Prepping for a Raise and the Holy Grail of nonprofit salaries

oh dear. two months since I've last checked in.

Well, things have been going great!

News item #1--I am now officially Dr. Leadfoot and will only respond when addressed as such. Dissertation-free life=amazing.

News #2--FT work has been busy and draining but rewarding. I feel like I'm learning alot and finally "part of the team" and all that rah-rah. Feeling like I'm an important cog in the machine is good for personal morale but also good for...

News #3--asking for a serious raise next week. Cuz I've done my research and have discovered/confirmed/come to grips with the fact that I am severely underpaid. Like at least $15,000/year under paid. More like $20,000 under paid.

Two colleagues of mine know exactly how much I am paid (cuz I've told them) and they have both impressed on me that I am essentially giving away my labor. I knew that, but then this past week I found the holy grail of salary comparisons and really learned how underpaid I was.

Let me back-up. All the job hunting books say to do as much scouting as you can of other employers in your area to get a sense of salary range. This is fine if you are looking for a job that has very public records, like a university. This is not fine if you are looking for a job in the non-profit world. Ever since I became interested in this job, I have struggled to figure out how much I should make. The one time I broached the raise issue with my Boss and used comparable positions at a nearby university to talk about salary, she shut me down immediately with all sorts of reasons why comparing nonprofits to education centers doesn't work.

I was stymied until this week. All the job ads I've seen for non-profits (and really, pretty much all jobs that aren't edu- or gov-related) say "compensation based on experience" or something equally loosey-goosey and unhelpful. But this week I found Holy Grail of Non-Profit Salary Comparisons. Oh Guidestar.org, how I love thee.

See all non-profits have to file tax returns, called 990s. And while some organizations are on the up-'n-up and post their 990s on their own websites, plenty of organizations aren't as forthcoming. But Guidestar has access to all these 990s (or at least the last 3 years) and after you register for free, you too can see the original 990s.

This is how I figured out exactly what peer organizations in my state were paying employees who hold a similar position to mine. Or at least what they were paid in 2007. In 2007, organizations had to report exact salaries for employees making more than $50,000/year. In 2008 and 2009, that threshold was raised to employees making more than $100,000. But some organizations still report their lower paid employees and all have to report what their executive directors make.

This is all to say that minimally I should be making ~$54,000/year or more, especially now that I have the PhD in hand. Not the $37,500 I currently have coming in.

This inappropriately low salary thing really irks me--especially since I've asked about a raise twice before: once when I went full time from part time and once when I went from contractor to part time employee. Granted, these were rather weak attempts, but I am holding my ground on this and think I have a pretty solid case. I'm ready to negotiate hard (out of irritation, being educated, and having a legit case). I'm also beginning to prep myself to walk away from this job completely if necessary. Who knew I'd be restarting job feeds and bookmarking jobboards so soon?

I'll skip over all the gory details, but suffice to say--I've taken on a lot of unnecessary and unrelated (to my stated job) responsibilities and have proven my worth. If I don't receive an appropriate salary adjustment very soon, I'm back to hitting the pavement. And yes, if necessary, this will be a not-so-veiled threat during negotiations.

Hopefully I won't have to get nasty, and I really need to practice my "nice ask" so I don't start out too aggressive. That's the plan for this weekend.

Best Cities for Jobs, Cool Job Search Engine

This post has been making the rounds in the blogsphere this week--"12 best cities to find a job." Top of the list: DC (with 1.11 unemployed persons per advertised job).

The raw data, sans-photos, comes from juju.com (and actually extends the list to the top 50 cities where our employment chances are good) .

I had never heard of juju.com until this post. Wow, it's pretty cool! Type in your occupation and desired location in its search protocol and it actually turns up legit jobs! This is incredible! (I tried "anthropologist" + zipcode and "grants" + zipcode and got real job postings).

Man, maybe I just got lucky with these two hits, but this is way better than idealist.org or specialized RSS feeds.

Bottom line: there are jobs out there for us. There is hope.

I'm experimenting a little now with shorter posts. I'm hoping with briefer posts, I'll write more often? Also, I'm thinking folks won't fall asleep if I keep it less than essay-length. Let's see if I actually write more though....

More Student Loan Intel

Just off the phone with a student loan rep (my loans are through the government) and got a bunch of questions answered.

First, did you know that we can change our monthly repayment date? Mine was originally scheduled for the 28th of every month (what???). We are able to change the date to the 7th, 14th, 21st, or 28th of every month. Since I get paid at the beginning of the month (like the vast majority of workers in the US), I changed to a pay date on the 7th. I do automatic withdrawal which also reduces our interest rate by .25%. Every little bit helps, right?

