Thread by @HadasKotek

Academics: the results of your research are less relevant to getting an #AltAc job than the skills you used to obtain them!

Here's a 🧵 on transferable skills translated into corporatespeak, including resume bullet points that describe my own academic career:

1. Experimental design, data analysis:

Quant and qual methods, exp design, and other variations on this theme are by far the most common answer I get from former academics re: what skills from grad school are most useful in their new career. E.g. for my dissertation work:

"Designed and conducted 15 behavioral experiments and tested 500+ participants to study the structure and meaning of complex questions in English; wrote design documents and guidelines; analyzed the results using linear and logistic mixed effects models in R."

2. Communication and teaching:

This is the second most common skill my former academic friends mention as most useful.

"Communicated research insights to diverse audiences in >120 talks and panels at national and international conferences, colloquia, and public outreach events

> (with audiences averaging 50-100 participants per event); gave interviews for podcasts and social media outreach campaigns; wrote a blog post series to showcase non-academic career paths for linguists."

Here's a teaching-focused bullet:

"Developed and taught 14 courses in linguistics at 3 universities; designed curricula, lecture notes, assignments, and assessments. Managed 14 teaching assistants and over 500 enrolled students."

3. End-to-End responsibility:

"Led cutting-edge collaborative linguistic research at R1 universities, shepherding projects from ideation to dissemination, resulting in: 1 monograph, 1 edited volume, 20 peer-reviewed articles, 23 proceedings papers, and over 100 presentations."

(This bullet also demonstrates the important skill of *sharing insights in written form* and is obviously also related to the communication skills point mentioned above.)

4. Securing stakeholder buy-in:

i.e. not only doing the work, but also convincing others it's worth pursing.

"Justified research value by obtaining >10 grants and awards totaling >$120k."

5. Innovative problem-solving:

Co-created *Turktools*, a free toolkit for implementing and analyzing behavioral language experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk, including HTML and R scripts for data visualization and analysis, powering several dozen studies world wide thus far"

(Arguably any original paper you've written -- squib, seminar, qualifying paper, thesis, published journal article -- demonstrates your problem solving skills!)

6. Leadership:

"Led a team of 3 graduate researchers and 24 undergraduate research assistants in a large-scale data collection project; created a corpus of >22k example sentences from 900+ journal papers published in leading linguistics journals over 20 years. >

Created annotation guidelines to label the data for 10 properties. Oversaw data analysis in R. Provided training and ongoing feedback to the team, managed and approved budgets, and supervised quality assurance of the results."

(There's also some project management content here.)

7. Project management:

"Co-organized 5 national and international academic conferences and workshops with >100 presentations and >1000 attendees. Secured budgets, provided visa support for international visitors, and oversaw talk selection and programming."

Finally, circling back to bullets that have more of a linguist or social-science specific focus --

8. Human data collection methods:

"Recruited >2500 participants for over 3 dozen studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk and >200 participants for in-lab experiments over 4 years; implemented methods to detect cheating or distracted behavior to ensure data quality and reliability."

Consultant work / fieldwork is another variant of this skill:

"Conducted semi-structured interviews with native speakers of low-resource languages (Tibetan, Kaqchikel, Chuj) over 3 years to study several grammatical properties of these languages"

9. Large-scale data collection; labeling, annotation

"Constructed a corpus of over 1,000 example sentences elicited from a native speaker of Chuj (Mayan) over 2 years to study the properties and uses of question words (e.g. 'who', 'what') in the language."

The above (plus various additional examples) come from my recent blog post on transferable skills: hkotek.com/blog/altac-tra…. It joins other posts on starting to explore non-academic career paths for the .@AltAcChats-curious