World of Work Blog

When posts pop up on my LinkedIn feed by UX (user experience) anthropologists stating they were laid off, my heart breaks. Announcements by anthropologists who have found, sustained, and suddenly lost jobs in UX and other industry domains are appearing frequently these days. The newly unemployed express a mix of emotions: surprise, disappointment, and resolve to move forward and land their next job. LinkedIn comments flowing after these updates [...]

Hierarchies are everywhere. Government, corporations, and academia all rely on structures that enable managers to allocate duties and evaluate employee performance. Employees know their responsibilities and the compensation they can expect based on the work they do. In writing this blog post, I am thinking about my experience and those of my practicing anthropology colleagues whose careers began at or transitioned into immense hierarchies. As a novice in the [...]

My Job Interview for Fordham Business School Back in 2011, as an anthropologist, I was employed at BBDO advertising, after years of working in similar agencies as director of consumer insights. I wanted to make the ‘jump’ to academia. I thought the skills and practices that I learned in consumer research could be taught in a business school. So, to make an academic connection, I contacted one of the senior [...]

You have your degree—so now you want to find a job. The connection between career and degree seems to be getting harder to navigate. Should you focus on “soft skills” like interpersonal communication or teamwork? “Hard skills” like laboratory techniques or a particular degree title? Course work? Experiences? Interdisciplinary approaches? If your path is anything like mine, I am sure well-meaning people approached you to give their take on [...]

About a decade ago, the Ontario Universities Council on Quality Assurance tasked my colleagues and me to write “Program Learning Outcomes” (PLOs) for our undergraduate modules in Anthropology. These were meant to be statements that would communicate “what successful students will have achieved as well as knowledge, skills, and abilities they should have acquired by the end of [our programs]”. Mandated by a government program that was intended to [...]

A longstanding issue for anthropology has been its low public visibility. The effects in the US, UK, and elsewhere range from erroneous assumptions about the discipline, to still-too-few "seats at the table" in contributing to public conversations and debates, policy, and governance. Economists, psychologists, and political scientists are first among the social and behavioral scientists to be interviewed by journalists when local and national events take place, human actions [...]

As Keith Kellersohn mentioned in a previous post, anthropologists and anthropology students should be on LinkedIn for several reasons, but how do you make an effective profile? Essentially, you market yourself. You and your achievements are the product, and you need to frame that in the best way possible. For LinkedIn, achieving the “all-star” profile rating is a good indicator of profile strength. Currently, LinkedIn requires 7 sections to [...]

No matter your specific field of study, an anthropology degree equips you to better understand humans — how and why we act, what we value, and what forms our beliefs about the world. One booming field that values this perspective is user experience research Since user experience research has become one of the fastest-growing markets for working anthropologists, this blog post explores how an anthropology degree can help you [...]

One of anthropology’s greatest strengths is committing to holistic research that emphasizes personal experiences. Due to this approach, anthropology provides researchers with the unique position to contribute evaluations to the field of science that can span and encompass macro and micro-level data. While this approach undoubtedly contributes to rich, meaningful analyses, anthropology as a discipline overlooks how field study affects researchers—or worse, considers researchers’ reactions while in the field [...]

When I began coaching sessions with Nethra Samarawickrema last summer, I was flailing. Having earned a PhD in literature from Stanford in 2018, I’d supported myself through adjunct teaching positions at multiple universities while also working on my writing projects. As teaching jobs grew increasingly hard to get, as they have in anthropology, I realized that I needed to look for different employment. But what to do? Knowing that [...]

A Process If you are looking to shift your career trajectory, I want to offer you a process I use in coaching. Many people begin transitioning by asking: “What else is out there for me to fit into?” This can spawn self-doubt and overwhelm. My process begins with a different question: ‘What is within me that I want to center in my working life?’ When I ask my clients [...]

Transitioning out of a career you worked hard to build can be unmooring and heartbreaking. It leaves you feeling lost about how to proceed. Yet, uncertainty can be a doorway to possibility. If you create an internal compass to navigate the change, you could reorient your life towards a future you craft. For anthropologists changing careers, I share my story and a process for finding your way.   A Story [...]

Undergraduate anthropology majors are immersed in a wide body of ethnographic work from near and far. In other words, they read extensively about others’ experiences and research in “the field.” Relatively few of them (at least of a cultural-anthropology bent) have any deep, systematic engagement with real-world problems. I offer thoughts here about experiential learning to generate discussion and illustrate how a well-intentioned program went significantly astray. Now you [...]

