What keeps PhD students jobless?
There is no one who is going to come and help you to get an industry job. If you are doing that, you will perhaps keep waiting for a long time. Taking the situation in your hand is the only way to gear up your career. Remember that your effort is the only thing that is coming in the way of you and your dreams.
I suggest that you make the decision today to never make these mistakes so that you don’t remain jobless for a long time.
- Spending a lot of time in thesis writing: the thesis you write during your Ph.D. is the means to an end. It should be treated as a stepping stone to get yourself the job you desire for yourself. Have your goal set to getting you thesis written in the stipulated period while you also maintain the quality standards. Rather, an equal amount of time should be dedicated to building networks and getting yourself a job.
- Creating an unrealistic resume for yourself: The methodology adopted to write a resume by most of Ph.D. scholars, by habit, is research based as they just search for few samples and extracting ideas from them, draft their own resume. Often it ends up to be a document comprising a whole lot of details that need not be included in the resume and make it weighty and repulsive for the employer because of the extra content and glorified look.
- Abstaining yourself from seminars, conferences, and other networking events: D. work is time-consuming and daunting. It can involve you in the work to the extent that you can spend all your time just being in the lab and the work wouldn’t just finish. This may seem like the most important thing to do at that time but remember that just doing research all the time is not s balanced perspective. It won’t impress your supervisor, and it may not hasten your course completion. But it would surely keep you away from all events that you should be present at, for having the kind of networking that would get you placed.
- Not doing cold calling to recruiters: You have to learn to step out of your comfort zone and call up recruiters to investigate about vacant positions that match your area of expertise and interest. Not all opportunities would come knocking to you; there are some to which you would have to walk up to yourself.
