Stories from Beyond Academia #16: Jonathan McGuire

(PhD in Cognitive Science)

In our last installment, you heard a little about Sam’s career so far, following her PhD in Cognitive Science. But of course that’s only half of the story that prompted us to start this Substack, and to founding Sequitur Consulting.

Jonathan’s career story started with a PhD in Cognitive Science too, but the rest is shrouded in mystery, hidden behind the interviewer’s microphone… And we can’t have that, can we?!

Well, remember Dr Miranda Batten, from Stories from Beyond Academia #10? Here, Miranda returns to give Jonathan a taste of his own medicine… by interviewing him! 

Miranda and Jonathan talk about Jonathan’s career in analytics and evaluation, the brutal arithmetic behind Jonathan’s passionate advocacy for one-page resumes, and how nomenclature can be a barrier to success for PhDs moving beyond academia. 

Read on for plenty of actionable tips from Jonathan, gleaned from a decade of employment outside of academia as well as his experience reviewing hundreds and hundreds of job applications. 

Jonathan McGuire: This is weird, because I'm having the tables turned on me! Miranda, I really appreciate your offer and taking the time to do this.

Miranda Batten: Of course, happy to! 

JM: It's funny, I had a conversation at work today where someone said 'Jonathan, you transitioned from academia to data to leadership, can you tell us about these transitions? Do you have any advice?' It was like someone had set them up to ask!

MB: Ha! What was the advice you gave them?

JM: I talked about how often you'll have skills in one domain that could transfer over into another domain, but you just don't have the right language for it. You might not gel with the phrase 'must be good at synthesising evidence', but if you can do a literature review then you're good at synthesising evidence. It's about recognising that they're using different language for the same thing, and then being able to put it in the employers' words. So instead of telling a hiring manager 'I did a lit review', you tell them 'I've synthesized evidence from over 100 different scientific articles into a coherent narrative'.

MB: From your experience in the PhD, is that something that you felt might have been a gap - that acknowledgment that there are only so many jobs available in academia, there are a lot more students who become PhD candidates and then become doctors as compared to positions that are actually available?

JM: When I did my PhD, there was this assumption that you would go down the academic path. But funnily enough, one of the first guys we interviewed - Tom - he did a PhD in Physics at Oxford, he said that in his cohort nearly everyone was planning a non-academic career. That could be because there's more obvious non-academic options for physicists, or they talk about it more, or it could be about the country and context more broadly. I suspect it varies quite a lot by discipline and geography. But for me, it was unspoken and I felt a huge amount of shame when I went to move out of academia, like I was the only one.

MB: I see that, and I've heard that, like 'if I'm the outlier, the problem must be me and not the system. And so that raises a question that I'm really curious about: I'd love to find out a little bit more about why yourself and Sam started doing this work and taking the time to reach out to people who ended up doing non-academic type roles?

JM: I won't speak for Sam but for me, there's two angles on it. The first was my own experience of moving out of academia and the process of me realising that this wasn't viable for me, and also realising that maybe my personality wasn't particularly well-suited to academia. 

I made the decision that I should look elsewhere but just had no idea what to do. I was looking up 'research' on Seek and getting market research jobs, which weren’t interesting to me. Then I tried 'data' and I got data engineering roles, which didn’t seem like a thing I could do. I was flailing around in the dark, not really knowing where to look, and simultaneously feeling like I'd failed and feeling a lot of guilt and shame for leaving academia: like I was letting my supervisors down, I was letting the scientific establishment down, I was letting the past Jonathan that had decided to do a PhD down, I was just giving up too easily. So my experience in moving beyond academia was quite tumultuous. 

The other side of it is that I'm now a hiring manager. I see super competent people with research degrees, sometimes they've held multiple postdocs or even professorships, and they straight up don't know how to sell themself in that recruitment context. Sometimes you're sitting there as the interviewer thinking 'I can tell you're brilliant but you're selling yourself short'. So reflecting on my experiences, and seeing that there's clearly work to be done to help people who want to make the switch do it well so that they land somewhere fitting for the level of expertise and knowledge that they have, that's the gap that we saw. 

