 I'm Nancy Frischberg, and I'm one of the organizers of the Linguistics Career Launch in the summer of 2021. And I'm really excited to invite you to, or welcome you to this workshop on career exploration through the lens of self with Daniel Moglen. And Daniel got his PhD at UC Davis, University of California at Davis. And he's currently working in the School of Health there on very similar topics to the ones we're exploring here. And I'm going to let him talk a little more about that. But Daniel, I thought in this exploration of self you would appreciate the following story. I had a friend who when she was a high school student decided she needed a part time job and she went to the office and said to the office staff, what kinds of work do we have around here. Somebody said, Well, we are hiring somebody who can alphabetize, can you alphabetize. She was like a sophomore or junior in high school and she thought, Oh my God, of course I can alphabetize, which she said to the person, but that she had to ask me as a high school student says what about my colleagues here that they don't know how to alphabetize so I want to say to all the people who are listening in today. That's a skill you have you can alphabetize and it's actually valuable and getting a job. I actually have been using that little example with her as I've been coaching her about changing jobs now. She's been an elementary school teacher for many years and has some really interesting specializations but during the pandemic realized she's got some tech skills that could be useful to other people as well. So she's exploring how to make that transition. So without further ado, tell us what else we can do besides alphabetize Daniel. Thanks Nancy yeah and really happy to be here and just before everyone hopped on Nancy and I were talking about how two years ago. We organized a networking mixer right here in my hometown of UC Davis, and so it's been we're just marveling at the fact that it's been two years since our last career event with fellow linguists so I am so happy to be invited here today to give this presentation it will be highly interactive. I hope all of you have had the opportunity to fill out the skills, interests and values assessments on Imagine PhD where we will be going into breakout rooms and doing some deep dives on those in just a minute. So I will introduce myself. I have a bachelor's master's and PhD in linguistics bachelors from Berkeley and graduate work from UC Davis. And in my graduate work, I was much more on the applied side I worked with international graduate students and supporting them and conducting research on their language development. And through that process of working with graduate students and and postdocs so much during my grad program that I really became like so you know just like endeared and just like really wanting to provide support to that population. My first job out of grad school ended up being a senior career advisor for grad students and postdocs and I've been in this role now for about four and a half years and I just so enjoy. Yeah, I just really enjoy working on the forefront of, you know, making this transition from, you know, from grad school to to the work world. And, you know, I firmly believe that, you know, UC Davis and all of our institutions train, you know, grad students to be really good researchers, but there's this huge missing gap which is like, Okay, how do you make that transition from, you know, from your grad program into the work world. And so yeah, and so that's that's what I do. That's, I teach a class on career exploration I do one on one advising. Programming and mentorship and things like that. Alright, let's go ahead and dive in. I'm going to start with screen share and some slides. So the name of this talk is, and I will be trying to monitor the chat box but Rachel something comes up in the chat box that I missed. Can you just get my attention. So career exploration through the lens of self so I work with the approach that you and yourself are are like the starting point to figure out what you want to do right so you have all of these lived experiences. And, you know, just reflecting on those lived experiences is going to be a wonderful place to start with asking questions like, What am I good at, what am I interested in, what do I care about. You know, there's really nothing that beats a lived experience right we can always have informational interviews and learn from mentors and other people about their experience and we can take that into into consideration. But really, it is, you know, so helpful to have lived experience to, you know, really compare and see like what what are we truly interested in and where what direction we want to go. So why are we giving this talk so this is a 2018 Gallup, you know, engagement trend survey that found that, you know, about a third of folks are engaged in their work that's that's great and, or that's okay I guess I mean it'd be nice to have that, you know, much higher but and then we actually see you know hovering between like, I don't know 13 to even up to 20% of folks are, you know, actively disengaged in their work. And so, you know, this is just kind of like just a starting point as like why why are we having this conversation you know I, I don't think I'm going to go too far out on a limb to say that we are here, because we want to be engaged in our work you know that's something that we're that we're looking for work that is meaningful work that is that aligns with our skills our values and our interests. I just want to like start with this as a way of saying like, this is why all of you, I presume, are, you know, getting your bachelor's your master's your, your PhD, because you want to, you want to actually put into, put into work what you've what you've learned. And so, let's talk about that. There's this you know very, you know, I would say rudimentary theory of career exploration where if you have this Venn diagram of your skills your values your interests and your personality and you overlap all the circles, right in the middle will be your career. I'm here to tell you, that's not totally true. Just because if it was so formulaic and so easy, then we would not have this