Why PhDs Dread Coming Up With Quantified Results On Their Resumes (& What To Do About It)

Join Isaiah as he shares why PhDs dread coming up with quantified results on their resumes, why it is important and what you can do about it

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

• First, Isaiah explains why PhDs dread coming up with quantified results on their resumes
• Next, Isaiah reveals how PhDs can reinvent their professional brand on their resume
• Finally, Isaiah describes how PhDs can communicate quantified results on their resumes

From This Week’s Show… 

Why PhDs Dread Coming Up With Quantified Results On Their Resumes

A resume is your marketing document. A good resume is not enough to get you the job but a bad resume can keep you from getting hired. The number one problem, and the top solution that comes up most consistently for PhDs is correctly formatting the bullet points on the resume. You may be facing many struggles, if you’re trying to get hired into your first job or for your promotion. These struggles can be narrowed down to correctly formatting these bullet points. As a PhD, you understand the nature of limiting factors in any equation. You know that there is a weakest link in any chemical reaction. 

Incorrect formatting of bullet points in the resume is the number one issue. And I am going to fix it for you today. Staying in academia for long causes changes to our psychology. We get a wandering eye for other career paths hoping that might fulfill us. Eventually, in academia, we realize we’re not having the impact that we thought we were going to have. So, we look for a vehicle to have that impact. The vehicle being our career. 

Tenure is dying. We see ourselves underpaid and underappreciated. But we hope for a better life when we see that other people are living a more fulfilling life. As PhDs we work hard, are intelligent. So it’s easy to feel like we haven’t achieved anything. You need to know the job titles to make bullet points impactful. You don’t know what other job titles are out there until somebody puts them in front of you. How do you search for something when you don’t know the keyword to search for it? And so we get this wandering eye. We start looking for other careers that are available. 

Learn how to how to position ourselves for an industry job!

How Can You Reinvent Your Professional Brand

So, how do we reinvent our professional brand so that the employers see this brand, which is our resume. When the employers see your resume how do they recognize that there’s value? How do they find that profile in the first place? If they’re scanning through it among thousands of resumes uploaded online. What can you do to grab their attention? 

And it comes down to communicating results. It’s not the result or the answer that matters as much as the process. Employers know that PhDs know how to communicate results. You should be communicating results on your resume. And how you write your results that appear appealing to an initial gatekeeper who does not have a PhD is more important. 

Many PhDs opt for lower jobs. You are confronted with the overwhelming process of getting a job outside of academia. And you don’t understand that process.

How Can PhDs Communicate Quantified Results On Their Resumes

Get to that limiting factor which holds you back. That factor is understanding and communicating your value. In academia, we don’t make claims over any results. Everything’s very passive. You want to avoid confirmation bias in academia. This is the exact opposite of what you want to do in your industry job search. You want to have extreme confirmation bias. You want to say, I achieved this. I did this. And it resulted in this. Even if many people were involved, it doesn’t matter. It’s a resume. It’s a persuasive marketing document not a peer review timeline of your study. 

Quantified results are numbers. The number of reports or documents of any kind that communicate your expertise in an area. You will be spending a lot of time creating maybe figures for white papers, several types of reports. They’re based on the company’s culture or brand. That’s a result that matters in business. Number two, resulting in X number of poster presentations on ABC topic. Number three, resulting in X number of publications, including a publication in a reputed ABC journal. Results with transition language, as evidenced by, resulting in, as demonstrated by that’s, how you end the bullet point properly.

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