We'd been doing some work on this already: the University where we did our PhDs had us back to talk to the PhD students about non-academic careers and contribute to courses, we'd done ad-hoc work separately and so we decided to join forces.

I was thinking “I'm the only one who's doing this,” but as soon as word got around, people were pulling me aside asking for details about how I did it.

MB: I think it's really good for PhD candidates to hear about people who have done the PhD and ended up in unexpected places: it's actually reassuring to know you're not the only one having those feelings and having those experiences.

JM: When I got my first government job out of academia I was thinking “I'm the only one who's doing this,” but as soon as word got around, people were pulling me aside asking for details about how I did it. I realised a lot of people were thinking about it, but there was a taboo about talking about it, so there weren't the networks of mutual support. There was no-one saying “hey, I was looking up the word 'research' and I kept getting market research until I realised that I could put this filter on and then I started seeing roles that were much more relevant for me”. Without that kind of thing, everyone's having to find that stuff out themselves, so if we remove a bit of that taboo so people can talk to each other, then hopefully that can make the process of making the switch a bit smoother.

MB: You mentioned that as a hiring manager, you see experienced people from research backgrounds who don't know how to describe what they've done or sell themselves in that context. What would you suggest people might want to think about when they're considering that first job outside of academia?

JM: Part of it is about nomenclature. Anyone who's ever designed an experiment has taken an abstract concept and had to operationalise it: starting with a very big question, partitioning that down to something that is researchable within a three year period, breaking that down into sub questions, breaking those sub questions down, and then operationalising them as an experiment.

In some respects, this process is very similar to being a business analyst. When a stakeholder says 'we just need this system to work, it's really clunky', what a business analyst needs to do is go 'When you say clunky, what do you mean?' And so they've got to break that big problem down into smaller problems until it can be solved. Sure there are differences, but there's a huge overlap between the skill sets in those two examples. 

So you need to be able to identify your transferable skills and then use the language that your interviewer is going to be using. So if you're interviewing for a BA job, the word operationalise probably isn't going to work. But saying requirements capture, which is the process I just described, might.

MB: Getting a sense of the language that your interview will be using, how would you work that out? Would you want to go and have some informational interviews with people in the industry? Find out a bit more about exactly what the work entails, get to better understand exactly what the lingo is, and use that to figure out if your skills are transferable?

JM: For sure. If you've got a PhD, you're a researcher, you know how to find stuff out. That's one of your core competencies. So let's say you've heard about this business analyst thing, you're curious and you want more info. 

Informational interviews can be fantastic to get a real sense of what it is actually like on the ground. But if cold contacting someone for that's not your jam, you might look up some job ads for business analysts and look at the list of duties and then for every thing listed that you don't know what it is, Google it. Like, “what is requirements capture?” And someone will have written up about requirements capture.

It can be handy to grab a friend or family member who's intelligent but not in your field, and describe to them the things that you did in your PhD, then describe the things that you would have to do in this job. Because they're not in your field you're going to have to use less jargon, which can help you notice the similarities - so in this example you might have talked about how you start a PhD and you need to break it down and figure out how you would study it and make all your stimuli, etc, etc and then you run your experiments; and the BA job? You might say something like 'from what I've read, it sounds like you start with this amorphous problem, you gotta define it, and maybe make wireframes or your prototypes or whatever, and then you gotta do it'. This process can help make the similarities become clearer.

MB: So can you tell us a bit about your story now, what you studied for your PhD and the field you moved into?

JM: I did my PhD in cognitive science, and I studied how people make moral decisions. It was at the intersection of philosophy and psychology - there was this big push at the time toward what people called 'experimental philosophy', which was all new and shiny and lots of big claims were being made. My PhD was in that context, and was very deflationary. Specifically, I looked at the extent to which moral decisions might feed back into our understanding of causality. The received view was that people undertake some cold cognitive processes about a situation to say something like A caused B, which caused C, which was a bad thing. The countervailing view that was coming out of the experimental philosophy work was that your decision about whether or not C was bad influences your judgment of whether A caused B. 

