Your Masters Degree outside Academia

For some people, the master’s degree is a continuation of the path to a doctorate, for others it's a step up the pay grade ladder, and for some just something to keep doing after they finish their undergrad. Whatever the reason for pursuing the degree make sure you get the most out of it, especially if you're pursing a non-academic future.

Boost your skills and chances for employment post-degree by tracking transferable skills and taking advantage of any free certifications or skills building courses offered around campus.

What's a transferable skill? Any skill or ability that’s applicable across a variety of disciplines, some people refer to them as "portable" skills. Obtain them one place (your degree) and take them with you (to your new job).

What sort of transferable skills might you get from your master's degree? Depends on the type of program you're in. Some programs are entirely course-based and don't require you to carry-out research or large projects. These programs might have you work collaboratively with real-world partners, facilitate mock workplace scenarios, prepare you for careers in specific places with particular tech, programs, and routines or simply upgrade an undergraduate degree in the same field while putting further emphasis on report writing and communication skills.

The other end of the spectrum is the thesis-based masters, which require longer time periods, planning and work rather than an emphasis on courses and real-world scenarios. You often focus on one area of interest when you're done your courses and culminate your degree with a large written document of your research program and findings. Now this isn't to say you can't get real-world experience in this degree, often students will try and undertake research with outside organizations and groups in reciprocal relationships.

The last thing you need to think about is what sort of job you're aiming to get into. This is where the extra, often free, certifications you can get from your school come into play. Teaching and leadership certifications, coding and stats classes, anything offered around campus that gains you new skills is something to take advantage of. You can usually find them on the internet in other forms, but why would you want to pay for them if you can get them for free while you're doing your degree?

So, what are example of transferable skills? This list is not exhaustive by any means, but it’s a starting point particularly for those of you in research-based programs looking to move into non-academic employment after you are done.

1. Communication – Big, and standard skill, but how did you gain this in your degree? Did you give presentations to audiences of academics or non-academics? Did you have to share your research findings with a non-academic organization you were working with? Did you need to interact with a variety of people to collect your data? Send emails? Post information online? This all falls under communication.

2. Networking/Liaising/Collaborating – Similar to communication but is all about your people skills too. Did you have to approach an organization to help you carry-out your research? Did they help facilitate your visits while you planned the activities/data collection? Did you need to work across a bigger organization and interact with multiple departments to get your research done or obtain information and approvals for it? Did any of these companies/places etc. give you additional contacts that would aid in your research or knowledge development? Lastly, did you gain permission to do your research with a group so long as you provided something for them as well? I’m talking reports, presentations, solving a research question they needed enlightenment on? Those are all examples of collaboration, not to mention if your research was lab-based and you worked with a team of people to achieve lab goals that later informed your research.

3. Writing/Report Writing/Grant Preparation- Most theses result in a long document at the end, it comes in various forms but often the traditional version is just a written document of your research program, methods, results, findings etc. You also might have experience applying for awards and grants with an advisor or team. Capitalize on these specific writing skills you have, summarizing research, compiling data and results, applying and writing grant applications.

4. Data Analysis/ Database Organization and Management – You collected data for a thesis, end of story, whether it was qualitative or quantitative you still collected x number of responses and had to organize it, clean it up and then run analyses to understand/solve your research questions. For those of you who did quantitative talk about the programs you know how to use, the statistics you ran, organizing and managing a database of over x responses and not to mention collecting it all to begin with (which can also fall under project management). Did you use an online survey, recording software for interviews, software for qualitative analysis? Explain it, explain how data needed to be transferred to be managed and overall, this can be a general technology skill as well proving you are tech-savvy and capable of learning new systems quickly and efficiently to achieve goals.

5. Project Management – This is a huge one! There are some companies that require you to have a project management certification, they exist, over-arching bodies who run this standard and professional certifications, but for those who don’t need to see this money grabbing certification next to your name, you can tell them you can do it anyways! You had to plan a research program for yourself, mostly independently, you had timelines and deadlines, you had to organize with multiple people – ethics, your advisor, your participants, you might have had to plan to follow-up, have mid-way deliverables, meetings, updates, and then finish the project after collecting data and analysing your findings, writing a final report and might have even had to write a plain-language version on-top of your scientific version. You worked with multiple people and managed your participants and their data.

Side Note: Plain language writing is when you take your research and make it accessible for a non-academic audience, often aiming to be writing, speaking, explaining for a maximum of a grade 11 education level. This often happens when working with external stakeholders who might not be experts in your particular field but have interest in learning things about their patrons/stakeholders etc. through your research. Plain language writing is also a transferable skill!

Of course all of these transferable skills have opportunities to talk about working in teams versus working independently and softer skills like presentation preparation and creation, report preparation and creation etc.

Overall these are some of the big ones you gain from a thesis-based masters, the biggest one being conducting a project with an over-arching end goal and taking it to completion. Future research jobs, jobs in fundraising, staff management, reviewing, auditing, you name it, all require the five skills listed above. It’s important, however, that you tailor your experiences to what the job application is suggesting might be major roles and responsibilities in the position they are hiring for. Don’t just talk about your own research and skills, link them back to specific examples or skill sets they list in the job description, you can even just say “this experience provides me transferable skills for x y z, they had listed in the posting.

Good luck!