Visiting assistant professor skills for your resume and career

Soft skills are most important to working once one has gotten a job rather than important to getting a job since those are quite difficult to discern from applications and brief interviews. That is one of the reasons schools can be wary of hiring with tenure; a person could look great on paper but be a nightmare to work with, and you're stuck with them.

I believe that tenacity, organizational skills and time management, and the ability to work long hours are crucial to getting tenure and succeeding in academia more broadly, in some ways more important than raw intelligence (if such a notion is coherent). Failure and rejection are endemic to the job; anyone who gets discouraged easily will do so. One must persevere in the face of sometimes harsh criticism and hostile conditions (especially now that much of the country has turned against higher education and the humanities in particular), and one must be able to juggle multiple responsibilities that make considerable time demands. In this, the tenure track resembles other early-career positions, such as medical residency or working towards partnership in a law firm. The untenured often must do the scut work that no one else wants to do, made more difficult by the fact that they are frantically trying to learn on the job with little to no guidance. It is not at all unusual for early-career professors to teach 4 classes per semester, at least some of which are new and/or large, do all the grading for them, serve on multiple committees, and write for elusive publications, all at once.

Well, a Ph.D. is necessary, although one can sometimes be hired within striking distance of it. The ability to teach so as to bring students to the major and get high student evaluations are often requirements at teaching schools while writing well enough to publish, often in journals with single-digit acceptance rates, is crucial to research schools. Comfort with technology is becoming more and more important.

I am taking this from the perspective of an agribusiness major.

If a student isn't able to land a position within their field of study, I would suggest they work on their people skills and stay up to date with what is happening in the markets, ag policy, and agriculture. Staying up to date means following the popular press in the areas you have a career interest in. That could mean following the news from places like Drovers, local and national producer associations, or congressional or senate ag committees. This will help keep you up to date on what's happening in the areas you have an interest in or are looking for a career.

I seem to be harping on the people skills piece. Get experience in working with customers, customer service, customer complaints. These experiences will help you develop critical thinking skills, problem-solving skills, and communication skills sought after by employers.

Graduates entering the workforce will need strong critical thinking skills and the ability to wear multiple hats. For example, the data scientist may need to understand, or even work on, web programming. Job seekers will need strong programming skills in one or more of these programming languages - Python, Java, C, C++, and Javascript. Graduates should also consider getting a second degree in another field, such as bioengineering or electrical engineering, because the intersection of disciplines can provide new research and development opportunities. A student once asked me, "If machines can do everything we do and do it better, what will we do in the future?" Graduates have to be ready to refresh their skill sets periodically so that they are irreplaceable.