Translating Your Academic Value for the Industry Job Market

If the board of directors of an organization that can make things happen heard your research and wanted you to help fix the problem, would you know what to do? Not, like, "yeah, of course, here's what you'd need to do." If they gave you 6 months and $100,000, would you know what to do with it? If you can't implement your research, they'll thank you for pointing out the problem, and then pay someone else good money to fix it.

How do you translate your value?

At the core of this miscommunication between academia and industry is an ideological difference of value systems. If you want to get a job outside of academia, it is your responsibility to translate your value using industry language. How do you do that? Don't try to convince industry of the worth of academic value. Instead, rediscover your own worth using your audience's language & lingo, then share your story. Speaker Bio: Eric James Stephens, PhD is an award-winning, nationally recognized researcher and educator. After graduating from Clemson University with a PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design, he taught university writing. Due to the COVID pandemic, however, he and his wife lost their university jobs, packed everything into a storage unit, and moved their family (them and three kids) across the country to live in his parents' basement where he used his childhood bedroom turned storage unit turned make-shift office to make some plans. From those dark moments of frustration, Eric founded #HireHigherEd, an initiative dedicated to helping other academics transition into industry roles. To his core, Eric believes we are here to help each other. We are pulled into existence in order to help-we have an obligation to do so. His goal is more than a goal-it's an ethical obligation to help people.