#TeamTuesdays: The Shift from Academia to Industry
For our first two #TeamTuesdays posts, we’ve been examining how many of our teammates started their careers in UX. So, for this week’s post, I’d love to share more about a topic that I am extremely passionate about: how people shift from academia to industry!
I thought I was going to be a doctor, a therapist, a neuropsychologist, a cognitive neuroscientist, or a professor. But UX found me, and I fell in love with it! Here’s more about my journey, and how a recent university gig had me thinking about trends in academia, UX, and industry as a whole!
Here's me doing science! And if you're interested in what our lab learned, you can read the article below!
My Journey
When I started preparing myself for A CareerTM️, I didn’t know what UX was. I didn’t even know that I wanted to work in industry. All I knew was that I loved Psychology.
I am passionate about understanding everything about people: their experiences, their motivations, and their worldviews. Combine that with an proclivity for experimentation, a joy for teaching, and a desire to have a practical and helpful element to everything I do, it was only a matter of time until UX Research found me – and I was heartened to learn that most of us in UX are cut from the same cloth, while also incredibly unique in our paths to the same space!
At the same time that I was doing this introspection and observation of possible paths forward, I was also seeing firsthand the perils of a career in academia. The pure pursuit of knowledge is still one of my core motivations, but I kept seeing the same issues play out: amazing and inspiring professors being denied tenure; brilliant researchers struggling to get vital funding; a broken educational system doing a disservice to both educators and students alike.
We’ve long been aware of these issues. They hung around in the air throughout my experiences in graduate school. The academic funnel means that there are already fewer tenure-track jobs available. Entrepreneur researcher John Carigan from RebelBio highlights six key problems: an abundance of postdocs, less-than-thrilled graduate students, the stigma around focused training, less-than-ideal mentors, grant money competition, and the devaluing of traditional training. Science communicator Andy Stapleton adds these issues to the mix: “paper mills, exploitation and anxiety, fake data, and the reproducibility crisis”. You can even go down a whole Wikipedia rabbit hole on the issues in the American higher education system!
A super fun read! My favorite part is where it tells you that this article "may be too long to read and navigate comfortably" -- you're telling us!!!
I only knew of two career paths in Psychology: become a professor, or become a therapist. But when I explored the potential of moving into cognitive-behavioral therapy, I learned that similar issues are abound in the field of mental health. Therapy is underutilized, but only because it is underfunded, undersupported, and undervalued. Even though we have gotten better at recognizing mental health issues, we still refer to the professionals who provide care as having a “calling”, i.e., it takes a very special person who is willing to make some extreme sacrifices to do what they do.
Though I do hope to work in academic and clinical environments again someday, the reality is that making the shift to industry was and still is the right move for me. It has helped me establish and build a life that I love, doing work that is creative, stimulating, and influential, alongside motivated mentors and teammates who have given me a wealth of knowledge.
At first, I wasn’t sure how to parlay into industry the skills I learned during my time gaining my Masters of Clinical Counseling and PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience. With practice and grit, I succeeded. And now, I have found a new calling: sharing my own experiences, and the experiences of those around me, to highlight how to make this shift. (Check out our two previous articles, How Family and Culture Shape Our Practice, and How Past Professional Experiences Led Us to UX, where our Verizon Connect X Team share their stories!)
My Keynote Speech
Recently, I got the opportunity to give a talk at Texas Wesleyan University (in collaboration with the phenomenal Lauren Coursey!), as well as to give the keynote speech at Psychology Career Day at University of North Texas at Dallas (in collaboration with the wonderful Priya A. Iyer-Eimerbrink, Ph.D.!), about the different career paths that are available to Psychology majors. When I was creating the content for this talk, I tried to put myself in my audience’s shoes by asking myself, “What was the top question on my mind when I was a Psychology major?”
I came up with this:
This might be my best work.
I had four main messages that I wanted to communicate, so I addressed my speech to my audience (Psychology undergraduate students) and organized the talk according to those four pillars:
Your Career Paths
Your Skills
Your Brand
Your Authentic Self
After reflecting on these four pillars, I essentially asked the audience to be explorers, to dig deep into what intrinsically motivates them, couple that with the skills, activities, and outcomes they hope to incorporate into their careers and daily lives, and communicate that in a style all their own, in order to find the best fit for them!
Your Career Paths
A Psychology degree prepares you for literally any kind of work!