I found that those effects do occur in some circumstances, but in general, I noted that those effects were pretty small. That was important for me because some of the more hyperbolic interpretations of the experimental philosophy work was saying 'this renders moral cognition circular, moral cognition is now entirely suspect and can never be trusted'. Don’t get me wrong, there's plenty of reasons to distrust people's moral judgments, but this kind of perfect circularity isn't one of them.

MB: And then what happened after you finished your PhD, did you go into academia for a while before you ended up in your first government job?

JM: While I was doing my PhD, I did various Research Assistant (RA) jobs, and ended up being involved in a stream of research about social cognition in schizophrenia. We were doing some remediation work, working in hospitals. And as it happened, my PhD supervisor was involved in that and then she got a grant to look at moral cognition in schizophrenia. The probability of that seems pretty low, so I can't help but feel like she might have been kind of preparing that for me. 

So I started a postdoc while I wrapped up my PhD, then did that for another couple of years before the funding ran out, and I applied for all the grants, did all the things, did not have any success. We were pulling together various bits of funding to continue this work and at that point - I already had my suspicions that academia wasn't for me, personality-wise - but just the pure logistics of running out of funds and staring down the barrel of not particularly much security was enough to make me think I needed to really look elsewhere.

MB: You mentioned that your personality was one factor, which added to the logistics in prompting your move from academia into your first government job. Did you want to expand on that at all?

JM: Yeah, what I mean is that I work best under pressure. I like a fast-paced, relatively high-pressure environment. I'm sure, in the future, a cardiologist will tell me that following this was a terrible decision but I found that the really long timelines of academia weren't compatible with how I work best. It was hard for me to stay motivated in academia, to be honest.

MB: So when you moved into that first job you mentioned, did that pace better suit you?

JM:  It was funny, I interviewed for that job, the interview went well, and I got a phone call from my future boss asking to have a coffee with me before he would make a formal offer. So that was foreboding. But I went and had a coffee with him and he said 'I need you to understand that your timelines here are going to be very different to academia, you're not going to have three years to come up with a provisional result, you're going to need to turn around results in weeks or days or sometimes even hours'. And I was thrilled, I was definitely on board with that. 

It was more fast paced, but I still had plenty of time to do robust work, and learn new things, and try and fail at stuff until I succeeded. It was probably the perfect first job: I was a data analyst in a small government agency, I was the only data guy there so just the fact that I knew how to code a bit got me a certain level of cachet, I think.

MB: In terms of that initial switch, was there anything that you felt helped you prepare for it?

JM:  Like most people who did a psych undergrad at that time, I originally used SPSS for my stats, and then I would copy paste out of SPSS into my Word docs, yada, yada, yada. And then one day, in the RA work I was doing, I'd dutifully done that for this paper where we were reporting dozens of correlations. Looking back, we would have had a horrible type one error rate, but I didn't realise that at the time.

I sent the draft through to my supervisor, and she was like, 'that's really good, just checking that you remembered to remove that person that we decided shouldn't have been in the sample in the first place?' And I had not, so I had to go back into SPSS, rerun all my analyses with that person excluded, copy and paste all the new correlation coefficients into the paper. It didn't change anything meaningful but all the values changed at like the third decimal place so I had to update all the numbers. By the end of that, I was so incensed that I ended up looking into literate programming, which would have allowed me to just add an extra line of code and regenerate the report. So I went and did some online courses and learned R and literate programming. 

That was the biggest thing that prepped me for the switch over - in addition to all the skills I've developed during my PhD I could say I know how to code, and give the example of taking a previously manual process that took five hours of copying and pasting and building a process that will do it in 10 seconds. That's the sort of thing that an interviewer loves to hear - I did this thing, here's a measurable outcome, here's the benefit. It was really helpful for me to show not just that I had those skills but that I was thinking about things from an efficiency perspective too.

