Episode 2.7 – Postac Skills: You Have Them

Moving forward in our discussion of how to build a side hustle in these scary and precarious times, Karen and Kel talk about the challenges for academics in “knowing what you know.” The challenge is, you forget and/or discount all the hundreds of skills you had to master to get to unitary academic identity categories that become so fetishized, such as: “academic”, “faculty member”, “grad student,” “scholar”, or, for example, “sociologist”, “philosopher”, or “physicist”. Making a successful postac transition means letting go of those categories, and instead recovering all the skills that went into them: Writing, reading well, managing complex ideas, collecting and retaining information, public speaking, knowing how to learn new things well and quickly, working on a shoestring budget, seeing multiple sides of an issue …. these are just a few of the skills you have that you probably don’t give yourself credit for. But they are rare and valuable. You just need to recognize and translate them.