This resource grew out of the FGLIF webinar Translating Your PhD: Resumes for Non-Faculty Careers, a conversation about turning years of academic work into language that lands with hiring managers for non-faculty roles, whether inside higher education or beyond it. It’s written for graduate students, postdocs, contingent faculty, and anyone else who finds it useful!

One thing worth saying up front: non-faculty roles do not mean leaving higher education. There are two broad non-faculty paths:

• Alt-fac, a term coined by panelist Matthew Loar, encompassing roles located within colleges and universities (e.g., fellowships advising, student affairs, teaching and learning centers, advancement, and many more)
• Alt-ac, which are roles located outside a higher education institution

Everything here applies to both paths. For more on alt-fac roles, check out Matthew’s two-part series for Inside Higher Ed:

Alt-Fac: Being ‘Alt-Ac’ in the Academy

5 Steps for Going ‘Alt-Fac’

Before we begin we want to acknowledge that if you’re reading this, you may be experiencing something new to you. You might be rethinking the path you trained for, or exploring what else that training makes possible. Nothing here assumes change is easy, but it does assume that you’re capable, you have real experience, and any perceived gaps are primarily about translation.

Resume vs CV: Sisters, not twins!

First thing to unlearn: a resume is not a shorter CV. They perform different functions.

A CV is a record, your res gestae. It looks backward and says “here is everything I accomplished”: every publication, talk, grant, and award, accumulated over years.

A resume is an argument. It looks forward and says “here is what I can do for you.” It is not a comprehensive list; it selects the few things that matter for one specific role and makes an evidence-supported case. The purpose of a resume is to show an employer you read their job posting, you understand the problem, and you could start solving it now, with skills you already have.

The job ad is your starting point

Don’t start writing a cover letter or adjusting your resume until you’ve read the posting closely. Look for:

• Keywords and phrases that repeat
• Core responsibilities
• Required versus preferred skills and experience
• Office/department housing the role (tailor your materials to that unit’s priorities)
• Culture and values of the organization

You generally want to have roughly 50–60% of the listed skills and qualifications, especially core ones, and a willingness to learn the rest. You do not need to be a perfect match. For many roles, cultural fit and a demonstrated ability to learn outweigh a missing technical skill.

Something most academic job seekers miss is that we already have far more relevant experience than we think. Teaching, mentoring, committee work, organizing a conference, running a research project, service, etc.––all of these experiences map directly onto the responsibilities for roles in student affairs, administration, communications, recruitment, development, and plenty more. Ask yourself: What is this organization trying to do, and where have I already done something like it? The honest answer is usually “more often than I realized.”

What belongs on a resume for non-faculty careers

Aim for one to two pages maximum; shorter is better. You don’t need to include your entire work history; include only what’s relevant to the role in front of you.

Typical sections, placed from top to bottom on the resume:

• Professional Summary: One to three sentences on your experience, strengths, and what you’re aiming for, optionally followed by a few bulleted skills. Rewrite this section for every single application because it should never be boilerplate.
• Relevant Experience: Paid and unpaid, reverse chronological. For each role, describe what you did and what resulted from your work. A useful frame is STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result. For example, “Organized the seminar series” is a task. “Grew seminar attendance 40% over two years by reworking the format and outreach” is a result. Employers care far more about the second. Instead of “Taught introductory history courses,” say, “Instructed six sections of introductory history serving 180+ students, while keeping grading and feedback on schedule under compressed deadlines.” Quantify wherever you honestly can.
• Skills: Technical, language, software, and analytical skills that fit the role. This is also where some of your academic work can do double duty if it maps to the job.
• Education: Degrees in reverse chronological order. You almost never need your dissertation title, GPA, or advisor’s name.

Translating academic experience

Most academics stumble on this point because we describe ourselves by our discipline instead of by what we can actually do. Below are some ideas for how to translate academic experiences into marketable skills.

