Translation of academic experience into business language (opinion)

It has become a cliché to say to postgraduates and PhDs who are leaving higher education translate their academic experience in terms of business and industry employers will understand. This is often presented as the first step transformation academic resume in resume.

Such advice is valid. However, few people who drop it appreciate the monumental challenge this translation poses to graduate students and PhD students, especially those who have spent most of their adult lives so far in the cocoon of an academic cult and who may never have written a book in their lives. non-academic summary.

To translate means to overcome the language barrier. Academics are advised to translate from their native language – let’s call it “academese” – into the language of the country they want to enter, or “businessese”.

But how do you translate into a language they’ve never spoken that comes from a country they’ve rarely visited? How can you talk about the wants and needs of non-academic employers, with whom they practically do not interact?

PhDs and PhDs are often told that because of their writing and teaching experience, they have a strong communication skills. This is true in a narrow sense – that they are fluent in their native disciplinary dialect of academic language.

But business is another language. It has its own unwritten rules, its tacit assumptions and cultural norms, its criteria for effective communication. The difference between academics and business people is a profound lesson that too many academic expats learn the hard way: through broken phone screens, wallpapers of rejected resumes and the eerie silence of an empty inbox a week after the last round of interviews.

Translator from academic to business

This table is designed to make the translation process as easy as possible. It is designed to help graduate students, PhDs, and anyone leaving higher education begin to overcome the academic/business language barrier. This can be especially useful for writing a non-academic resume, creating a LinkedIn profile, or formulating answers to common interview questions.

These bullets are meant to be imported into the Experience section of the resume. However, they are not set in stone. If you’re using this chart to write your resume, adapt each bullet to your circumstances as well as the jobs you’re applying for.

Begin each line with a strong action verb, ideally one that conveys some kind of improvement: “enlarged,” “exceeded,” “remade,” and so on. Add numbers wherever possible: student learning, funding received, percent improvement, and the like. The numbers provide a concrete measure of professional achievement. If you don’t have exact numbers handy, make a guess.

You can expand on or combine many of these points into a STAR story that will unfold during the non-academic interview. If you are not familiar with the STAR method, an interviewing technique that provides a format for telling a story by describing a situation, task, action, and outcome, see This article. STAR is by far the most common method of structured interviewing. If you want to break into business and industry, always keep two or three STAR stories in your back pocket.

In summary, at all stages of the job search – resume writing, interviewing and beyond – it is essential to translate academic experience into business and industry value. Effective communication requires more than just writing and public speaking skills. This requires the ability to address the audience in their native language, using familiar terms to articulate their wants and needs, while addressing the tacit assumptions and cultural norms behind everything said. Translating there is possible and experience is the best teacher. This table is intended as a starting point only.