The main message that I wanted to communicate in this intro was that Psychology majors are always told that academia and therapy are the two main tracks that exist out there. But even in Psychology, there are so many sub-specialities! There’s Social Psychology, the study of how we are when others are around, and how we interact with them. There’s Personality Psychology, the study of all of the factors that make us uniquely us. There’s Health Psychology, the study of the biopsychosocial model and how all of these different aspects interplay with our well-being. The list goes on and on!
Because we focus our study in these foundational areas, we are well-equipped to take on almost any work that involves humans. I say that somewhat humorously, but I really do believe it! There are tons of examples within industry. Social Psychology integrates systems thinking, vital for understanding how teams work together, like in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Personality Psychology serves as the basis for so many of our industry personality assessment tools that help us build teams. And the case for Health Psychology couldn’t have been clearer than during the worst days of our Covid pandemic, with health information communication and protocol establishment being top needs.
Your Skills
Psychology gives you so many applied and technical skills!
I always talk at length about the skills in which a Psychology background gives you an edge! Qualitative skills like interviews and observations are vital in setting up structured methods of trying to capture phenomena that you need to understand; Psychology students know how to employ proper research designs to get you those insights.
Many people also don’t know that inferential statistics are part of the Psychology curriculum; Psychology students can find statistically significant differences between groups or can even build different kinds of predictive analytics and machine-learning models. I even taught those courses! (Check out this page and section "Research Design and Statistics", as well as read hilarious feedback from my students from Stats I and Stats II!)
More importantly, though, is that Psychology students can apply those same research design skills to determine if those quantitative skills are even necessary for the question at hand. Often times, we researchers are asked to run a specific analysis because our stakeholders are familiar with that analysis from a previous project, or from their own training. Psychology shows us how to ensure that the questions that our stakeholders are asking, and the methods that we employ to answer those questions, are hypothesis-driven, and appropriate for the kind of data we anticipate collecting. It truly is a science of its own!
Psychology can also give you a great practice ground for soft skills. Projects in Psychology almost always require teams, written communication, oral presentation, and an element of showing your thinking – all critical skills that almost every job requires.
Your Brand
Research experience translates well into project management, risk assessment, and success metric tracking!
In addition to the formative undergraduate experience, Psychology research experience is extremely applicable to work in industry! I honestly believe that what we have here is just a translation problem.
In industry, we talk about project management, timelines, resource allocation, risk assessment, and success metrics. In academia and research, we employ the same exact skills in syllabus and course creation, grading projects and exams, writing extremely detailed grants for funding, and explaining the merits and limitations of the projects that we run in order to broaden our bases of knowledge.
Regardless of if you’re doing this in Blackboard or Monday.com, you’re flexing the same muscles! The biggest hurdle is just translating this into industry-ese. When I think about my time in the initial job search after graduating, I realize that this translation is what helped me find more success the longer I kept at it – I was starting to learn the language!
If it's all about the soft skills, you need to find a place where you can be YOU!
I told my audiences at TWU and UNT Dallas this: I thought my biggest gap in the job search was having zero experience in industry. Though I had worked in a National Science Foundation-funded Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (ours is called iPerform and led by the fabulous Dr. Fillia Makedon!), I hadn’t done any proper internships or gotten work experience outside of school. In some cases, I was actively encouraged not to; graduate schools often frown upon students having jobs outside of their responsibilities as researchers and teaching assistants. So, I would try to avoid talking about my inexperience.
Because this came from a place of insecurity and fear, I now know that this was actually disingenuous of me. It wasn’t until I leaned into my inexperience that I found more success. I started to find ways to translate what I had done in my research and teaching experiences into what potential employers were asking for. I connected with people on LinkedIn to find collaborations to help fill in the gaps. I turned my CV into a resume and a portfolio, and I posted more articles about what I was up to in order to share my true story.
By being my authentic self, I was actually able to connect with the people I was meeting. Job interviews felt less like tests and more like simple conversations. I talked freely about my studies and found ways to show how I could use my findings to further their knowledge, or how I could use my skills and resources to make new discoveries and connections.
The Audience's Questions
The experiences I had giving these talks were so invigorating. These young minds are brilliant, and they asked fantastic questions! Here are some of the discussions we had after the talk!
Was I nervous about getting up on this stage? Nah -- well, not until I had to ask if "Buzzfeed was still a thing".
Q. I loved the videos and practicing skills section of your talk! Where can I do more?
In my talk, I give some example user experiences modeled on the kind of work I do and the prompts I received during my job search. We talked about how to create research designs and experiments that would help us learn what we needed to learn. Students loved this approach!
