Graduate school builds expertise, but planning for your career often happens outside the classroom. These free tools, available to UO graduate students and postdocs, can help you explore career options, build job search skills, and plan the next steps for your chosen career path.
Find what you need to: Explore Career Options | Clarify Goals and Plan Next Steps | Build Job Search and Professional Skills | Practice Interviews
Explore Career Options
Not sure what you want to do after graduate school? These tools help you explore careers and see how your skills translate beyond your program.
Jump to: Meaningful Work Kit | ImaginePhD | The Versatile PhD
Meaningful Work Kit
Developed by Stanford Career Education, the Meaningful Work Kit offers a structured self-reflection and career exploration approach designed to help you understand and prioritize what makes you thrive in a work environment. Through questions and exercises, you'll explore your interests, values, and strengths.
Meaningful Work Kit can help you:
- Understand what motivates you at work.
- Identify career paths that align with your values.
- Make intentional career decisions, in or out of academia.
ImaginePhD
ImaginePhD is a free career exploration and planning tool for PhD students and postdocs in the humanities and social sciences. It's designed to help you explore career options beyond the professoriate and see how your skills translate to different roles.
ImaginePhD includes:
- Three online assessments for career-related skills, interests, and values.
- Information on 16 job families relevant to the humanities and social sciences to help you explore, connect, build skills, and apply for positions.
- "My Plan," a tool to create an individual development plan (IDP) and set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based goals to help you advance in your graduate program and career.
The Versatile PhD
The Versatile PhD is the oldest, largest online community dedicated to non-academic and non-faculty career paths for PhDs in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields.
Resources to help diversify your career planning include:
- Options 4 Success, a six-module career exploration program.
- PhD Pathway Series webinars with an “outside the academy” perspective on career preparation and job opportunities across a range of skills, trends, and industries.
- Opportunities to network with 85,000+ members across the US and Canada.
- VPhD Smart Jobs job listings.
Clarify Goals and Plan Next Steps
These tools can help you set goals, track your progress, or create a career plan that you can actually use.
Jump to: Individual Development Plans | VitaNavis
Individual Development Plans (IDPs)
An Individual Development Plan (IDP) is a simple planning tool that helps you think through and make progress toward your goals.
An IDP can help you:
- Clarify your short- and long-term career goals.
- Identify skills you want or need to build.
- Break big goals into manageable next steps.
- Track your progress.
VitaNavis
If you're feeling unsure about your direction, or pulled between multiple interests, VitaNavis can help. This short assessment uses the Strong Interest Inventory to help you understand how your interests and strengths align with different careers and research paths.
VitaNavis can help you:
- Clarify what kinds of work environments fit you best.
- Explore careers that match your interests and talents.
- Think more intentionally about next steps.
Build Job Search and Professional Skills
Learn practical skills that today's employers expect, on your own schedule.
Jump to: LinkedIn Learning | National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity
LinkedIn Learning
LinkedIn Learning provides free access to thousands of short, on-demand courses taught by industry professionals across a variety of topics, including communication, leadership, project management, data skills, and more. These courses are especially useful for building skills that aren't always part of graduate curricula, but matter a lot in today's job market.
UO-curated learning pathways for graduate students include:
- Salary and benefits negotiation.
- Navigating difficult conversations.
- Managing perfectionism.
- Resume and CV writing.
- Networking strategies.
- Workplace confidence and mindset.
More information about activating your account is provided by UO Human Resources.
National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD)
NCFDD offers practical, research-based professional development for graduate students, postdocs, and faculty, with a focus on how to get things done. Topics include writing, productivity, career planning, and navigating academic culture.
With a free UO membership, you get access to:
- the Monday Motivator newsletter.
- Live webinars and multi-week skill-building courses.
- A library of recorded workshops.
- Dissertation Success curriculum.
- Peer mentoring and discussion forums.
- 14-day writing challenges.
Practice Interviews
Practice talking about your experience and prepare for real interviews.
Jump to: Big Interview
Big Interview
Big Interview helps you prepare for job interviews through guided practice and helpful tips. You can watch short training videos, practice answering real interview questions, and record your responses to review later.
Big Interview can help you:
- Feel more confident in interviews.
- Practice common questions, as well as industry-specific ones.
- Get comfortable talking about your experience and skills.