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Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2002 01:52:22 -0500 (EST)
From: Alfred M Kriman <akriman@darwin.helios.nd.edu>
Message-Id: <200202240652.g1O6qMb02483@darwin.helios.nd.edu>
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: RE: classics majors and skills: a tale (was: persistence data)

Janice Siegel:
> > silence. No reaction at all. Then I heard her take a deep 
> > breath, and she said, "I'm very sorry, we only hire people 
> > with skills." !!!!!!!

Ginny Lindzey:
> Oh yes, I was told this by two employment agencies, one adding that a
> year of doing all the paperwork that teaching requires from gradebooks
> to making materials and tests did NOT count as secretarial skills.
> 
> What the heck is so different?  I type, I file, I prepare materials and
> letters, I proofread, and I keep accounts.
> 
> Sheesh.

If it's any consolation, this is a problem for physics and electrical
engineering Ph.D.'s, also.  The solution that many have independently
hit upon is to repackage the individual tasks performed in doing their
teaching and research, publications and dissertation, and even their
coursework, as projects/achievements recognizable to prospective
employers, breaking them out as GL does above (but bulletize, and
use stilted bizspeak).  The remodeling usually involves placing
educational history dead last, on page two or (as was more common
fifteen years ago) at the bottom of page one.  For a first job out
of school you might want to lose the Ph.D. in a busy line of text, if
you can put TA-ship or other work in your employment history and not
leave a noticeable time gap to be explained (when what you were
really doing was writing the damn dissertation).

Bookstores carry r‚sum‚ books, but you can just google through
some samples, or get advice from a university placement office.  To
a certain extent, the term CV is restricted to the academic sort of
detailed r\202sum\202 that employers, particularly in the US, don't
want to see.

> The problem also is in battling with Human Resource administrators who
> have such a low level of education themselves that they don't know what
> they are looking at when they see a person with a decent education.

Afaik, you only want to deal with HR after you get the job.  The
problem of nonacademics not understanding what is implied by the
components of a CV, however, is very general.

AMK
.