Hi, world!
I wanted to write about looking for a job after leaving academia and doing that with a degree in humanities. Dwayne and I both have Masters in Philosophy and we began looking for work seriously at the beginning of July. I’ll explain what “seriously” meant in our case later. We are now both permanently employed in positions within higher education that we find to be quite fulfilling. Dwayne started on a short-term contract as an academic advisor at BCIT in mid-August and that contract has now been extended until May. I started in a temporary role working with the office for international students at Capilano University in mid-September and by the middle of November, I have successfully tested and interviewed for a permanent role in the same position.
In the series of posts that follow, I reflect on our job-searching process in hopes that it could be helpful for anyone out there who finds herself in a similar situation: a recent grad with a humanities degree who is presumably doomed to a failure in the “real world.”
Let’s Do Some Math
First, let’s consider what I mean when I say we were serious when looking for jobs.
I kept a pretty accurate record of all the positions I’ve applied to. In total, I applied to 80+ jobs. I interviewed 5 times and was offered 3 out of 5 positions I interviewed for.
I applied most aggressively between mid-July and mid-September, which is when I got my temporary role. We were dedicated to modifying our resumes and especially cover letters for each job we applied to, so the process was pretty time consuming at first. I think in the early days, I managed to apply to 4-5 jobs per day which took up good 8 hours of work. When I wasn’t rewriting my cover letter, I was tweaking around my LinkedIn account, reading about interviewing skills, and seeking out more positions I could add to my list of potential jobs. It was a full-time endeavour.
One of the jobs I was offered was a sales role. To get it, I interviewed in person with the management, did some testing, then a mock sales call, followed by a phone interview with VP. I got the job and was promised an opportunity to grow into a training position within the sales team. However, going through the interviewing process made me realize just how little I cared about being in sales, so I had to decline the job offer.
The second job offer I got was for a position within a tech HR start-up where my role would’ve been matching prospective candidates with jobs. The company focused on hourly employees, so I would have been interviewing folks who were interested in working at grocery stores, coffee shops, retail, etc. The job was a full-time contract for several months of work in a pretty cool office located in Vancouver’s Gas Town and there were promises of being able to grow within the company after the contract expired. I declined the job offer because, during a group interview with the company, I felt that I did not fit in well with the company’s culture.
The two jobs that I did not get were an advising position at the Sauder School of Business at UBC and an outreach/recruitment role at Douglas College. Although I did not get these jobs, I was happy to know that my resume was being noticed and I was being considered for these roles.
The third interview that resulted in a job offer was for the position I was already doing at the time on a temporary contract at Capilano University. Since that was my fifth interview in the past couple of months, I was pretty skilled at handling different questions and talking about my previous experience meaningfully. It also helped that I already had a first-hand experience of the job and knew exactly what the role entailed, which meant I could talk about it well.
The Kinds of Positions We Applied to
We decided to look for work in higher education because we felt that this was the field where we didn’t have to hide the experience we gained in graduate school. I had three years of experience in teaching, working with students in groups and one-on-one, doing research, presenting material in front of different audiences, organizing academic conferences, etc. We were on job boards for every post-secondary institution in Vancouver. I also started sending my resume to language schools and advising agencies that helped students with university applications or recruited qualified recent graduates to go teach English abroad.
Although we felt that we were qualified for many of these jobs, we learned that most of the staff positions in post-secondary institutions were unionized, which meant that even though the jobs were being advertised to the general public, internal applicants coming from within the union were give preference over us. We did not hear back from over 95% of jobs we’ve applied to, which was the most frustrating aspect of the job search. Since we had no feedback, we were not even sure whether what we were doing was right and there was too much competition or whether our resumes were being thrown away without being seriously considered.
Resources
Our number one resource throughout this experience was The Muse. Although not created with a humanities grad in mind, the website has a plethora of helpful resources on resume building, interviewing, exploring careers, even writing “Thank You” notes after the interviews. Having to step into the world of job search and interviews with no previous experience was scary, but we approached the whole process as a research project where although some things did not make much sense at first, the more you read and learned about them, the better you became at them.
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