Meeting the Moment: Professional Development in a Time of Change

Have you found yourself reconsidering your career goals this spring? You’re not alone. Students who aspire to tenure-track faculty careers are concerned those opportunities will dwindle. Students who’d been applying for jobs in the federal government have had to retool their searches. Hiring at some nonprofits and NGOs has also been affected by federal funding changes. These shifts may feel seismic, especially if you’re within a year or two of graduation.

Yet through your time in graduate school you have developed marketable skills that will be valued by employers across sectors—you just may not be used to talking about those skills in the same way that those employers do. In academia, we do a terrific job of focusing on achievements and accomplishments—the research published, the grants won, the classes taught—but we spend very little time articulating the transferable skills necessary to each of those accomplishments. Instead, we tend to focus on technical skills, the discipline-specific training gained through your graduate degree. That makes sense, since the chance to develop those technical skills brought you to Duke, but they are not the only skills you have to offer.

In order to achieve each line on your CV or résumé, you probably needed to communicate effectively with other people in writing, meet deadlines, problem-solve, and perhaps even explain technical content to non-expert audiences, whether that was mentoring an undergraduate in the lab or in teaching a class. If you start to unpack each of those accomplishments, you’ll find beneath it an array of skills that are transferable to other contexts. I would be willing to bet that you also developed persistence in the face of setbacks and flexibility in meeting challenges in order to succeed in your program. These are all skills that can be critical in succeeding in a diverse range of career paths.

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Employers outside the academy particularly value strong communication skills (both oral and written), the ability to collaborate effectively with others, and the ability to provide constructive feedback. This latter skill is one you might develop in TAing, grading papers, and providing formative feedback while teaching—but you might not have thought about it as a precursor to management roles. So, one of your challenges is to start thinking about your skills in the way a potential employer might see them—as helping them meet a need, address a pain point in their organization.

I often find that students think that “everyone” has these skills. Part of that feeling comes from being at a high-achieving institution like Duke, where you’re surrounded by people with graduate degrees, and it’s intensified by our location in the Triangle, with two other major research universities nearby. Yet among adults in the U.S. over age 25, only about 11% hold a master’s degree and only about 2% hold a doctoral degree (according to 2021 census data). Put into that context, the skills and experiences you have to offer a potential employer are rare and unique. The combination of your Duke disciplinary training and your transferable skills can set you apart from other candidates.

Identifying your skills can be the first step in a process of realistically evaluating what you can offer a potential employer, even if that employer is in a sector you hadn’t previously been considering. Below I outline positive steps you can take to build on that skills inventory: formulating a plan, connecting with helpful humans, seeking out ways to expand or deepen your skillset, and broadening your search. These steps can help you move your professional development forward, even at this moment. The shift from experiencing anxiety to taking action can help you regain a sense of agency and direction: you can bridge the gap between your previous goals and new aims with concrete steps.

Take Inventory

To get started, you can identify the skills you have as well as the things you do regularly that you most enjoy—your interests. Whether you’re a STEM student using the free myIDP tool or a social sciences or humanities student using the free ImaginePhD tool, you can find lists of skills or interests you may not have considered as part of your toolbox. (Find even more options for tools in Skills & Interests Assessments online.)

Discover your strengths with a free online CliftonStrengths assessment. All Graduate School students can take advantage of this tool, which will help you identify your top five strengths and provide a custom report on the unique constellation of your abilities and how you can use them. This is my favorite strategy for seeing the value you bring to a hiring organization beyond your technical training and thinking about how you could take those strengths into a variety of workplaces.

Now, you can use your favorite GenAI tool to help you brainstorm career paths that might be interesting. Type in your degree and discipline, three to five of your top skills and interests, and your CliftonStrengths, and ask what careers could be a good fit for you. This strategy can be a starting point to help you uncover new ideas or reconsider paths you haven’t fully researched before.

Make a Plan

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Now that you have some starting points for your process, it’s time to enlist some help in making a plan for moving forward. Graduate School students can take advantage of one-on-one career advising with Duke Career Center. Whether you need to formulate a plan for a more career exploration process or you’re ready to create a strategy for reaching out to your network, you can find support and accountability.

