A career exploration method for PhDs in the arts and humanities

What can I do with my humanities PhD?

[[[IDEA 1:]]] If you’re a humanities PhD, PhD candidate, post-doc, or ABD trying to understand how your academic experience can translate into work beyond the university, this workshop was built with you in mind.

You may be wondering some version of the same question: What else can I do with my PhD besides chase short-term contracts, adjunct roles, or an ever-narrowing tenure-track market? Or, more bluntly: How do I turn an academic CV into a resume and a story that make sense to employers who have never set foot in my department?

In this workshop, we start by getting clear on what you want your next chapter to look like, then translate the experience you already have into language and tools that make those paths more real and more reachable.

[[[IDEA 2:]]] If you're a humanities PhD, PhD candidate, post-doc, or ABD trying to understand how your academic experience can translate into work beyond the university, this page is for you.

Humanities PhDs and ABDs leaving academia face challenges that STEM-focused career resources can't address. Years of specialized academic training develop exactly the kind of rigorous, analytical, and interpretive thinking that industries value — and yet the academic career path offers almost no guidance on how to recognize that in yourself, or say it in language employers understand.

After more than 25 years in career transitions — and working with humanities PhDs in earnest since 2013 — what keeps proving true is that the transferable skills reside in how someone earned their degree, as much as in what they studied. The work lies in identifying what you already have, understanding how that experience is valued by employers and the industries they hire for, and then learning to translate it into language employers (and their resume-scanning machines) recognize.

This workshop is built for humanities PhDs and ABDs who want to:

• explore professional roles outside higher ed

• translate their academic credentials into language that connects with employers

• move forward with a realistic, research-backed sense of where to go next

Where this methodology came from

I’m Jared Redick. In 1999/2000, I began my own multiyear career transition from being a singer, pianist, and music educator—and co-founder of a nonprofit arts organization—to retained executive search, and later, executive coaching.

Then in 2013, the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) invited me to share my career change methodology—one I’d codified in 2009 and had used with about 450 people at that point—with 70 PhDs and post-docs at a conference in Berkeley.

If you watch the video below, you might see that despite a lifetime on stage, I was a bit nervous. I was the last presenter. The tail end of session after session, led by PhD after PhD, all presenting career perspectives that, from where I stood as a career transition specialist in San Francisco, felt well-intentioned but outdated.

Still, my methodology felt informal in comparison. But I’d been trained in executive search, I was a solid communicator, and I had something I thought could help attendees who were looking at careers beyond the academy.

Did I mention I was the last speaker of a two-day conference? And it was a Friday?

I decided two things: (1) the audience members were first and foremost human, and (2) I didn’t need to pretend I was an academic. I was going to be fully myself—and if I got laughed out of the room, I’d take my toys and go back to my very full practice in San Francisco.

What happened was sort of magical. I presented my methodology—starting with the difference between an academic CV and a business resume.

The design differences are easy to see on the page. But the mindset shift from “presenting a list of lists” to “designing thoughtful, research-based copy to influence a hiring entity” was a new concept for the audience.

Then we shifted into my Job Description Analysis (JDA)—a tool I built out of frustration one night in 2009 after a client handed me 27 job descriptions and said, “I want to write my resume for these job types.” That’s an unglamorous origin story, but the development of the JDA opened up a world of change for the people in that room. The session organizer pulled me aside afterward and said, “Pitch perfect.”

The session—if you watch it—has an unforgettable moment. I’m standing by a flip chart when I reveal my naivety about the length of a dissertation. The first chunk of laughter came when I mentioned that the audience’s 50-page dissertation wasn’t likely going to be the main attraction for their alt-ac career change. I’ll stop there, because that’s what the room did. They stopped. I stopped. The energy sucked out of the room and an attendee clarified my gaffe about dissertation length. I sheepishly replied, “I’ll just hide behind this easel,” and the room—after laughing with (or at) me—relaxed, and we got down to business.

Since that day in 2013, I’ve presented this methodology nearly thirty times in person, applied it to about 80 private clients per year, and now share it as a webinar with people around the world.

That session in Berkeley led to more.