MB: Were there other skills that you developed during your PhD that helped you prepare for that change from academia and in your journey since then?

JM: This might sound a little odd, but hear me out! I did a lot of clinical interviews with people with schizophrenia during my time in academia. And one of the skills that you need to develop doing that work is overriding your normal conversational impulses to an extent - you need to become comfortable with waiting in silence for someone to answer, not jumping in because it's awkward, but giving that person the space to answer in the way that they want to or the way that they can. And sometimes people are telling you stuff that's pretty challenging or really traumatic for them and you need to manage your own mental states and emotions and reactions.

That skill set about self-management in those sometimes difficult situations translates over really well to things like tense conversations with a stakeholder who's upset that the dashboard has broken when they really needed it. Or a conversation with a team member who's going through some stuff and you being able to control your own reactions such that you can be a supportive colleague or boss.

MB: Can you tell us a bit more about what you've been up to since that initial data analyst role?

JM: I moved on from that role after a few years into a data scientist role in the private sector and stayed there for a couple of years at which point I decided to move back into government. I went into the data scientist role because I thought what I wanted was a job where I could listen to music through headphones and code all day. And then I got a job listening to music and coding all day, and I was bored out of my mind. And at that point, I realised I need a certain amount of human interaction. So that's another tip:  try to know yourself and what your real preferences are when you're applying for jobs. 

By then I'd had a bit of experience acting as a project lead and that sort of thing, so I went back to government as the head of a small team. There were four of us in a small agency and we were a one-stop shop, data and analytics function. We grew over time, and I ended up leading the data analytics capability for that organisation over the course of the next few years. And from there I moved over to another agency where I now head up the program evaluation capability, looking at the programs, policies, procedures that the organisation rolls out, how that rollout went, and whether they had the intended effect. 

Evaluation is a mix of qualitative and quantitative work with a huge overlap with applied research skills. I work with lots of people who have PhDs, and we do what are essentially multi-year research projects, looking at the efficacy of particular programs.

MB: You mention there are lots of staff who have PhDs working with you - how has that happened?

JM: The part of the organisation that I work for is considered relatively prestigious and has a reputation for doing really rigorous, evidence-based work. And so I think for people with that mindset, they want to work there because they can still do research-ish work. It’s not quite as self-directed as it would be in academia, but there is space to flex those skills and use that expertise. We also have people who decide to do a PhD while they work there. 

There are other well-known government departments that are similar, as well. And organisations like this can be fantastic in how they're different from academia. When I was in academia, it was a three way split: I spent a third of my time writing grants, a third of my time doing research, and a third of my time trying to publish that research. Whereas, we spend no time doing grants! 

I should also say here that writing a grant application is very similar to writing a business case. If you're working in an organisation and you want to spend some money, then you've got to convince someone to spend that money and that's a business case. That's also what a grant application is - it's saying, here's this thing that should be done and I'm the person you should pay to do it. But if you ask a dozen postdocs, who have all written grant applications, 'do you know how to do a business case', they'd probably say, 'what's a business case?' It's another case of having the skills, but just not knowing it.

MB: And this is again about that idea of nomenclature that you mentioned before posing an unintended barrier, with people thinking 'I can't possibly do that because I don't know what that is'. But then if you do some research you might get to 'It is the same thing. Yeah, I can do that'.

You have experience in academia, the private sector and in government roles. Can you tell us a bit about how they are similar and different. And are there specific benefits you've seen of one to the other?

JM: Sure, so the thing that you're not supposed to talk about is the money, but I will. When I moved from a postdoc to government I got a 20% pay rise, and then when I moved from government to corporate I got a 65% pay rise. They were apologetic that they couldn't pay more and I was just trying to act cool and not have a panic attack. I later got another pay bump, so over the course of three years, I more than doubled my pay. 

