Mr. Qualitative

Professional Development Time Plan

April 12, 2012 By Allan McDougall Leave a Comment

I’m sure there must come a time in the life of any working professional where one needs to develop new strategies for time management. The fact is, for working professionals in most fields, your list of responsibilities increases with time spent working in a given role. You’re becoming obsolete if your responsibilities decrease with time. I was recently faced with the crushing realization that I needed a new way to approach my professional responsibilities.

As a PhD student, part-time research associate, writing centre tutor, and freelance qualitative data analysis consultant, my list of responsibilities had grown so overwhelming that just looking at crippled me to the point of paralysis. Literally, professional paralysis; I was spending days staring at my list twiddling my thumbs with fear rather than chipping away at my projects bit by bit in an organized, systematic fashion.

The solution was simple; I simply needed to talk about my schedule with someone who could help me breakdown and compartmentalize tasks into time-sensitive, manageable units on my weekly schedule. My fiancé, the successful professional that she is, helped me do this last week. Suddenly I found space on my schedule to make time for crucial professional tasks that I’d otherwise been putting off. And she helped me find space for less crucial yet also important tasks I’d been putting off too, like blogging.

And so, I’ve emerged from my cocoon of professional stasis and I am once again putting words on paper. My last post, oh so long ago, was about Academic PR. And my interest in this topic has not faded. In fact, I’m so interested in this post that I’ve dedicated 2 hours per week to my own professional development, which includes Academic PR, but some other tasks as well.

So as a way of making myself accountable, I want to outline some of the ways I’ll be using this time.

Blogging: An important part of my professional development, keeping a blog allows others to see how I think and learn about what I’m working on. Blogging is also cathartic and in the past I’ve found it gives me a safe space to test out and refine new ideas.
Academic PR: I’ve said before that 21^st century academics need to carve themselves a place out online. I’ll be making time to develop my presence online on relevant social networking sites like LinkedIn, Academia.edu, SlideShare, and Wikipedia.
Continuing education: While I have an interest in diagraming, communication design, and advancing my expertise in qualitative data analysis, my professional development time will allow me to make time to hone my skills with tools like Visio, PowerPoint and NVivo.
Job market research: I’m not looking for a new job, but more than one of my mentors has advised me to observe market trends. This will allow me to understand what’s been happening on the academic job market when the time comes that I am looking for a new job.

I hope you’ll join me and lend me your insights as I progress. Thanks for reading!

Filed Under: professionalization, public relations

Academic PR Part 2: Academia.edu

March 16, 2010 By Allan McDougall 2 Comments

This is my second post about Academic PR, the practice of PR by academic professionals seeking to network, disseminate research, and discover funding opportunities. Today’s post is about Academia.edu, a social networking website for academics. I love the site because it leverages powerful techniques from the social networking web in a way that is easy and accessible for academics. But I hate the site because it overlooks some the most fundamental social networking techniques as well. Before I get into the details, first let me begin with the caveat that I’ve been in touch with the developers of Academia.edu about my concerns, and I was told that they are working them out. So by the time you’re reading this, things might be all better, in which case I’ll edit this post or write a new one. But for now, it’s a love-hate relationship.

Why I love Academia.edu

The reasons I love this website far outnumber the reasons I hate it. Most importantly, Academia.edu has an obvious understanding of their audience: academics. When you want to communicate with academics, you really need to cut the flack. Academics want simplicity and efficiency, not flash and complexity. So I love academia.edu because they’ve succeeded in appealing to their audience. And they’ve done so in three primary ways: the functionality, the database, and the interface.

Functionality

Academia.edu is a free and easy way for academics to publish their bios, publications, contact information, and Twitter-like status updates for the entire world to see. Further to that, users can use specialized search terms like research interests and departmental affiliations to find like-minded individuals and forge potential connections. I briefly mentioned that users can post publications, but I want to emphasize what an easy way this is for academics to highlight the work they feel best represents what they’re currently interested in. Furthermore, the Academia.edu site allows users to easily write blog posts that become part of their online profile.

Database

The information about thousands of post-secondary institutions has been populated into the Academia.edu database. So when a new academic user first registers, the site intuitively auto-populates the information about their academic institution and department. A simple example of this is the fact a PhD candidate from, say, the University of Waterloo’s English department (my alma mater), can choose the appropriate departmental title, the “Department of English Language and Literature,” instead of simply a generic title like the “Department of English.” Academia.edu achieves this by allowing users to populate the database as they register. So the first registrant of a given department paves the way for subsequent registrants to easily select their department from a list of options.

