Suggestions for leaving Academia?

[unclekarl]

Given the market, it seems that many people (including myself) may need to look for work in the private sector. Was wondering if anyone who's thinking about making the transition has any useful suggestions, resources, or advice for doing this? This is not something we tend to get much help or support for in grad school!

[formerfed]

If you're looking for govt jobs, look at usajobs.gov.
With a PhD, you're looking at ~GS 12 salary, which is around $60k + living adjustments (higher in DC, etc. -- www.fedjobs.com/pay/pay.html)
With some reasonable postdoc experience, you *might* qualify for a GS 13.
In any event, when you look for jobs, if you see a limitation for applications from "local commuting area only" in the job ad, that means they have someone in mind and are going through the legal motions to post the job so as few people qualify (similar to a VAP internal hire bullshit post). If you see "status candidates only" or something similar, it means it's an internal-government hire, so if you don't have status in the agency/department/etc, they won't even look at your application. In other words, don't waste your time with those ads. Anything else should be reasonably open in terms of hiring people, although you'll want to apply broadly since they likely get tons of applications for any given job. Feel free to slightly 'stretch' the qualifying questionnaire stuff too, not outright lying, but stretching to cover questions like 'supervising individuals' even if you weren't technically the supervisor of record (hopefully this makes sense...). Finally, if you've got a felony conviction, I wouldn't bother applying to most of the govt jobs that require a security clearance (which at the GS 12+ level are quite a few), since you'll get dinged sooner or later when they do the (very extensive) background check.

[raven]

Sign up at versatilephd.com and peruse the forums. There are a ton of resources there for people seeking employment outside of academia with a Ph.D. (or even just an MA). There are also links in the forums to blogs from people who have left academia, most of which offer advice for leaving and finding outside employment.

[cyclorama]

idealist.org might have some reasonable options for you.

[policy]

Policy-related jobs can be found here: www.publicservicecareers.org/

[anon]

If you have quant/programming skills, you can look on:

www.icrunchdata.com

You can also try looking at universities' or state-wide university systems' employment pages for research-related positions.

Good luck!