workshop, all I would do is say hey fill out this assessment and then at the end. I would just like spit out what your what your career is. So not totally the case so let's kind of break this down a little bit. So what we're going to be doing is we're going to be learning the language of skills interests and values. When you take these assessments, some of these things will be really affirming as in you may have already known this about yourself to be true. Other things might be kind of surprising or insightful as in I did not necessarily know this but as I'm filling out this assessment I'm realizing this to be true to myself or I want to at least inquire about this. The skills I really love Nancy's story about the alphabetizing because when you go through the skills. I'm curious to hear your experience about this but oftentimes what happens is that you realize that you have skills that are valuable for employers that you may not even have identified as skills. I work with PhDs and postdocs every single day, and you know they're so immersed in their research that they don't even recognize their skills as skills right because they're also comparing themselves to their colleagues and their professors and there's this whole you know imposter syndrome. And when you break it down with them it's like everything that you're doing on a daily basis, these are such valuable skills, and employers need these skills. Your job is to communicate your skill set to the employer, you cannot, you cannot expect the employer to guess, assume, or figure out what your skills are right. So at the bare minimum, taking an assessment like this and identifying those in the five category like these are things I'm really good at. And one of the one of the effects will be you will just have language to talk about your skills. Okay, and this is going to be valuable, not only for you, just to know what your skills are, but also when you're putting together your resume. You need to be able to talk about your skills. When you're in an interview situation you need to be talking about your skills. And when you're looking at job postings right a job posting is essentially here is a list of skills that we need. And you can go to your inventory of skills and saying this this is a list of skills I have. And the idea here is you want to find a good, a good match a good fit. So finding the language of skills is going to be valuable. And that's part of what we're doing here. And the same thing with interests, and frankly the same thing with values. And I think values. I'm going to go ahead and just like say my bias here values are my favorite. I love talking about values. So, if you ever want to talk to me about values I'd love to love to have that conversation. I want to talk about what you care about right what's important to you what matters to you. And these are things that are going to be really important to think about as you're as you're looking into different career, different careers. All right, and I want to bring in this career exploration tool of reflection. Okay, so and we will be asking some of these questions today breakout rooms momentarily. This tool is reflecting on what am I doing right now, what have been my lived experiences. What do I like about what I'm doing right now. What do I not like, what do I want more of, what do I want less of what am I curious about. I really want to encourage all of you to put put into practice, a practice of inquiry, right using using self reflection. This is going to be, you know, and it's and it's almost, it's it's it can be a somatic experience to right like, you know, just to give you an example. For me, I am a people person. So, if you if my if I were to take on a job, where the task was for me to be in a room by myself, just on the computer all day with no human interaction. I'm not a visceral feeling of no, like, no, thank you. And some of you might love that and want that and that's wonderful we need all kinds of people. I know for me. So, when I was asked to do this workshop, I was like, yes, this fits my human interaction need. I get a lot of joy from this. And so I want to find work that is, you know, work that's meaningful for me, it involves, you know, high levels of human interaction. Cool, I'm seeing some chat. Yeah, feel free to use the chat box to talk about. And yeah, things things related to the top as well. So that's cool. Awesome. All right, everyone's so with me makes all good. So we're going to use imagine PhD it's called PhD but it's really for open for anyone. This was a platform that was developed by actually one of my friends and colleagues at UC Davis Teresa Dillinger and a handful of other career professionals. Through my professional organization called the graduate career consortium. And it is, it is a free and accessible and really nicely made tool. So I hope I hope that was fairly easy to access and navigate. Imagine PhD. If you Google it should come right up. All right, so let's go into the skills interest in values. So basically I'm going to kind of do an overview of skills interest in values and then we'll do breakout rooms for for each topic. All right. All right, so skills. What are you good at. Right. And so these might be skills that you have gained in your academic training. They might be skills that you gained in some internship or or employment situation. They might be skills that you've had since a really young age, you know what it doesn't matter necessarily when or how you acquired them, although it's nice to pay attention to that. But these are things that you are good at now. Look, I went through a grad program. I know many of you are as well. One thing that grad programs, you know, tend to do is they they kind of make you feel like you're not good at anything. So like, when I work with my, you know, PhDs and postdocs, and they tell me that they don't have skills. You know, I, I, I work with them right you all you all have you all have skills right the idea is just to identify those skills, figure out how to convey those values to the employers. And you know Nancy and I and the whole team can really reassure you that your skills are valuable right they really are. And when I think of skills. You know, it's