This is the third post in a series about how I made the transition to non-academic work after my English PhD program (if you missed them, here’s Part I and Part II).
In my previous post, I mentioned that one of the major steps I took in transitioning into a nonacademic job was conducting informational interviews. This approach is recommended by academic transition resources like Beyond the Professoriate, as part of a larger focus on networking and “reading yourself into” the specific role you want to target. I promised I would dive deeper into my informational interview process, which is the focus of this post.
Between July and October 2022, I held upwards of 40 informational interviews. Initially, these interviews were a way for me to learn about careers and roles with which I was unfamiliar. Once I had a sense of the particular job I wanted to pursue, the interviews I held were primarily with people in nonprofit development, specifically people who currently or had formerly worked as prospect researchers. When I started conducting interviews, I was still living in Cleveland. However, we were gearing up for a move back to our home state of Minnesota because my spouse had secured a job in the Twin Cities. We made the move in mid-September, with our toddler in tow.
Because I was moving and changing careers, I knew I would have to put in extra work to rebuild my local network. While I conducted early informational interviews with people who lived all over the U.S., as I became more targeted in my job search, I also began to focus my interviews on people living in the Twin Cities metro area. I was trying to not only (re)build my local network but also create relationships within the existing Twin Cities nonprofit development community.
I really believe that networking—in addition to the and reading/research I did on the role and field I was targeting—was what helped me eventually get hired. As I met more and more prospect researchers and nonprofit development folks in the Twin Cities, I also learned more about the organizations they worked for and which places had openings (or would soon be hiring). To be clear, I never asked any of the people I interviewed for a job or to hire me (and if you don’t know already, to do so during an informational interview is an absolute faux pas).
I did, however, ask them questions about their career path, including how they ended up in their current role. I also asked about the skills and qualities they felt were important to the role I was considering, and whether those were skills I would be expected to already possess or could learn on the job. This last part helped me figure out how to position my transferrable skills in my job documents and interviews to better communicate how my graduate student career had prepared me for the role I was hoping to be in next. I also asked questions about what it was like to work at their organization—what the culture was like, how the development team was structured, what a typical work day/week looked like, and with whom they primarily interacted on the job. I learned that the answers to these questions could vary widely depending on the size and focus of the organization (e.g. a large hunger-focused organization looked quite different from a small animal rescue). A local chapter of a nationwide organization (e.g. Planned Parenthood) was also quite different from a local independent nonprofit.
Other questions were more focused on the future possibilities that directly related to this kind of position: in other words, was there room for career growth, either within the same organization or in the sector more generally. One of the reasons I decided to move away from the faculty job search was because I realized I wanted more career variety than a professor typically had. I didn’t want to back myself into another corner by jumping into a similarly limited role.
I also used informational interviews as an opportunity to ask the question that job seekers often want to know but can’t ask in an actual job interview: what is the salary like? I did not ask them what they, specifically, made; rather, I phrased it as what would you say is a realistic salary range for someone just starting out in the field, mid-career, and more senior? I also only asked this question if I got the sense that the person with whom I was speaking wouldn’t be offended or made uncomfortable by the topic. Answers to this question helped me in two key ways: 1) to gauge whether the typical salaries for this role would suite my needs, and 2) the degree to which I might be able to negotiate a future offer. Frankly, after eight years of earning a humanities grad student stipend, I had little idea what people in other fields made. I also realized that compensation in the nonprofit sector can vary widely depending on an organization’s size and how established it is. So it’s worth it to do this digging, even if you’ve been socialized to avoid talking about money!
Informational interviews can also make you aware of events of interest to your job search. Through interviewing, I learned about an upcoming conference for prospect researchers (held by the MN chapter of APRA, the professional organization for prospect researchers). I signed up for the conference, which I ended up being able to attend for free because of a scholarship (thanks APRA MN!). At the conference, I was able to meet many of the people with whom I had done informational interviews in-person, as well as meet many more local professionals in the field. Plus, I sat in on sessions led by these same professionals about current topics of interest to the field (I’ll be honest, most of that went over my head at the time!). I felt that the people I met at the conference were impressed that I was doing the work to show up even though I had not yet been hired as a researcher. I felt myself being viewed as a member of the community, with a formal role/organization affiliation becoming a matter of when, not if. This feeling was a much-needed boost to my confidence, and I am grateful to the wonderful people I met who were so welcoming.
I spent the bulk of my career transition networking and conducting informational interviews. I only applied for about 10 development positions in the end (mostly all some form of prospect research), and I ended up getting interviews with four of those places (and eventual offers from three of them, which gave me some negotiating power). I think my application documents stood out because the research I had done made me sound more knowledgeable about the position and field than the average applicant—and I absolutely consider informational interviews to be research. Informational interviews pushed me out of my comfort zone at first (I really am an introvert!); frankly, I would never have guessed I would enjoy them so much).
These interviews also made me feel less depressed and anxious about job searching in general. It’s much more pleasant to talk to other human beings about their career path and what they enjoy about their job than to shoot resumes out into the void! For these reasons, networking and informational interviews are my biggest recommendation for anyone looking to transition out of academia (and into to any industry, not just nonprofits).
Were these interviews time-consuming? Yes. But I met a host of great people, several of whom are now my colleagues! And the ones who aren’t my colleagues now, might be someday. I will keep working to develop these relationships and hopefully will one day be in a position to offer them a helping hand, as they did for me.
I hope this post has convinced you to give networking and informational interviews a try. I also hope that if you’re an academic who is considering making the jump, you were able to find something useful in this series for your own transition. If it did (or even if it didn’t), connect with me on LinkedIn. I’d like to be part of your network.
Brita M. Thielen 