidance.
The next tip that emerged from my career journey so far would be that ‘staying in academia’ or ‘leaving academia’ isn’t always the dichotomy it seems. Having transitioned into what we might broadly call a student-facing (or researcher-facing) professional services role in Higher Education, I don’t feel like I’ve ‘left academia’ at all. I still contribute to scholarship through attending conferences and even publishing research articles, but now I do it in the field of researcher careers rather than contemporary literature. I really believe that you can bring your curiosity, analytical approach and scholarly mindset to so many different types of roles; I talk more about this in my blog article ‘“Non-Academic Jobs: More ‘academic’ than you think?’ , as well as my post ‘Academic-adjacent careers’: what are they, and how do I find them?
As for how I found my way into my current role, I was 5 years out from my PhD when I was appointed. Before this, I used my part-time work experience as a postgraduate ambassador to firstly move into a full-time job in postgraduate student recruitment, which I did for just over 3 years. It was a fun job, and I got to travel around Europe representing the University at study fairs across the EU and beyond. However, it was an entry-level role and there were few opportunities for progression.
Whilst I was in that role, I applied for a host of other jobs in higher education to try to progress, but I was often told that I lacked experience. This was what pushed me to invest in doing a PGDip in Career Guidance part-time (between 2014 and 2016), and soon after starting this I was able to move into working for the careers service via a six-month secondment. I ended up turning that role into a permanent job for about a year, and by then had accrued just enough experience, motivation, and professional qualifications to apply for and land my current role of Careers Adviser for Postgraduate Researchers.
I quickly realised that doing a PhD, and spending time as a researcher, had endowed me with a whole range of skills that were useful to my current role: it just took me some time doing the role itself to fully appreciate what these were.
Firstly, I had empathy and understanding of researchers’ situations, and could relate to them on a personal level. That’s something that not everyone can do, and it gives you credibility in any role that involves supporting researchers. Also, having studied English for so long, I was very good at analysing narratives to uncover patterns and meanings: a key part of career guidance practice.
Finally, I think one of the biggest assets that researchers possess is the ability to take on a big, messy problem with no obvious answer, and shape it into a project with scope and direction. My current job has involved setting up a career guidance programme for PhD students from scratch, so I’ve had to do exactly those things.
That said, in my first year or so in the role I still very much feared that I wouldn’t be good enough to do the job! Imposter syndrome definitely followed me from academia into my current line of work, and still rears its head to this day. What I’m still coming to terms with is the fact that, in many lines of work, ‘good enough is good enough,’ and you don’t need to know everything to add value and be useful to people.
To conclude, my main advice for you if you’re a researcher contemplating a transition to a new career path is:
- Start to work out what move you want to make by asking yourself ‘if I was going to turn my PhD/postdoc/current job into my ideal job, what bits of it would I want to keep, what would I want to lose, and what would I add to it that I don’t get much chance to do at the moment’ (‘keep – lose – add’).
- Broaden your network to give yourself real-life role models: people who have the kind of impact on the world that you want to have. This can give you clues as to where you might see yourself. If all you’ve ever known is academic research and teaching, it’s very difficult to envision yourself doing anything else as you don’t know what ‘anything else’ might look like! Fill in those gaps by doing some research on what other PhDs & postdocs have gone on to do and building a network of people who have made similar moves to the one you’d like to make.
- Don’t think you have to solve your whole life with your first job beyond academia. Try things out, and use your next job(s) to develop and learn where you want to be longer term.
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