During my chat, I also learned more details on the Income Based Repayment plan and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness plan. I wrote a little bit about these programs back in August but this post should provide more answers and less speculation.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program is intended for people with high debt, but who continue to make relatively low incomes because they work in a nonprofit, government, or other public sector job. After 120 consecutive payments (i.e. 10 years), Student Loans will forgive the remaining balance.

According to the Student Loan rep, we apply for this program after 10 years of payment, not at the beginning of our working careers. This means that we need to have signatures from every one of our employers to sign off on the paperwork stating that you worked for them for X years during the 10 year period. See I thought we got into the program as soon as we started working in the public sector, but apparently not. Note to self: don't lose track of former employers.

During the 10 years that we are making payments, we may have our monthly repayment rate adjusted using the IBR Plan. Income Contingent Repayment Plan or Standard Repayment Plan.

If we have high debt and low income we receive significant benefits from enrolling in the IBR or ICR plans. These will adjust down our monthly payments. Then, after 10 years, the Public Sector Loan Forgiveness plan will cover the rest. The combination of these programs works best for those of us with really high debt; with low debt (it is all relative), the benefits are minimal.

At least this is how I'm understanding it as of today.

Oh real life, how you pain me sometimes...

More Job Leads

Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education had this great article about anthropologists working outside of academia (props to Career Services Advisor for forwarding along this article to me).

The article did an excellent job interviewing practicing and applied anthropologists It also did a great job hyping up the American Anthropological Association's attempts to integrate alt-acads with acads—a project that is minimally successful, as far as I can tell. All I can say is that at the conference, the alt-academic career fair was pitiful.

However, while at the AAAs, I also had coffee with a colleague. She's starting to write her dissertation while her hard social scientist husband is starting his new numbers-crunching job at a high-powered research firm (again Leadfoot cursing her decision to not learn statistics). Colleague and I were talking about finding alt-academic jobs for the non-numbers set and swapping resources.

So here's some more workplaces that may have the occasional-regular opening for us social science and humanities PhDs.

Abt Associates. Colleague tells me that they specialize in federal government contracts, but specifically do not do military-related contracts. In the words of Cartman: sweeeeeet.

Battelle Memorial Institute. Not so sure about this one. I only say this because locals that live near their headquarters say they have no idea what goes on there. Still, one of the alt-academic anthropologists in the CHE article worked there for 25 years.

And of course, an oldie but a goodie: Federal Government.

Corporate Internships and Employment

So this internship just came through on the VPhD and I am intrigued.

Goldman Sachs is seeking PhD candidates or graduates with non-finance backgrounds to participate in a 6 month fellowship opportunity scheduled to begin in early 2011. The fellowship will enable PhDs to explore a potential long term career transition into credit or equity research. The fellows are provided with mentorship and individual training opportunities as well as hands-on experience on a research team.

*Open to PhDs in all disciplines except finance or business related programs (all non-economics / non-finance fields are eligible) *Finance background not required *Passion for investing or knowledge of the markets is helpful but not required.

Not that I really want to use my anthro-skills to figure out how to better pad the bankrolls at Goldman Sachs, but I am interested in the possibility of non-specialist internships and job pathways at mega-firms. Is this a phenomenon that occurs elsewhere?

I know that Intel has at least one anthropologist on staff. Yahoo has several psychologists. My sense is that these folks did not intern their way into a job. But maybe it's more and more a possibility?

Certainly there are people with social science and humanities PhDs/MAs working at mega-corporations... my question is if an anthropologist wants to stay an anthropologist and work for the private sector, is that possible? Or is this where that whole "transferable" skill set kicks in?

For some folks, they have no interest in repeating their PhD work in their professional life. Others take a middle path (I feel like I fall into this category with my new public policy focus). Others are a "public [historian/sociologist/scholar/etc]"

So I don't really have (m)any "take-aways" from this post. Biggest point I guess is that we PhDers, ABDers and MAers have lots of valuable skills that even a totally corrupt global corporation wants! Yay?

Welcome to the "Real World": Student Loan Repayment

Ooops, I hadn't realized that quite so much time had passed since my last post...

I'm in the midst of working up a new post but keep getting sidetracked by dissertation chapters and work and other life stuff.

Including figuring out the registration game for my last semester ever (fingers crossed!) and how to defer my student loans a little longer.

You know that rumor that was going around recently that said if we worked for the government or a nonprofit organization [i.e. 501(c)(3)] we could get our student loans forgiven after 10 years? Totally true and I finally found the paperwork that explains it. Biggest problem I see at the moment is that we have to be working 30 hours a week at one (or a combo) of nonprofits/public service. I'm currently working 20 hours a week at my 501(c)(3) employer. Hopefully I can fix that soon.

Here's another resource regarding student loan repayment: the Income Based Repayment info website. I believe they're run by a bunch of former grad students. I'm on their listserv which sends out the occasional notice or FYI. I definitely recommend getting on their list (seriously, they send emails less than once a month) and their website has a lot of great info.