Teaching demonstrates:

• Oral and written communication
• Conflict resolution
• Time management
• Training and facilitation

Research demonstrates:

• Project management
• Information literacy
• Data analysis and data management
• Complex problem solving
• Ability to work independently

Writing demonstrates:

• Critical thinking
• Communication
• Analysis and synthesis
• Attention to detail

Leadership and supervision (in the classroom or in the field) demonstrates:

• Collaboration
• Negotiation
• Coordinating people
• Decision making

If you’ve supervised a trench or managed a lab on a field project, you were juggling budgets, timelines, logistics, and a team dependent upon you. Don’t hesitate to position such roles as management experience!

How to talk about grad school

Grad school is work, so you should treat it that way in your resume. Don’t lead with “student” or “post-doc.” Depending on what you actually did, you can present yourself as a:

• Researcher/University Researcher
• University Instructor or Educator
• Project Manager
• Instructional Designer (especially for user-experience roles)
• Program Coordinator

The exact title matters less than being clear about what you accomplished and what you can now do. Don’t forget that you can mine every distinct role you’ve held––teaching, research assistantships, conference/lecture series organizer, etc. It’s completely fine to leave things off if they don’t serve the application.

How much should you tailor each resume?

You should tailor every single resume. This seems like a lot of work, but we recommend developing a system that makes it survivable and much quicker. Build a master resume: one document holding everything! It should contain every role, accomplishment, and skill, written out in full. Think of it as the professional twin of your CV. Then for each application:

1. Copy the master
2. Rewrite the professional summary for this role
3. Adjust the skills to match the posting
4. Cut anything that isn’t relevant
5. Borrow the exact language from the job ad to flesh it out

The point is to describe real experience in words the employer already recognizes and wants to see.

A note on timing: postings appear year-round, and review often begins about one to two weeks after a job goes live. If you see something you want, move on it quickly! 

Yes, a robot might read it first

Many institutions and organizations run applicant-tracking systems or AI screening before a human ever opens your file. While there are still folks who will read every application with human eyes, there are many organizations that don’t. To get through early screening:

• Mirror the terminology from the posting
• Use plain section headings like “Skills,” “Experience,” “Education”
• Spell out acronyms
• Use bullet points
• Skip unusual layouts, heavy graphics, and fancy Canva templates
• Get an internal referral (see “Networking,” below)

You should aim to strike a balance between machine-readable and human-readable language, because a person will read it eventually. Hiring managers and even recruiters are usually racing through a tall stack of applications; make their job easier by ensuring your documents are quickly parsable, thereby demonstrating early on that you can communicate clearly and efficiently.

AI can also work for you here. Used as an iterative drafting partner, AI is decent at rephrasing your skills in industry language. Just remember that first drafts tend to read “samey” and it can sometimes hallucinate experience you don’t have, particularly if you don’t prompt it wisely. The judgment about what’s true and what fits lies with you, so you should never fully entrust this process to a machine. 

If you’re coming from a writing-heavy field, the application itself is your audition. Especially for writing-intensive roles, your materials are where you shine in ways AI can’t fake: interpretation, argument, articulating complex ideas clearly. For more corporate or technical roles, lean on the robots a little more for phrasing. 

Common mistakes

1. Treating the resume like a trimmed CV. Don’t shrink your CV, start from scratch. Different document, different purpose.
2. Running too long. One to two pages, maximum. White space and readability are better than cramming.
3. Echoing the cover letter in bullet form. The resume and the cover letter are not the same content in two outfits.
4. Describing tasks, not results. What happened because you did the thing? That’s what you should be describing!
5. Choosing pretty over readable. Clean and simple almost always wins. Save the design energy for the work itself.
6. Cramming in everything you’ve ever done. Most employers don’t need your full publication list, an exhaustive conference section, dissertation details, or awards unrelated to the role.
7. Leave these off entirely: photo, age, marital status, number of children, citizenship or immigration status (unless genuinely required), references (unless requested upon application), your advisor, your GPA, and generally anything older than about ten years, unless something old is highly relevant.

A note on publications and awards: don’t list them, use them. “Three peer-reviewed articles in high-impact journals” belongs in a data-driven role as evidence of output. A publication record can also become a single line about communication or knowledge mobilization. 

What is the role of the cover letter?