Interface

In terms of user interface, Academia.edu has done everything right. The layout is clean and clear with solid web architecture. And one of the most noticeable aspects of the site is the visual layout of academic departments. Once a user has chosen their institution and department, they can see the other faculty members, graduate students, and staff who are also Academia.edu users (see my screen shot).

I think this is a neat way to visualize the hierarchy of a given academic department, although I have to admit it’s rather unremarkable if a department only has four Academia.edu users. The site uses a similar visual approach for laying out users according to their research interests.

The is also comprised of four primary feeds: News, Papers, People, and Status Updates. Which leads me to the next part of my post . . .

What I hate about Academia.edu

In its current iteration, I despise Academia.edu because users can’t filter the site’s feeds. The feeds are scrolling updates about users posting papers, status updates, profile changes, etc. You’ll be most familiar with this user interface from Facebook (and I can only assume you’re familiar with Facebook if you’ve read this far.) Academia.edu claims . . . CLAIMS that the site uses your reported research interests to populate your feed with information you’ll find relevant. Well this is just not true.

Like many others, I’m an interdisciplinary researcher with interests reaching from Linguistics to Medical Education. Perhaps this diversity is the reason my feed is constantly clogged with information about academics who I am not interested in and papers that I don’t want to read. Although the site allows you to “Follow” the work of some academics, this doesn’t occlude the work of academics you’ve never heard of from appearing in your newsfeed.

Everytime I log into Academia.edu I find myself having to sort through a wealth of unnecessary information. While I can perhaps see the logic insofar as the site’s organizers hoped to foster previously unknown research connections, it’s completely unacceptable that I my Papers feed contains a graduate student research paper about Islamic poetry when the closest Research Interest that may link me to this topic is “Illness in Literature.” This site desperately needs filters for their feeds and right now they don’t.

So maybe I was a little off when I said the site’s designers fully understood their audience. After all, while academics are particularly good at cutting the chaff from the wheat, we need to be in control of WHO’S work we want to follow, and WHICH papers we want to read. Anyone who understands academics knows that while we appreciate recommendations, we don’t want them forced on us.

Filed Under: Communications, graduate studies, professionalization, public relations Tagged With: academia, Academia.edu, academic careers, academic networking, Academic PR, Academic public relations, academic writing, PR, professionalization, public relations

Academic PR part 1: What is Academic PR?

March 13, 2010 By Allan McDougall 7 Comments

This is the first of a series of posts I’ll be writing on Academic Public Relations (PR). The thrust of these posts is to talk about Academic PR as a set of strategies for academics, young (graduate student, PhD candidates, etc.) and old (ABDs, post-docs, sessionals, etc.), who are looking to get their work noticed. All major post-secondary institutions will have PR departments, but this isn’t Academic PR. A university’s PR team governs their institution’s image in order to recruit students and increase public awareness, but Academic PR is the practice of PR by academic professionals seeking to network, disseminate research, and discover funding opportunities.

A teachable topic

The job placement rate of a given graduate program directly relates to that program’s prestige. And more prestige leads to more funding, more industry partnerships, and more growth in the form of course offerings, faculty specializations, and scholarships. So it behooves academic institutions to teach career strategies, doesn’t it?

You’ll recall an earlier post where I interviewed Carleton University’s Dr. Lara Varpio and she outlined the importance of networking for PhD students nearing the end of their studies. Dr Varpio told me that effective networking helped her land her a job, and that effective networking leads PhD students and post-docs to the coveted markers of academic success: publications, fellowships, scholarships, and, most importantly, jobs.

Graduate students are told to disseminate their work at conferences and to network; but they aren’t taught to put themselves on the radar of potential venues for their work. And while Dr Varpio had in mind the more traditional form of networking (face to face at academic conferences), it is my contention that graduate programs and graduate students fail to teach the networking possibilities afforded by the internet, i.e., Academic PR.

Hidden curriculum

So in this sense, Academic PR remains the hidden curriculum of graduate studies: there aren’t any courses taught on this subject, but you need to understand it if you hope to get a job. Why is this?

It could be that the practice of Academic PR is distinctly unacademic. The academy is about pure objectivity while PR is about overt and covert persuasion; the academy is about meritorious knowledge dissemination while PR is about strategic knowledge dissemination; the academy is about research and reporting while PR is about pragmatic, human connections. But the fact remains that many successful academics are practicing Academic PR, and the next generation of academics should learn to do the same.

What do you think? I can see this post generating a lot of disagreement, and that’s great! I’d love to hear your feedback in the form of a comment below.

