An Analysis of Alternative Skills in Academic Job Ads
See also the writeup of this project: Scott Jaschik, “The PhD Skill Mismatch,” Inside Higher Ed, January 2018.
As a PhD interested in alt-ac careers, I felt that the digital skills I was gaining for my alternative career plan were also an asset on the academic market, as I’ve written about before. This project finds the data to back this idea up. I analyze the 1,658 job ads of the 2015-2016 MLA Jobs Information List PDFs. I analyze them for the presence of skills useful beyond the academic market, and find correlations between skills and fields. I got to learn some NVivo and SPSS for this project, which was great fun. I presented this at the MLA 2018 Conference. (See the session information and my original abstract for the project.)