Hope to have more info regarding loan repayment programs as the time come closer for me. Sigh. Will be sharing that, I'm sure.

Another post to come (hopefully!) this weekend.

Skill of 2010: Computer Skills

Every year around January 1st, I resolve to learn a new skill over the next 365 days. I often don't have a skill in mind, instead they usually present themselves. One year I learned how to play Texas Hold 'Em poker. Another year I learned how to rock climb. Several years I tried to learn Spanish (okay, that was a real resolution).

This year, 2010, I wasn't sure what skill I was going to acquire or work on. But after having an awesome whiz-bang techie afternoon at my job, I realized the skill this year has been computer savviness.

This might better be called, "thank god I learned Excel." It was painful and I still don't know much beyond the basics, but figuring out how to work those lil boxes has been my number one biggest techie achievement to date. Excel has made life sooooo much easier. Yesterday's golden moment involved making microsoft Word correctly talking to Excel to do a "mail merge". For you non-geeks, essentially I had Word use a spreadsheet I had constructed over a month. Word drew data from that spreadsheet to correctly personalize a bunch of form letters and then email said form letters to over 80 people. I didn't have to do a single cut-n-paste, not a single retype. By spending 30 minutes figuring out mail merge, I saved myself 1000s of clicks and over an hour's worth of work. Plus, I now can say I know how to do mail merge.

Ditto for the time spent figuring out how to set equations in Excel. Grades were finally a snap this year--I just had to figure out the formulas and bang! it was done.

Second awesome tech accomplishment to date: learning basic web programming. Again, I'm talking basic. But, for example, now I know how to make italics and bold at will, and without having to use the buttons in Blogger (though that's what I prefer to do...). I learned how to write web code from working on this blog. [I knew this blog would be good for something.]

RSSs have been another techie tool I never understood. Now I can't imagine life without RSSs feeds.

Last month I learned how to shrink long urls [psst: go here or here].

Now, I admit. I don't understand Twitter, but that's my next challenge. I'm on it as @leadfoothunting. You can "follow" me, but at the moment, I don't do anything. I mean, I don't tweet.

Okay, so why am I bragging about my e-prowess? Basically because I realize that these are skills that I'm going to need in any workplace--especially when I go alt-academic. I also think that employers want to know if we can do the electronic game. Did anyone hear this recent NPR story about a guy who landed his dream job? He got it by buying google ads and personalizing them. $6 for the ads=>phatty position with biggest, baddest advertising company around. That's some basic savviness put to good work.

Contributors to wrk4us (btw, hope you all got the memo about its new home) also admit to googling potential employees. Many jobseekers have been asked about something that was not part of their application materials, but googleable (as if I didn't need to tell you--Facebook privacy, yo!)

You know that "please hire me" email I sent last week? I mentioned that I included my website in my signature line. What I didn't mention in that post is that I spent almost as much time cleaning up my websites (yes, plural), as I did on that email.

My university nicely gives us server space to host our own professional websites. My website includes the following pages: "contact" "biography" (short blurb people can cut and paste), "publications" (with links as possible), "Research Resume/CV" (abbreviated version online, up to date, downloadable, pdf version at bottom of page), "Research Background" (long narrative about my work) and a "Publishing and Editing Experience" page. The Publishing and Editing Experience page gives a brief summary of my work in publishing, includes an up to date publishing resume, and a link to my editing website. The editing website is pretty extensive.

The "professional" website I outlined above is linked to my department profile page. Which also includes a lot of the information of the "professional" website, but in short form.

Oh, and my editing website and this blog show up in my facebook account. Keeping academic separate from personal, I don't have my university website on facebook. Besides, that's totally lame.

Bottom line, I want employers to find me. I want to make it as easy as possible for them to get to know me virtually. I don't include personal life stuff (well, except some here and a lot on facebook), but I do include my picture and more information than you ever want to know about Leadfoot, ABD (yes, I'm treating ABD is a lettered achievement, just like MA and BA).

We are kidding ourselves if we don't think people aren't going to e-stalk us. They will--they pay me at my hourly job to e-stalk people.

Okay, enough with the rambling self-congratulations. This is peanuts, compared to what most professionals know. But still, alls I'm saying is that loving my computer programs has been one awesome experience so far this year. And, dare I dream? I think being computer savvy may just give me the edge I need over 1000s of other job candidates who want the same jobs as I do.

more on GS levels

Back at it after a week of dissertation/publication nonsense and a weekend off. I've finally had a chance to work through my wrk4us digests and am overwhelmed by all the good info I've had sitting in my inbox.

I have several posts in the works; this one piggybacks on an earlier post and gives more info than a wikipedia link. [I can't believe I gave you a wiki link. I would fail me for incompetence and laziness except I know all you On the Hunt readers regularly use wikipedia].