The differences in things like workload, hours, flexibility and all that sort of thing between government and private sector weren't actually particularly pronounced for me. There were some cultural differences, but probably not as much as you'd expect. I think that there is sometimes a conceit that everyone in the corporate sector is entirely motivated by money, but I didn't find that to be the case at all. There were a lot of people who were just interested in solving particular kinds of problems and a corporate role was the context in which the opportunity to solve those problems existed. 

There's definitely differences in levels of formality - I found academia relatively flat, structure-wise, and very casual in how you dress, how you engage with each other. Government is a bit more formal and hierarchical. Corporate was even more formal and hierarchical. So there are trade-offs. And obviously the other bit is that in academia, at least in theory, you have relatively free rein to choose what you do. I suggest though that the free rein is not quite as much as people stereotypically think it is, because there are certain constraints and one of the big constraints is that you can only do the things that you can get a grant for. Even so, there's less ability for free rein in corporate and government, and it’s much more dependent upon the kind of job you have and the attitude of your immediate supervisor towards you carving out little bits of time to pursue those kinds of things.

MB: In your current role on the opposite side of the hiring desk, what do you look for in people applying for jobs?

JM: The first thing I tend to look for is mindset and culture fit. I want to know what people's values are and I want to see examples of how they live up to those values, especially when doing so has been difficult. I once interviewed someone who said that one of their core values was truth. Later on in the interview, when I asked what they’d do if a senior manager asked them to lie using data, they said they would. To me that didn't seem to match. 

Depending on the role I'll also be looking for particular technical skills. If I'm hiring a data analyst, they need to know how to interpret the kinds of statistical models we use and how to code in one of the software packages that we use. If I'm hiring an evaluator, they need to show applied research experience and the stakeholder management side of things, even if they haven't worked directly as an evaluator. 

And then I'm looking for people who understand that things aren't always black and white. So in that example of what to do if the senior leader said to lie with data? 'Well, I'd immediately lie with data' isn’t a great response. But, 'well, I would flat out reject what they asked me' is probably not great either. There's a middle ground there where a person should be against lying but acknowledges that they should try and find out what that senior leader really wants and why they want it. That willingness to have a conversation to see where the person's coming from is important. That can be a challenge for people with research training because something that's incentivised in research is directing very specific and detailed criticism towards someone else's work and proposing a better alternative. That's not always feasible or the best thing for relationship building in other contexts. So you sometimes need to use other ways to get to the best outcome.

MB: Would you say that would be a particularly important skill for someone with a PhD moving out of academia to maybe not do automatically, but stop and use that critical thinking that they've gained in the PhD to come up with a range of options?

JM: Yeah. And, again, these are smart people, I don't think it's an inability to do that. I think it's just the cultural norms of academia differ to other contexts in terms of how to engage with certain questions. And I should say, sometimes the right thing to do in a non-academic context is to absolutely be pedantic and hold your ground and say, 'absolutely not, that's a no go, you've done it wrong.' Sometimes that's the right thing to do. But that shouldn't necessarily be the first thing you jump to.

I know that some employers have had experiences or hold beliefs about people with PhDs that are not so positive. I think sometimes it's a culture shock and people needing to spend a bit of time reorienting to how things work differently or how interactions might be different in a non-academic context.

MB: I'm also really curious about your perspectives of whether there are any potential or actual downsides to hiring people who've completed a PhD?

JM: Not that I've personally experienced. But I know that some employers have had experiences or hold beliefs about people with PhDs that are not so positive. I think sometimes it's a culture shock and people needing to spend a bit of time reorienting to how things work differently or how interactions might be different in a non-academic context. That's probably the biggest thing where there might be some friction. 

Now, occasionally, you interview someone and it becomes clear that they actually don't really want this job, they really just want to be in research. In that case, I would expect that if I hire this person they're going to be miserable, and they're probably going to leave really soon. If it's clear that you don't want the job, then that's not great. But that's true whether or not the person has a PhD.

MB: Is there any other advice you wanted to share with someone who might be considering switching from academia to a non-academic setting?

