Job Skills Any success when leaving PhD off resume?

[twofish-quant]

But you're leaving a resume gap when you do that.

See previous posts. There are pretty useful ways of getting around the resume gap.

Really? I hear all the time how Ph.D. holders are disqualified from technical jobs for being overqualified.

Here is where marketing comes in. You have fifteen seconds to make an impression, and if in those fifteen seconds, the first thing you say is "Ph.D." people will immediately assume a large number of things about you. If you say something else, then people will assume different things, and then if they conclude that you are a good match, at that point finding out that you have a Ph.D. is merely a random fact.

Also, there are reasons why people don't hire Ph.D.'s that have nothing to do with being overqualified. Ph.D.'s are being stereotyped as being too academic, too argumentative, too arrogant, or too smart.

We have evidence on here of people getting better results when applying for jobs and leaving the Ph.D. off. It seems pretty typical for people to disqualify candidates who may be awesome fits simply because they spent 5 years getting a Ph.D. in a tough technical field like physics.

Not true. If a Ph.D. really *did* disqualify you from a job, then what would happen is that you'd go through the interviews, and when they find out that you had a Ph.D., you'd get the door slammed in your face.

You have a Ph.D. If you are in a situation in which someone will absolutely refuse to hire a Ph.D., then you are screwed and so you better give up and look for another job. That's *not* the situation people are finding themselves in. There's no point in getting an interview for a job that you aren't going to get.

Part of the problem is that for most physics Ph.D.'s, getting one is probably one of the most important things in their life, and so it's hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone that doesn't think that. The other problem is that academic selection tends to be partial ordering. I.e. you can rank jobs and candidates, and if A gets a job and B is better than A, then B will get the job. That's not the case in industry. There are also other differences. There is a pretty settle set of criterion for who gets admitted to university X, but you'll find that in industry there isn't a set of fixed criterion.

Someone with 5 years industry experience in a technical field may be overqualified for entry level jobs. But they will be sought after for jobs requiring 5'ish years experience.

Which stinks when people are firing experienced people so that they can get cheaper people. Also, there *are* industries in which people *like* physics Ph.D.'s. The trouble with those is geography.

Someone who spent those same 5 years getting a Ph.D. in physics is overqualified for entry level jobs, and they don't have the skills and experience required for the jobs requiring 5'ish years industry experience.

A lot depends on the Ph.D. For my first job, I was able to sell myself as an experienced numerical programmer, because I was.

I don't think being a pastry chef for 5 years would leave one overqualified for getting an entry level computer programmer position, but a Ph.D. in physics certainly could based on what I've seen.

It could, but in situations in which Ph.D. leaves you overqualified for entry level positions, then you need to go after the positions which require programming experience, and that means calling yourself an "experienced scientific programmer" rather than a "physics Ph.D."

 

[twofish-quant]

Disgruntled PhD graduate sets up hideout in volcano, builds death ray and robot army ... "they laughed at my resume, now I'll show them all, mwahahaha!" Someone call the SyFy channel, this is way better than most of their plots :P

I prefer the John Byrne version of Lex Luthor to the Silver Age version. John Byrne figured out that an evil supergenius wouldn't be in some underground lair and draw attention to himself. Rather Lex Luthor would be a corporate executive, carefully playing chess behind the scenes.

Evil lairs, death rays, and robot armies require a great deal of funding, and if you start mumbling about crushing your enemies, you ain't getting any of that.