Helping Employers See What You Bring to the Table as a Social Science or Humanities PhD

If you’ve ever felt like nonprofit or industry employers don’t quite see the value of your social sciences or humanities PhD, you’re not imagining it -- many don’t. Many haven’t learned how to see what you bring.

Many employers outside academia have often absorbed the same misconception that has long lingered within graduate education: that a PhD in these fields only “matters” inside universities. If you’re not teaching, publishing, or chasing tenure, then what could it mean in the so-called “real world”? However, the very skills you developed in graduate school — your research, your teaching, your communication — are also the tools that can help employers understand your value. You’ve been gathering evidence, analyzing contexts, and tailoring information for years. Those same practices make you uniquely equipped to show organizations what your degree really means outside academia.

Why Employers Struggle to See Your Value

• Academic tunnel vision: Hiring managers may assume your expertise is too narrow, too abstract, or too disconnected from the practical needs of their organization.

• A language gap: Employers think in terms of outcomes, projects, and metrics. So “ethnographic research” or “critical theory” doesn’t always register as “stakeholder engagement,” “program evaluation,” or “strategic planning.”

• Limited exposure: Unless they’ve worked with PhDs before, they may not realize how your research skills, teaching background, and analytical strengths can transform a team.

• Misconceptions about fit: Some assume that PhDs won’t adapt well outside academia — that you’ll be overqualified, hard to manage, or uninterested in the day-to-day work. These stereotypes can cloud how they read your application long before you walk into an interview.

Why Translation Matters

It can feel unfair that the work of translation falls on you. You’ve already spent years in rigorous training — shouldn’t that speak for itself? And yet, employers won’t always connect your dissertation interviews to their need for user experience research, or your teaching background to their professional development programs.

You already have the tools to do this translation. Your research trained you to ask the right questions and organize complex evidence. Your teaching trained you to adapt to different audiences. Your writing and presentation experience trained you to turn specialized knowledge into something accessible.

Think of it as an act of translation: reframing what you’ve done so it becomes visible in the language they already use.

How You Can Bridge the Gap

• On your résumé: Swap out academic shorthand for terms that reflect job postings. “Designed and taught undergraduate seminars” can become “Developed and facilitated learning programs for diverse audiences.”

• In your cover letter: Draw clear, compassionate lines between your academic work and the challenges the employer describes. “My qualitative research on community health” reframed as “Experience gathering and analyzing stakeholder perspectives to inform policy and program development.”

• In interviews: Share grounded examples that highlight how your skills align with their goals — managing projects, building partnerships, analyzing complex data, or communicating across audiences.

From Academia to Everywhere

This process isn’t about reinventing yourself. It’s about applying the very skills you already practice — research, teaching, communication — in a new context.

Employers may not see your strengths immediately. But each time you translate your work, you’re doing what you’ve always done: finding the right evidence, tailoring your message, and making complex ideas accessible. That’s how they begin to recognize what’s been true all along: that social sciences and humanities PhDs are adaptive thinkers, rigorous analysts, and skilled communicators.

And in showing them, you also remind yourself—your degree has already prepared you for this.

© 2025 Marya T. Mtshali. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author.