Filed Under: Communications, graduate studies, professionalization, public relations Tagged With: academia, academic careers, academic networking, graduate school advice, graduate studies, networking, professionalization, public relations

How to write a persuasive resume

February 23, 2010 By Allan McDougall 7 Comments

Whether for essays or emails, I’ve always been the designated editor for my friends and family. But my favourite genre to edit has always been the resume. I think I enjoy editing resumes because they are such highly persuasive documents, hence the title of this blog post. But most of us have some very common misconceptions about resumes—and here I’m speaking from experience, not just as an editor.

I was turned down by six companies in a row before I was finally hired at a marketing company as part of the co-op program I enrolled in during grad school. With schoolwork mounting, I was very frustrated that six potential employers turned me down. So I booked an appointment with a co-op advisor, I attended a practice interview session, and I had my resume edited by a professional. Along the way, I asked a lot of questions and received a lot of helpful advice. I changed my resume to fit the advice of the experts and I was hired after my next interview. I realize now I wasn’t hired at those first six jobs because editorial hubris got the better of me. I couldn’t get a job because I didn’t realize the potential power of my resume.

What you’re probably doing right

Most of the resumes I edit have the header nearly perfect. Everyone understands that your name should be the central focus of your resume. Under their names, everyone understands that your contact information (street address, phone number, email address, and website) is also included in the header. (Don’t have a website? The least you can do is list your linkedin profile. Don’t have a linkedin profile? Go create a linkedin profile right now—and don’t forget to add me to your network.)

Everyone also understands the general structure of the resume. First you list your job objective, then you list your education (by the way, don’t list your high school education—it’s a given), next you list a summary of your qualifications, followed by work experience. This is the structure of a resume at its most general. But this structure on its own won’t lead to many recruitment calls.

What you’re probably doing wrong

The history lesson

Misunderstanding a resume’s purpose is the first major resume misconception. When composing a resume, people tend to write a historical document. Their resume tells their education history, their employment history, and perhaps a bit of their personal history. But resumes aren’t historical documents; resumes are persuasive documents. The purpose of a resume isn’t to tell your life story. The purpose of a resume is to persuade a recruiter that you deserve an interview—and remember the recruiter has a stack of other resumes to choose from.

In order to earn you a job interview, your resume needs to focus on three main things: accomplishments, skills, and attributes. Every single sentence of your resume needs to be an accomplishment, an attribute, or a skill. If information isn’t an accomplishment, attribute, or skill, then it doesn’t belong in your resume.

Erase the irrelevant

Now the question is, can you distinguish irrelevant information from accomplishments, skills, and attributes? Try this quick test:

Which of these pieces of information are irrelevant?

Consulted with management daily to update website information
Provided outstanding guest service to hotel guests
Created weekly schedule for 63 employees

I guess it was a trick question: all three of these are irrelevant because they aren’t accomplishments, skills or attributes. While they each certainly provide relevant information about a job description, they’re nothing more than historical information about your past work. This information does not demonstrate what makes you special, what makes you necessary, or what makes you valuable.

Accomplishments, attributes, and skills

Your resume should at all times aim to detail unique actions and benefits that you offered your former organization. Here’s how I would reframe the above list to highlight accomplishments, skills, and attributes:

Created new daily website update system to relay current information from management to clients
Consistently earned 5 out of 5 stars for outstanding guest service
Generated $1500 per week in additional revenue by eliminating unnecessary shifts

For some reason, people reflect on their past work experience in generalities. But you need to be specific. Before writing your resume, sit down and make a list of all of the special things you did at your past jobs. At first you may find this exercise difficult, but the longer you think about it, the easier it gets. Were you ever recognized for a special achievement? Was one of your suggestions ever enacted upon? Were you promoted? Did you somehow save the company money (actual statistics and figures are VERY persuasive)? What skills did you use regularly or acquire?

Activities and Interests

Finally, for some reason, nobody ever includes an “Activities and Interests” section in their resume. Yet three bullet points about your life outside of work can do so much to set you apart from other applicants. Employers ARE interested in your experience with music, drama, dance, sports, and any other type of collaborative enterprise that demonstrates teamwork, creativity, or coordination. You might also want to tweak this section of your resume depending on the job you’re applying for. For example, demonstrate an interest in technology if you’re applying for a job with a technology company.

So, will I edit your resume? Of course! But now that I’ve written this piece, I’m going to send you to read it first. I hope you’ll also read the other article I wrote on more general job hunting advice. Good luck in your search!

Filed Under: professionalization, Writing Tagged With: job advice, jobs, persuasion, Persuasive writing, resume writing, resumes