How To Communicate Your Skills To Employers

Join Isaiah as he explains why your technical skills are worthless in industry and why you need to start communicating your transferable skills right now

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah states why your technical skills won’t get you hired in industry and why you should focus on your transferable skills instead
• Next, Isaiah reveals why PhDs overlook their transferable skills when creating their professional profiles, which makes them lose professional opportunities
• Finally, Isaiah discusses why you need to let go of your technical skills if your want to advance your career and get an industry job

From This Week’s Show… 

Your Technical Skills Won’t Get You Hired

The idea that you will be hired because of your technical or specialty skills is a lie. That’s one of the last things employers truly care about. Sure, if you put buzz words on your resume that match the words in the job posting, you might get a callback, but those skills are not going to get you a job offer.

There’s an immense amount of data showing that the number one reason employers hire PhDs is because of their transferable skills. Your transferable skills are the softer skills that transfer from sector to sector, company to company, and job to job in industry.

What Transferable Skills Are In Demand And Why PhDs Often Overlook Them

Unfortunately, most PhDs cannot swallow their skills being labeled as “soft.” Most PhDs struggle to list even the most basic skills industry employers are hoping to see: project management, time management, writing and editing, and market knowledge.

These sound too simple, and academia has taught you that simple means less intelligent and less valuable, when most often the opposite is true. Most PhDs don’t even list research, analysis, work ethic, innovation, comprehension, or problem-solving on their résumés or LinkedIn profiles.

They would rather posture and list niche-specific skills that sound impressive (but are skipped rather than read) like fluorescence microscopy, real-time PCR, quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and anything with the word qualitative or quantitative in it.

Why You Need To Let Go Of Your Technical Skills If You Want To Move Your Caree Forward

I know what you are thinking: … but … but … I have a PhD! What did I do all my advanced technical training for if I can’t use it to get hired? You have a PhD? Me too. So what?

Guess who are some of the most overworked and underpaid people in the world right now? Guess who has more debt than anyone else? That’s right—PhDs. Despite all the education and advanced technical training, most PhDs are unsuccessful in their careers.

Perhaps you spent your time in academia developing some extraordinarily complex laboratory technique. Did you learn advanced molecular biology techniques or how to rewire commercial electrical systems? Did you study for two years straight to master a field and then spend several years compiling a thesis that helped push a niche scientific or interdisciplinary field forward?

While that’s great, the technical skills you learned along the way will be obsolete in a few years, if not a few months. In fact, many of them are obsolete already. And the specialty methods you learned, while useful in academia, have been streamlined or completely replaced with more innovative methods in industry.

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.