Strategies for Success > Career Planning > Recognize your Skills

Recognize the skills that you have developed during your graduate education

Consider how the skills and capabilities developed in graduate school can be applied more broadly. Recognize how your acquired skills enhance your qualifications for various jobs. Graduate students can underestimate the breadth of skills they have developed. You may view some skills as commonplace when in fact, those skills qualify you for more jobs than you realize.

Conduct a thorough skills inventory based on your graduate experience. You may not be fully aware of the full range of intellectual and management skills that you have developed as part of your graduate work. Consider how your graduate training has helped you to develop the following skills:

Research /Analytical Skills

• Ability to locate and assimilate new information rapidly
• Ability to break-down and understand complex content
• Ability to reach and defend independent conclusions
• Problem-solving tools and experience
• Intellectual maturity

Communication Skills

• Ability to convey complex information to non-expert audiences
• Ability to write at all levels: brief abstracts to book-length manuscripts
• Editing and proofreading
• Ability to speak before large groups

Entrepreneurial Skills

• Ability to work independently and in self-directed manner
• Ability to acquire funding and write successful grant proposals

Interactive Personal Skills

• Persuasion
• Strategic leadership
• Ability to cope with and manage complicated personalities
• Ability to work effectively in a competitive environment
• Ability to navigate complex bureaucratic environments

Project Management Skills

• Ability to set goals and targets
• Ability to identify and develop resources
• Ability to manage people and resources
• Monitoring project progress and outcomes
• Delivering a completed major project in a timely manner

Negotiating Skills

• Ability to negotiate with others the terms of research and written documents (thesis/dissertation)
• Ability to articulate a distinct intellectual position or opinion and to reach consensus with others

Team-Building and Collaboration Skills

• Ability to build synergy when collaborating with other researchers
• Ability to organize people around completion of a common goal

What it Takes to Advance to Candidacy (for doctoral students)

• Exceptional intellectual horsepower
• Track record of achievement
• Ability to perform under pressure
• Ability to learn and adapt at a high level
• Ability to meet high expectations

What it Takes to Finish

• Focus, tenacity, stamina, discipline
• The ability to close the deal