Ph.D. students can also explore Duke OPTIONS, a free online professional development planning tool designed just for you. No matter where you are in your program, you can build a roadmap for where you want to go, based on your interests and priorities. Begin with building your Self-awareness to engage in reflective activities and identify the areas where you want to grow, then launch your exploration of the other five competencies. Students report that it takes about 20 minutes to make a plan for each competency—and then you can start executing your plan.

Connect with Helpful Humans

Once you have a clearer sense of your interests, you’re ready to reach out and connect with professionals. As a Duke student, you can take advantage of Ask a Blue Devil, a tool that lets you simply ask a question and then be matched, using AI, with alums who can answer it. Often the alums’ responses include an offer to connect over a phone call or Zoom as a follow-up. This can be a terrific first step to building your network.

If you’ve already identified some positions or organizations of interest, you can begin contacting professionals who already work in them to request a career chat or informational interview about their job. These are short conversations (15-20 minutes) where your focus is to understand whether you might like working at the job or organization. Find more tips on identifying professionals and reaching out to them (including templates for emails requesting the conversations) in Career and Professional Development Fundamentals online.

Sometimes students are hesitant to request these conversations, wondering, “What can I offer this person in return for their time and expertise?” Well, if the professional you’re contacting is a Graduate School alum, you can offer to write up and publish the conversation as part of the Alumni Profiles series. With this strategy, you can reach out to alums with the opening line, “The Graduate School would like to publish your career success story. Could I speak to you for 15 minutes about your job and career path?” You can learn more about writing an alum profile at the May 15 workshop or get started even sooner by contacting the blog team at grad-profdev@duke.edu.

Grow Your Skills

Talking with professionals can help you identify the additional skills you’ll need to build to be a competitive applicant for those kinds of jobs. You can find online skill-building activities through InterSECT Job Simulations, a free online repository of exercises designed for graduate students, or through Forage, which offers work simulations and experiences to students at all levels.

If you’re looking for in-person skill-building, consider taking on a leadership position in a campus student organization (login to Duke Groups to see graduate and professional groups), or find pro bono consulting opportunities through groups like Duke Interdisciplinary Social Innovators and Duke Advanced-degree Consulting Club. You can even volunteer with organizations in the Durham community to gain experience with a new skillset, or find a campus job that lets you expand your résumé.

Finally, if your timeline at Duke allows, consider an internship. This formal way to build skills with an organization beyond Duke can provide you with an excellent perspective on whether you’d eventually enjoy a full-time job with that organization—and it can give the organization a sense of the value that you could offer if they hired you. More importantly, from the perspective of some employers beyond academia, it’s the closest thing you can have to a “real job” while you’re a graduate student. You can find internship listings in Handshake and through employer events offered through Duke Career Center; Ph.D. students can find some additional summer internship options hosted by various campus units, too.

Expand Your Search

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Graduate School alumni work around the world, and you could, too. If you’re planning a job search outside your home country, you can find support from Duke Career Center’s global job search resources. If you’re just in the exploratory phase of an international job search, you can find advice in a recent Carpe Careers column on seeking international research jobs.

Take Care of Yourself

This process can be stressful. Feelings of uncertainty and anxiety are common as you make the mental shift from one career goal to another. Some people experience a period of mourning as they shift away from a long-held professional goal. You can find advice on navigating this process in a recorded workshop on Managing the Emotional Side of Career Change by Dara Wilson-Grant.

You can also find resources for taking care of your physical and psychological wellbeing online. The Graduate School is here to support you, in partnership with important campus resources such as the Wellness Center, Counseling and Psychological Services, and Timely Care (24/7 free mental telehealth). 

 

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AUTHOR

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Melissa Bostrom, Ph.D.

Senior Assistant Dean, Graduate Student Professional Development

Melissa Bostrom ensures that all Graduate School students can identify and develop transferable skills that prepare them for the full range of opportunities available to professionals with master's and Ph.D. degrees. She is managing editor of the blog.