This is a question that I have struggled to answer, but it has also lit a fire under me, spurring me to teach, write, podcast, and live more intentionally. After I completed the doctorate and finished my first book, I found work but I wanted more optimal choices to mesh with my life and career values. So, I began to wonder, what was the impact of my work? How [...]

I live in two professional worlds. Part scientist, part science communicator, I navigate a cross-disciplinary career with a saying from time in archaeology: Work from the known to the unknown. The Career Readiness Commission’s Fordham Conference cued up this phrase for me again and sparked questions. Should anthropology remain within the known training paradigms of the cultural, linguistic, biological, and archaeological subfields? Or, can it push into the unknown [...]

“Anthropology helps us think about the world differently; it helps us uncover social silences.” These words by anthropologist and journalist Gillian Tett resonated in my mind while attending the conference “Building Careers in Anthropology” on Friday, May 13th, 2022 held at the Gabelli School of Business, Fordham University, New York. The one-day conference, which I attended with two of my undergraduate majors, was packed with valuable information, reflections, and [...]

Higher education institutions are remarkably diverse: rural/urban; private/public; union/nonunion; R1/research intensive/regional comprehensive/liberal arts; religious/secular; and the list goes on. Today, in most institutional settings there is at least lip service paid to the linkage between education and career. All will have a career center and have some minimally loose ideas, often not completely correct, of how the social sciences fit into the larger work world. Enter the liberal arts [...]

Wow! That’s such a relevant question for those on the job market. Our job search as practicing anthropologists is unique. Unlike other job seekers with degrees in fields that sell themselves, we anthropologists have to explain the value of our research methods, technical skills, and understanding of human behavior. As I focused my job search as a User Experience (UX) researcher, I found myself overwhelmed with what I did [...]

The “field” and “fieldwork” are central to the discipline and the ethnographic project. However, ethnographic field schools seem to be on the wane, especially those oriented toward undergraduates. We might step back and ask: Why does such a central feature in identity and practice receive such scant training in anthropology? It’s a good question because together these are critical rites of passage for our professional development. How can we [...]

I’ve been on LinkedIn for almost 10 years now.  While I keep my profile updated, I frequently post news articles about the role of anthropology in business and the benefits anthropology can bring to the workplace. These posts not only keep my profile active, but also help promote the discipline of anthropology to a large user community. I try to post something weekly. I also continually comment on the [...]

Anthropology is my true love; some would even say I’m evangelical about it. But Anthropology has fallen out of favour in academia and in the public eye. It’s been cut from academic institutions across the USA and the UK. Funding for projects and study has declined. People have no idea what Anthropology is. In part, I believe this is because of the focus within Anthropology on the divide between [...]

As an applied anthropologist, I am concerned with solving practical problems. This started with my University of North Texas direct-to-consumer genetics thesis research and has continued into my professional life. Many tech projects I work on, while important, are relatively minor when it comes to their impact on society. My thesis project, however, was not one of them. After I submitted my thesis to the UNT library archive, where [...]

A frequently-asked question to Anthropology students about their choice of major is “What are you gonna do with that?” Inspired by the 2018 AAA Annual Meeting in San Jose, the Rollins College Anthropology department faculty decided to make some structural changes to infuse professionalism into all parts of our academic programs. Some of these changes included: Swapping the Anthropology theory core course for an ethnographic methods course to provide [...]

Hopefully you know that a resume reveals who you are, what you can offer, and what you hope to get out of your professional life, now and in the future. A resume is a roadmap to finding work. When I created my first resume, I wrote it in the “I did this,” or a task-oriented format, which was standard back then. But things have changed, and now, stating information [...]

Great question!  You are not the only one asking this question.  Anthropology instructors have growing concerns that their students are not finding employment opportunities that put their anthropological skills to use. They wonder what more they could do to assist. Some suggest that the students reach out to certain alums they remember.  Others point their students to the career planning office on campus. Many doubt their own abilities to do [...]

Glad you asked. The notion of T-shaped qualifications has been around since the early 90s, but you don’t hear it much in anthropology. It refers to the skillsets needed to actually apply a discipline. Think of the vertical bar of the T as the disciplinary core. The horizontal bar, then, includes the skills and competencies required to actually use the discipline for something. Here’s an example. The application skills will [...]