Skip the Tracks: breaking the career track fallacy

There was a time when most travel happened by train. People would pack their bags, buy a ticket and settle in for a long journey to a far away destination. On a train, you can't stop off for a scenic jaunt, exploring the towns that are blurring by. The train takes you where you want to go with no variation. And you know you will get there because it is on the tracks. 

But why do we think our careers would be the same?

This concept of a "career track" is about as antiquated as train travel. In Josh Boldt's article  "The Ph.D. Needs CPR," the concept of refocusing "the Ph.D. degree on other career paths" in order to make it "relevant again." While I agree with everything else he shares in this article, this statement gives me pause. Because, from my experience:

1. there is no such thing as a career track
2. PhDs are already relevant

The idea that the people in careers outside of academy have degrees in those areas is a falsehood. Granted, you probably want a degreed and trained person in medicine, but in the vast majority of corporate positions, places where the concept of career tracks flourished in their hay day, the people holding them have degrees unrelated to the role. People aren't boxcars on a track; they are loud and chaotic cars, driving along freeways, side streets and sometimes on barely cleared dirt roads. 

Instead of tracks, we need to provide PhDs with maps to these roads and guideposts along the way.

Which takes me to my next point: relevance. I often joke that I have a $40k acronym. I say this because I often feel like that's all my PhD has been for: a few initials behind my name. But that isn't true. Earning my PhD helped me in many areas: it taught me how to be an independent thinker, how to be self driven, and how to facilitate a discussion, skills I use every day. The university of Michigan has a list of others skills PhDs acquire that they can leverage in the corporate world, including navigating complex bureaucratic environments and understanding and synthesizing large quantities of data. Is it a hard and direct line to roles outside of academia? No. But you are not starting from zero.

With relevant and useful skills and a map in hand,there is no place you can't go. Colleges themselves are seeing this too. " For liberal arts colleges and those of us who believe in the importance of a well-rounded education, the whole idea of assuming an inherent connection between major choice and career seems problematic.  Not only are there plenty of majors that don’t have a natural correlate on the job market (e.g., philosophy majors come to mind), but we are also regularly bombarded with the claims that individuals in today’s world will hold multiple jobs in multiple professions over the course of their working careers." says Mark on the blog  Delicious Ambiguity,  I have seen this at play throughout my non-academic career, having met linguists, anthropologists and even a Russian lit major working among the MBAs and communications majors. 

My point is that careers are not simple, single lines. They change and evolve with you. So, as you begin your journey of leaving academia, I ask that you let go of the tracks and embrace the road ahead to see where it takes you.