JM: I'll be really concrete. Your CV should be one page long.

MB: Oh! Okay - tell us more!

JM: I was recently involved in a recruitment which had around 20 applicants. I got a 583 page pdf that collated all the applications, and I had two hours available in my calendar to do my first round. That’s about 10 seconds per page. 

At 10 seconds a page, I'm skimming over them really quick. So you don't want that killer bit of info on page four because I might miss it.

And, I'm sorry to say, but the impact factor of the journals you've been publishing is irrelevant to me, and I don't need a list of your publications. You can put in the link to your Google Scholar or ResearchGate profile or whatever, if you must and I can look it up later. What I'm really looking for on the first run through is to be able to put things into an 'easy yes' pile, an 'easy no' pile, and a 'maybe' pile. 

The things that go into the 'easy no' pile are things like really chaotic CVs, cover letters that just say 'see CV', cover letters that include the wrong name or the wrong job title. You get those all the time, in pretty much every recruitment I've ever done someone has got my name or the job title wrong. They're not getting an interview.

The 'easy yes' pile includes applications where it's easy to see that it's a sensible path from where they've been to the job they're applying for. You want to make it easy for me to see that stuff, and one way of doing that - for me, at least, and not every recruiter agrees - is to capture the most important info in one single page.

MB: Do you want to just quickly break down what the main headings would be on that one page?

JM: The core sections for me are education and experience. One idea I'll put out there, particularly for people who are early in their career and don't necessarily have many jobs, instead of calling the experience section, 'work experience' you could call it 'relevant experience' and that way you can put in things like volunteering. Having a 'relevant experience' section with three items listed is a more cohesive approach than having a 'work experience' section with one item listed and then a 'volunteering' section with two items listed.

Some people have a skills section, but in my view, it's better if you include the skills more in the cover letter because then you have space to explain and give examples.

Everything else is negotiable. Sometimes, you might have a version of your elevator pitch at the start. That can be particularly useful if you're doing some sort of transition so you can contextualise your experience and it won't be a surprise to the hiring manager when they see your CV and that all your experience is in field A when you're applying for a role in field B. If you've got a brief description up front that acknowledges that you want to transition from A to B, then at least the hiring manager has that flagged right from the get go and won't be concerned that you just don't understand the difference.

You don't need sections about grants you've been awarded, or how many papers you have or your colloquia or whatever. But you may still have a reference, maybe in your experience section where you talk about your non-academic role/s, that says something like 'seven papers published in international journals'. I also cut anything that's more than 10 years old from my CV, again because I'm trying to fit it on one page.

MB: And just a last opportunity to throw anything else out there as we close the interview?

JM: It is worth taking the time to identify the skills that you have. When I left academia I thought the only thing I knew how to do was to research moral cognition. And of course there aren't really any jobs in that! I didn't realise all of the skills that I had that underpinned that program of research. 

Look at your last six months or more of work, all the things you had to do, and outline the skills that you used to do that work. Write those down, and start adding in examples. That will be the start of your materials for your cover letters and interviews, as well as helping you understand what jobs you might be able to apply for.

MB: And one last thing from me - early on you mentioned that there was perhaps a perceived taboo about discussing careers outside of academia. Do you have a sense if that taboo still there?

JM: I think things have improved quite a bit. For instance, I see universities paying more deliberate attention to preparing candidates for non-academic careers. There's definitely still some resistance and bad attitudes out there, but I think that's changing too. A PhD can be an apprenticeship for being an academic, but it doesn't have to be. It can be this other thing as well, and that's valid too!

And with that, we thank Miranda for returning for another chat with Jonathan, and for her thoughtful and incisive questions. And we hope that the tips Jonathan gave in this interview are helpful for any readers considering a move beyond academia.

If you are a PhD who has moved beyond academia and you are interested in sharing your story, please get in touch with us via our LinkedIn pages - Sequitur Consulting, Sam, Jonathan - we’d love to hear from you.

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.