So, to this, I say: Practice creating different experiments to test things! Shadow your professors! Find more clips on YouTube! Connect with people on LinkedIn! And then, write about and share your experiences! One of my favorite parts of my job search was meeting with other UXers and asking if I could do freelance research for them to build my portfolio. It’s a great way to start! At the very least, look for videos of the jobs you think you want on YouTube, and see if there are videos that show you the day-to-day. This way, you’ll get a good idea of what expectations to have as you step into those roles.
Q. How do we start networking?
One way to start is through LinkedIn! Not only do the web-based and mobile interfaces provide you an easy way to start, but you now have access to so many more people who have careers and experiences that may mirror the careers and experiences you seek. It all starts with a conversation!
Q. Have you ever been rejected for a job? How do you move forward?
We’ve all been rejected; it’s just part of life. A “no” could just mean that it’s not the right task, the right team, or the right time. One major thing that helped me persevere: the job search is just as much about finding what you want as it is fulfilling the wants and needs of others. Keep going and trust that you’ll find something that’s a better fit for you.
My Reflections
My goal for these talks, and my current academia-to-industry mission, was to communicate some key learnings that I had about parlaying my skills into a customer-focused role, namely, a UX Research career. But I keep coming to the realization that maybe what I am doing is more than that. It’s about echoing the trends that we’re seeing in UX, and honestly, in industry generally: the workforce is made better through adaptive, creative thinking.
You’ve seen the articles. Gone are the days of traditional pipelines to careers. There are no set paths anymore, especially now that information is so accessible, and the nature of our work is so diverse. Sources like SHRM share that “Skills-Based Hiring is Gaining Ground”, meaning that no One Thing – not formal training, not academia, not experience, not degrees – serves as the supreme identifier of talent or best fit for a role.
I love this article from SHRM!
Because of this evolution, we need to get better at telling our stories. We need to bring our personal experiences and communicate our brands, our approach to the work, our style of working, when seeking new positions. It helps us unlock an extra aspect to the work: it’s not just about whether or not you can do the job, but also about whether you are effective at collaborating and understanding the rhythm of the work you’ll do together.
And I don’t mean that just for those who are seeking jobs, or job-adventurers, as I like to say! Employers also need to tell our stories more effectively to ensure that we are finding, hiring, and retaining top talent. Now that I’ve been a hiring manager, I’ve experienced first-hand how tricky it can be to craft a well-phrased and truly illustrative job description. But the SHRM article I cited earlier points us all in a new direction, one that I’m definitely going to employ in my next hiring opportunity!
Anecdotally, I’ve seen fewer job posts related to ticking boxes on a list of requirements, like this:
Has a degree in [field 1], [field 2], or a related field
Has 10 years working in [field 3]
Knows [insert random and job-specific program here]
and more job posts with actual descriptions of the kind of work expected of applicants, i.e., the actual skills you'll need to bring:
Connects the dots between teams and their work
Can draw parallels between similar processes or systems
Is a creative problem solver
Takes initiative when leading projects
Structures tasks according to helpful frameworks
Learns fast!
I’ve also seen job descriptions that use words like “curious”, “adventurous”, “passionate”, and “highly-motivated”, oftentimes way before the description goes into any detail about skills. Therein lies our first learning: before these teams talk about the job, they talk about the kind of person they want to work with.
Importantly, you don’t need any one degree or skill set to show that you can do this work. And get this – a background in Psychology gives you the most fundamental of frameworks to hang all of your work on: the framework of the human mind!
To sum up, I’ll share one last story.
I had a recent 1:1 meeting with our Senior Director of User Experience (the Leader of Our Awesome Verizon Connect X Team!) April Durrett. She is an empathetic leader who recognizes the strength we bring as an inclusive and creative X Team!
After we checked in on how my team and I were doing with some business updates, I shared with April that she makes it very easy to see different paths forward, each with their own pros and cons. She told me some words that have stuck with me to this day:
Your flexibility is your superpower.
I truly believe that to be able to be any kind of functioning, empathetic, successful member of working society, we need to have flexibility. At the end of the day, we're all just people trying to figure out problems and solutions in a system that is forever in flux. Being able to navigate that comfortably, to ebb and flow, to bend and not break, is powerful.
I’m certainly lucky to be a part of Verizon Connect, where we are empowered to bring our authentic selves to work. But I truly believe that regardless of where we are, we can all have that superpower!
And, Psychology students, I’m a testament to this: you’re especially well-poised to harness it!