like, when I think of like my linguistic skills or something. Do I compare myself to, you know, all the other PhD linguists out there. Okay, then my skills are probably mediocre. But if I compare my linguistic skills to the general population, I would say, Yeah, I'm I have really high level skills right so it's also just who you who you compare to. But if it's something that you've been that you do every day, or you feel comfortable with this is this is a skill right and also just remember that pretty much every single employment opportunity, there will be on the job training. Note like a job wants you to have a certain skill set to make sure that you can do the job, but so much of, you know, getting into the work world is that they want to take your skills and they have something that they need you to do and they're going to work with you to you know train and refine and grow. So, I also want you to pay attention to skills that need improvement. So, for example, um, you know, we anything that you that you rate like a one or two or three. It's good to look at those and see which ones you want to improve. And, you know, for me, for example, I think I usually rate like grant writing pretty low. And it's also like not something I'm really interested in. So if I'm not interested in it, and I'm not that great at it, not a big deal, right. But if I'm interested in it, and I need to improve it like, I don't know, you know, computer programming or Python or something. Then, you know, the next step would be like all right so let's make a plan right do you want to take a take a course, a course error course or some sort of like online tutorial like how can you, how can you then take steps to improve. So I'm seeing chats but if they're not just let me know if I need to address any of them. I was looking for a spot to jump in there's been a lot of good chatter and a couple questions about choosing which skills to add. If they should or shouldn't add it if everybody if it's something that feel everybody also has type of theme. Great question. Go to the job posting. If the job posting says it requires, you know, you know, at, you know, high level of, you know, oral or written communication. Yes, include that in your if that's what you're asking like yeah include that in your resume so basically, it's not whether other people have them it's whether the job description is is asking for them that's what you want to speak to. So, and if you have, you know, if it's if it wants you to, if a job description wants you to have written communication skills and you don't talk about any written communication skills on your resume because you assume everyone has that. That's that that could be that could be problematic. So definitely just look at the job description for skills that you. So basically, for those of you who are totally new to job descriptions and resumes these are both like skills, you know, skills documents right the job description is saying, these are the skills we need the resume saying this is the skills I have so really that's that's that's so important to speak to them directly to the job posting anything else in there. I think that was the main one. So these are mine, you know, what the Imagine PhD kind of populates your top five. And then you can kind of tweak them or work around them depending on how true they feel to you. You know, but it's really interesting right helping others like it's, wow, okay, that's a skill. That's a skill that's something that I feel like I'm good at and that might not be a skill that everyone has right so so something that might be so maybe obvious to you as like, Oh, I didn't even think of that as a skill. Maybe it's maybe you don't think of it as a skill because it's so just ingrained in you and you're so good at it, you know, so this can be helpful to just kind of identify like these are, you know, these are some skills I have that feel comfortable with. All right, and then interest so the way I like to think of interest. If I were to give you a choice. What would you do. So do you want to spend, you know, the next, whatever, eight hours or the next week. Do you want to spend articles on a particular topic, or do you want to spend the next week designing the, you know, the experiment interview schedule, or do you want to spend the next week recruiting participants. If I give you a choice what do you choose this is basically how you can think of interests. I'm here to tell you that I have yet to find anyone with a job that has said 100% of the time I get to do, you know, everything that I'm interested in. So that's not that's not the goal. Definitely like all kinds of work will have all kinds of tasks and duties. Some you will enjoy some you will not enjoy. You know, for me, a lot of the bureaucratic components of working at a large institution can be like I can do it but it's not my favorite thing. But all of the benefits and the wonderful things about working at a public institution totally outweigh that. And so I'm happy to, you know, take take on the bureaucratic things to have this to have this work that I get to do. So think about, yeah, what comes up in your interest for me, working with a team, leading professional network. Yeah. So we'll be kind of workshopping these in just a second as well. And then the next one is values and the way to think about values is, frankly, what do you care about. Now, when you enter the work world. Whatever job you have is really going to shape so much about your, your lifestyle, right, where you're going to live, how much time you're working versus how much time you're free. Some people want really firm boundaries like at five o'clock. I'm not responding to any emails until the next day. Some people like more flexible hours. And that might mean responding to emails nights and weekends and people want that or are okay are okay with that. All of these things about the work right who like, you know, some people really care that they're working for a company that has a product or a mission that they really care about. For other people that might not be as important or it is important but not the most important thing. You know, I have a three year old son. That's going to impact a lot of the choices I