Over the next few years, UCHRI brought me back to present at their campuses across the state—Davis, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, UCLA, San Diego, and others—and at the Beyond Academia conference at UC Berkeley. Each room full of PhDs and post-docs pushed back, asked hard questions, and made the methodology sharper.

One of those sessions included a conversation with representatives from the National Endowment for the Humanities, who were evaluating continued funding for the program. A PhD candidate who had worked through the JDA spoke up unprompted:

What I’ve learned since 2013

Many PhDs approach industry careers the way attorneys approach Big Law, or accountants approach the Big Four—as a lockstep track where credentials signal the next rung and the path is more or less legible. That model never fully applied outside the academy. But it increasingly doesn’t apply inside it either. The erosion of tenure-track positions and the rise of adjunct roles have dismantled the framework that made academic career progression predictable.

More PhDs are finding the academy isn’t offering the lockstep they trained for—and that the skills needed to navigate what comes next weren’t part of the curriculum.

The PhD-to-industry transition is harder than most career changes for two reasons, and only one of them is widely discussed.

The first is real: you may lack skills specific to the roles you’re targeting. That’s not a character flaw—industry asks for things graduate programs don’t teach. You’ll pick them up. But you’ll enter as a learner, and it’s worth planning for that honestly.

The second is harder to see: you have far more transferable skills than you’ve named. You’ve spent years producing original research, building arguments from evidence, teaching complex material to skeptical audiences, and writing at a level most industry professionals never reach. You’ve just treated those skills as table stakes—the assumed cost of admission to the academic conversation. They’re not table stakes to an employer.

But the employer isn’t going to do the translation work. That’s yours to do.

This workshop is about doing both.

Recognition

The Modern Language Association—the professional body behind the style guide many humanities PhDs rely on across their academic careers—published a résumé guide for humanities PhDs that directly credited Jared Redick’s methodology. The guide adopted and cited JDA principles in its approach to resume writing for humanities PhDs.

15,000+ job seekers have used the JDA since 2009 to evaluate fit, identify skill gaps, and align materials with real hiring audiences.

THE WORKSHOP

What we cover

Ryan Fowler, PhD—who made this exact transition after fifteen years in academia—and I will walk you through five fundamentals in a single session:

• Converting your CV into an industry-facing resume — the design differences are visible on the page; the mindset shift is what actually moves the needle

• Translating academic accomplishments into quantified, industry-readable bullet points

• Making your resume ATS-ready for the “upload your resume here” button

• LinkedIn development for career changers

• Cover letter writing — straightforwardly, without the academic formality that tends to work against you

We’ll also spend meaningful time on the Job Description Analysis (JDA)—the tool that, at the 2013 UCHRI conference, prompted the session organizer to pull me aside and say the entire conference was worth that one concept. It’s now been used by more than 15,000 job seekers to evaluate fit, identify skill gaps, and write materials that connect with real hiring audiences.

PRESENTERS

Who leads the session

• Jared Redick is founder of The Redick Group and has taught this career transition methodology to humanities PhDs since 2013, beginning with the University of California Humanities Research Institute. His work focuses on helping accomplished professionals translate complex experience into market-facing language that employers can understand and value.

• Ryan Fowler, PhD spent fifteen years in academia before making his own transition into educational publishing. He now co-facilitates this workshop from the perspective of someone who has lived this shift firsthand and applied the methodology in his own career change. Ryan attends as many workshops as he can, with occasional absences.

FORMAT

No slides, no recording

This is a live Zoom session, and I’ve tried to make it as close as possible to a private working session.

Be in a place where you can freely observe my screen and talk through various anonymized examples. , live research when called for),

Higher ed is a small world so we don’t record these sessions. , and we’d like you to feel comfortable participating freely, so we don’t record these sessions.

no recording, and honest conversation. If you want privacy, use a pseudonym. You don’t need to be on camera.

This is a beta experience, which means it will evolve. If the demand is there, it grows into a series that unpacks each step in depth. For now: one session, one methodology, and the tools to start moving.

What others have said

Registered participants receive the current JDA worksheet and instructions in advance so they can begin thinking through fit, gaps, and target roles before the session.