Here's some more details on GS levels.

GS-9 jobs in the past have tended to be "team member" jobs. GS-12 tend to be the "team leaders." To take this out of corporatespeak and put it into academicese: GS-12=faculty. GS-9=RA/TA. GS-7=undergrad intern/work study kid. [Apparently there are no GS-10 jobs]

Here's how positions for geographers are classified.

"GS-9 geographers are engaged either in taxonomic and descriptive work of fairly substantial scope and complexity, or in analytic and interpretive work of relative limited score and complexity.

Research work at this level is typically performed under close supervision and involved responsibility for segments of the research process which are integrated into the overall project. This is distinguished from work involving the full scope of the research process as described at the GS-11 level.

Geographers doing taxonomic and descriptive work have independent responsibility for small projects or significant segments of larger projects. Their assignments have value as independent units of work, although they are often part of larger projects. This should be distinguished from assignments at the GS-7 level which do not typically represent complete projects or work units."

Job requirements for every federal job classification is managed and documented by the Office of Presidential Management. I found the geography info under the "0100 Social Science, Psychology, and Welfare Group". You can use this info here to help determine which level to apply for and to also see what kinds of skills each position requires. Nice.

Crash Course or How To Start

Before you do anything else, get on this listserv right now: https://lists.duke.edu/sympa/info/wrk4us
"WRK4US is the premier email discussion list on nonacademic careers for people with graduate degrees in Humanities, Education and Social science disciplines."

It's uneven and, at times, totally self-indulgent. Also subscribers are seemingly incapable of deleting the 5 messages that precede their comment. Still, you will find gems in among fluff. You'll see me citing the wrk4us listserv often. Get it in the digest form and you'll be fine.

Read this book: So What Are You Going to Do With That?: A Guide for M.A.'s and Ph.D's Seeking Careers Outside the Academy

Everyone says to read this book. There's a reason for that. I happened to have read it when I was really wavering about being in or out of academia. It came along just when I needed it the most. My best bud in this postacademic journey had already mentally decided to leave academia post-PhD, but was still coming to terms to the emotional decision and identity adjustment. She read the book. We occasionally call it the Bible.

Even if you are actually pretty sure you don't want to do anything else but the classroom. You should read this book, just in case. I got through it in an evening. The parts that don't apply to me yet (like interview suggestions) I skimmed. Just read it, yeah?

If you are just starting out in this game, or are still just testing the waters make a list of places you think you might want to work at or industries you might want to be a part of.

My list looks like this:
What sound like reputable places on NPR?: Brookings Institute. Pew Research Centers.
What kinds of publications did I find useful during fieldwork?: Reports from Urban Institute. Reports from The Department of Housing and Urban Development. Social Security Adminstration. The Census Bureau.
What else am I interested in?: Publishing

I maintain a spreadsheet and everytime I read or hear of a place that sounds like I might be even possibly hireable there, I do a 5 minute google search, get their website and mission statement/description and add them. I also enter where I heard about the organization and what day. Never used a spreadsheet? Now's the time to start working on those skills you're going to need in your new job. Seriously, this year I've taught myself how to do basic math and data maintenance on spreadsheets and its like a whole new world has opened up to me.

My spreadsheet's pages currently look like this:

*resources links to listservs, studies on post-PhD anthropologists, FAQs for leaving academia, etc

*govt internship and fellowship programs with specific departments. my login and pw info for usajobs.gov.

*policy-research this is where I put alot of my--hmmm, sounds like a place that might hire me--links.

*academic presses the general AAUP website, employment pages or homepages for presses I'm interested in. Also intel I gathered at my last professional meeting on hiring and financial situations at said presses.

*nonacademic presses if I get hungry enough, now I know what websites to freelance edit from or where I can find what kinds of positions McGraw-Hill is looking to hire

*commercial potentially sketchy, also potentially cool. I read a newspaper article about Yahoo using anthropologists in testing products. Saved the link and copy and pasted into the spreadsheet the relevant passages.


Where else to get ideas?

usajobs.gov (searches are called agents--how very unappealing)

idealist.org

Thinking of Policy and Research Tanks?

List of policy organizations, links to their homepages, etc. Everything from Brookings, to Dem&Rep Nat'l Cttes, NAACP, MADD, ACLU, etc.

What is a Think Tank? Who are the good guys, who are the bad guys?

Bookmark your dreamjobs' job postings websites. Start RSSs feeds if you can on employment pages. Don't know about RSSs? Another great skill to have in the new job! (most websites will walk you through it, so don't worry if you don't really know about RSSs)

Make friends with your Graduate College's Career Services Center. They are awesome and have all of this stuff up in their heads and at their fingertips. They helped me get my first "real" job (i.e. an hourly gig in academic publishing) and they turned me on to much of this information. Career Services roxs.