make in terms of my employment. You know, I need a job that has really good benefits right now I need a job that is secure I don't want to think about like, I don't I can't work for a startup right now because I don't want to. I don't want to have that kind of risk of like, I don't know if I'll have a job in six months for you know, I'm in my 30s but you know if I was in my 20s. Maybe I would want a higher risk job knowing that there will be maybe more opportunities for growth, because at UC Davis it's really stable but maybe not as rapid growth opportunities as as you know, a startup or a private company. So, so it's not just the day to day duties it's the whole picture of what do you care about. Okay. And I just want to say about all three of these, you know, skills, interest and values, you know some of that these can all change over time and they probably will so do not take this assessment and think that this is the, you know, the one and only time you can take it. Every whatever every year or two you can go back and change your answers, and then update it so you know these things can change right for me having a family that absolutely changes, changes my my values quite a bit in terms of what I need. Here are some for me. So for me one of my top values is location, like, my wife is licensed therapist in the state of California. There's no way we can just up and move to Nevada, or Texas, because she would have to go through the whole licensing, you know, process again. So we have to be in California and I'm from California and I love California so I want to be in a, you know, a family friendly town, you know so location. You know, and like this is so important to me that this would be what I would call a deal breaker, right as in if I got a job opportunity in a different part of the country. And I might have to say thank you but I can't, I can't do it because location is so important to me and I can't move my family right now. So really think about, you know, these values that you choose as as deal breakers right collegial, I think that just shows up as like, you know, I want to work in a, you know, when a friendly, you know, friendly work environment. So it's important to me. If you haven't noticed thematically about me. I am, I am a people person so I really like that that's something that's really really important to me like I want to. I want to feel like community and collegiality with my with my coworkers I spend, you know, just as much time with them as I do my own family it feels like so it's important to me, not creativity. You know, and I just want to normalize you know compensation is important. And, you know, I really appreciate in the career spaces that talking about money is a lot less taboo, because that's part of the, that's part of the equation. It's, it's something that you all need to think about, you know, I'm still paying my student loans. I'm sure many of you are too. And I just don't think, you know, taking a job that does not pay the bills is going to be helpful for anyone, right so really taking that into consideration is important. All right, that's about the end of my spills. Does anyone have any thoughts or questions or insights to share. Well the fourth, the fourth thing was personality and the Imagine PhD does not cover personality on that little yeah on that little wheel that I presented. Yeah. Yep, no worries. Okay. Just for the folks who are watching this on the recording, I will go ahead and show the questions and all the share real quickly how you can still do this activity. Ideally, this is an activity that you do in conversation. So I am a firm believer that the worst place to do career exploration is in a room by yourself in your own head. I just think that that's, that's just a really challenging place to figure something out. For me, in my experience, career exploration is an interpersonal activity. It is the conversations you have. It is. It is the conversations you have. It is expressing things that you are really interested into another person and having them give you that feedback and be a sounding board. It's doing informational interviews. It's going to see your career advisor that yeah exactly that's that's what we're trying to do here we're trying to normalize having these conversations because it's such an important part of the career exploration process. All right, for those of you who are just watching in the recording. So find a partner, two or three people after you do your assessment and here are some questions to consider. So, look at the skills that you rated a little bit lower in which skills do you want to improve. Okay, remember that you want to improve there might be skills that, you know, you know you're never going to touch not a big deal. Question to for skills. So just focus on skills for the first part and we'll be doing that here too. Which of your top skills did you gain in your academic training and which of your skills you gain outside of your academic training so just being aware of where you're acquiring these skills for interest. I want you to start looking at how your interest and your skills start converging. So which of your top skills interest correspond your top skills. If you see some kind of convergence there hey that's a really good piece of information. What is something that then then we have a self reflection question what is something you currently do in your academic program or internship or wherever you are in your in your journey right now. What interests you so start doing some self reflection here because that's going to be really, really important. I know for me the research process there are parts of it that I that I like I really liked having the outcome and figuring out the results but there are parts about the, just like the data organization that I was like, not really feeling this right so it's good to know right it's good to know your that these the self reflection and then for values. So think of your top values as deal breakers so which which of your values are deal breakers as in I will, I cannot accept this position unless it has this thing. And again another reflection question which aspect of your current role position align with your values in which do not.