Ideally, it should be one page long––absolutely no more than 1.5 pages––it must be readable, and you shouldn’t reduce the margins to give yourself more space. This document should not be your resume in prose. A cover letter answers three questions:

1. Why this role?
2. Why this organization/institution?
3. Why you?

The cover letter tells the story and acts as an argument for why you are what the employer or hiring manager really needs. It’s also often the better place for your research and writing skills to show through. Address the letter to the hiring manager by name if you can track it down (try using LinkedIn for this!), but if you don’t know the hiring manager’s name with 100% certainty, err on the side of caution and just write “To whom it may concern,” “Dear hiring committee,” or “Dear hiring manager.”

Your elevator pitch

It’s worth having an elevator pitch ready because you never know when a networking opportunity will arise. An elevator pitch follows a simple formula: What you work on + the skills and experience you bring + the roles or domains you’re exploring. You should practice this until it sounds natural and not bulky. 

Is networking actually important?

Yes, and it’s also very worthwhile! An informational interview is not you asking for a job; it’s you making the effort to learn how someone got where they are, what their institution or organization is really like, and what skills the work demands. Cold-email someone whose path interests you and ask for twenty minutes to talk to them about their work. People are surprisingly generous when you’re curious and not angling for an immediate referral.

Importantly, informational interviews can give you insight into whether you even want the job, plus a real contact who might remember you once they’re hiring. If a role opens in that organization, write to the person with whom you met. Sometimes that person can pass your materials straight to the hiring manager or give you an internal referral.

Two etiquette notes:

• If a job opens at someone’s workplace, reach out to your contact before you apply, not after.
• If that contact is actually on the hiring committee, don’t lean on them. If they’re not, they can often help you tailor the application.

What’s the deal with LinkedIn?

It is not strictly necessary (and there’s plenty of eye-rolling about it even in the professional world), but a clean profile that is another version of your resume is worthwhile. You don’t need to post constantly (we suggest not doing that!). LinkedIn’s real value is finding people for informational interviews and connecting with others with similar interests and backgrounds. Apply for jobs directly with the employer, not through LinkedIn. Use LinkedIn for networking, professionalization, and maintaining a visible profile, not as your application portal. 

What if they think I’m “overqualified?”

“Overqualified” is usually code for something else. The real worry is that you’ll bolt the second a faculty job opens up––essentially, it’s a worry about commitment. 

Networking can defuse this concern, and so can a resume that’s deliberately crafted for a specific job or sector rather than one fired off between academic applications. 

It’s also helpful to develop a real transition story. You should not write, “the academic market collapsed and I had to pivot” (even if that’s true!). Instead, tell them what genuinely pulls you toward the job or the type of work advertised. For example: 

“I loved teaching and research, and I realized the part I loved most was helping people navigate complicated information and reach their goals.”

You may be overqualified for entry-level jobs, and that’s fine. If you ran a dig, managed a lab, or served as head TA, you have management experience that easily translates into lower- or middle-management roles. Start thinking of yourself as someone with real professional experience, just from a different field. Aim high! (Within reason!)

Strengthening your profile while you’re still in grad school

If you have time and access, consider pursuing:

• Doctoral internships or community-based fellowships, if your university offers them
• Free workshops, bootcamps, and software or data courses through the library or career center
• Committee service
• Logistics-heavy roles like running a reading group, planning a conference, or supporting a field school
• Outreach, where there’s a mechanism for it (e.g., museums, local education)
• Project management course

Don’t discount what’s already been on your plate. Every grad student has managed a project: the dissertation! 

Career offices in particular are an underused gift: they frequently work with alumni, will read your materials, run mock interviews, and sometimes have internships for current students. Use them for as long as they will let you. 

A final note

Academic training builds exactly the skills employers want. The hard part is learning the language that translates it outside the seminar room. You are not starting from zero: you’ve managed projects, developed and promoted research, explained difficult ideas to people who didn’t share your expertise or specialty, taught, solved problems, and worked alone for a very long time without giving up. That’s a professional record!

These skills matter and they can lead into many different potential paths within higher education and beyond. Give it a try using the advice above. There’s no perfect resume, and endlessly tweaking will sidetrack you from actually applying. Your resume is an invitation to a conversation, not a guarantee of an offer. So keep refining it, ask for feedback––but remember, you should start hitting submit on those applications. Don’t let self-doubt dissuade you. You’ve got this!