Your recruiters don’t have enough time to devote on your resume when you apply for an industry job. In order to help your recruiters to know about your eligibility for a particular kind of job, you should mention your transferable skills that you developed during a PhD, but unfortunately you emphasise on those transferable skills that have nothing to do with an industrial job. Here are the transferable skills that you shouldn’t mention in your resume.
Tedious and complex emails
Having the knack of an academic writing style is a pride for any PhD scholar, but when it comes to email writing, this doesn’t impress everyone. Email is the main source of communication in most of the organisations. You can’t write in a tortuous manner. So don’t jump with an academic writing mindset while writing emails. You should explicitly and elaborately convey your message so that readers can twig your message. So before hitting send button, you should read your email and think the purpose of your message. Ensure your email format is professional and easy to understand.
Working Under Flexible Deadlines
Hardly any PhD scholar completes their projects within deadlines during their PhD programmes. They have full liberty to push deadlines by several weeks or months. Don’t think that you can procrastinate your assigned work as per your suitability. You have to turn in your project within deadlines if you don’t want to lose your job.
Giving additional and scientific information
You have to dive into technical and deeper details during your academia. You elaborate each point and justify with examples. However, giving additional information in resumes can throw you in deep water as it will raise more questions, and there are chances that you may get stuck to justify your information. Every word will be used by recruiters against you to judge your potential. In fact extra information will make your resume complex to know what you exactly need.
Putting lots of scientific information is also not appreciated and recommended. Technical terms will never endear you to your recruiters. You should bear in mind that recruiters might not be aware of those terms, and may not be from your field.
Overcommitting
Your words and statements have weightage when it comes to interview. Any statement can be misled as commitment by your recruiters and will be setting expectations. Always remember not meeting these expectations will be considered underperformance. So before making a commitment you should evaluate whether you are able to do it or not.
Handling multiple tasks
Being habitual of involving into multiple tasks is very common for PhD scholars, but this approach or work style is not going to be useful for you to sustain in an industrial job. Don’t spread yourself too thin as this will affect your performance. You won’t be able to concentrate on activities completely. In fact it will also affect the quality of work.
Generally people overload themselves with work because of an illusion of progress. You should consider whether you will be able to manage extra work pressure without compromising the quality of your work or not. Ponder over opportunities deep before jumping at them. Decide whether grabbing a particular opportunity is exactly going towards your destination or taking you off your goals.
Over Focusing on all details of all projects
Focusing on minor details is good especially if a project is scientific. However, it should be in the right context. But you can’t follow the same outlook towards every project. In an industrial job, you don’t have lot of time to complete projects. You have to fully utilise your productivity within time limitations. So you should focus on the crux of projects that is relevant to finish projects within deadlines.
Having too many priorities
Meeting deadlines and targets is very important to hold a strong position in industries. During your PhD you could give priorities to all tasks, but actually too many priorities means you have long list of works. In your job you should plan in advance the completion of your tasks. Usually complete two to three tasks for everyday. This will enable you to complete your all tasks in time and effectively. However, priorities keep changing in jobs. So don’t panic if it happens so.