Few things are more insulting to PMB than the approach that so many seem to have these days toward career guidance for humanities PhD students. You can say "Bear, why don't you have any legs," and the bear will not stir. You can say "Nice claws, one is falling off," and he won't so much as crinkle his nose. But don't say what Diane Auer Jones wrote in the Chronicle this week. While some offer ways of reconceptualizing the academic profession and its approach to training young humanities scholars for ever-dwindling academic careers with hopes of addressing the market oversupply, and others are willing (thankfully) to get feisty with those who propagate ignorance and misconceptions about what humanities programs do and don't do for a university, there remains always an undercurrent: humanities PhDs must be prepared for more than just an academic career, since academic careers are awfully hard to come by.
The thing is, humanities PhD students are getting all the "job skills training" and more by just doing what they do already. If you take a look at your preferred job listings source, be it a trade or professional website, Craigslist, an internal job postings e-mail at your current organization, a university careers services job board, etc., you'll find the same lists of the same general, desirable criteria for a broad range of different jobs: "excellent" writing ability, verbal/oral communication skills; ability to work in a team environment and work well with others; highly organized and detail-oriented; self-motivated; ability to work on and manage deadlines; wide range of computer and software proficiencies, etc.
Of course all of these "skills" are rigorously cultivated over the roughly six years it takes to earn a doctorate in the humanities. And as someone who has worked in "high-end" industry (consulting, finance, etc.) before, PMB understands that the "latent" training of humanities PhD students in these "skills" quite often exceeds that which is acquired in industry jobs via job training and project management. Of course the continual writing and revising that is part of a large-scale research project, culminating in a piece of original research that merits a doctoral degree, tackles several of the most important job "skills" on employers' lists: certainly these projects require outstanding writing ability, careful revision, constant and often tactically difficult communication with a committee of dissertation advisors and readers, collaboration with fellow students and researchers, the meticulous management and organization of vast amounts of information (much of it changing frequently) over long periods of time, meeting regular deadlines, and having the fortitude and the motivation to stick through it all, despite poverty-level pay for Wall St. working hours, and grim job prospects. Add to that the growing importance of "digital" humanities resources, familiarity with databases and online information retrieval, and the generally considerable role of software aids in academic research. Add to that the communication and organization skills associated with regular presentations at conferences and in university-based seminars and the regular teaching and grading of undergraduate students. Add to that department service responsibilities, like sitting on faculty hiring committees, organizing and running conferences, and in some cases serving on wider department and/or university academic committees.
What other kinds of "skills" do people like Diane Auer Jones think we should be cultivating?
The bottom line is that most humanities PhD students, many of whom have already worked in other careers, both possess and actively cultivate large sets of directly vocational skills that apply to both academic and nonacademic professions. The very notion of a deep chasm between academic and nonacademic work is more a mirage than not. There is no "Ivory Tower." In other words, the skills are largely transferable. The perception that they're not is the real problem; not that humanities academics aren't getting what they need to branch out and have successful nonacademic careers if the academic gig doesn't work out. Commentaries like that of Ms. Auer Jones suffer from a crude causal fallacy: they assume that because lots of humanities PhD students are still plugging away at academic careers that aren't there, and an oversupply still exists, and they're not looking to get into other (nonacademic) careers, it must be because of their unmarketability (a problem which must then be remedied by doctoral training methods and emphases). No, no, no. People plug away at academic careers in the humanities, despite dismal job prospects, because they really really really want to have an academic career in the humanities; because many of them left other careers precisely to seek an academic career in the humanities; because that's why they're in a humanities PhD program in the first place. They don't need "skills." They need to get organized in collectives and lobbying groups, get feisty, and get ready for a long battle with ignorance: the misconception that their work doesn't have value; that they're not prepared to make measurable and immeasurable contributions to the world; that humanities work should thrive on light consumption in Ivory Towers rather than down and dirty politics, like everything else. Roll up your sleeves, people.
