I’m going to risk doing the thing that encourages anxious and depressive moods for people whose experience is different than mine. Number 3 might be hard for some people, but number 1 might be helpful.

1) When interviewing, I have found people (HR reps especially) like demonstrations of independent initiative (the kind grad students have when we write papers), as well as enthusiasm for team-based work environments that involve lots of everyday coordination and communication. If you can demonstrate being a team player (which means, usually, knowing when to keep your mouth shut and just doing the thing that needs doing), you’ll grease the wheels a bit. They also like to hear about your style of conflict management–it helps to have a success story or two about a conflict. Oh, and being a TA (managing students, managing student complaints, lecturing and grading, dealing with a manager/instructor who communicates harshly, inconsistently, or inappropriately) offers a wealth of experiences that people would like to hear about. From an HR perspective, this constitutes a lot of “client services” or “vendor relations” experience to reference in an interview as long as you sell it that way.

All of this language grosses me out btw, but we need money and no one deserves to be forced to adjunct or take any position that has been created in order to be thrown away (even though technically that’s all positions).

2) During the summer, I prioritize finding temporary administrative work in the same field where I used to work before starting grad school. So my real resume (not my CV, because no one knows what that is) continues to be updated with recent work experiences.

3) I worked in an administrative environment for three years before going to graduate school. Three years of post-college administrative work experience has been THE boon for finding summer work during graduate school. No one cares that I study philosophy, but they like that I have 3-5 years work experience, and the recent dates of the summer jobs keep me looking fresh. Remember: no one knows about philosophy besides us, they don’t care about it, and they don’t really want to hear about it. My strategy is to talk about my academic life in the same way I talk about it to my family, which is to say, I pretty much don’t talk about it. (No one in the family has gone to grad school or have a sense of what academic life is. They all give me flack because I don’t have “a job” during the school year, which is just to remind us that academia makes exactly zero sense to people who aren’t in it.)