Philosophers, like everybody else, have to think hard about what would be a satisfactory job or career, and then have to be prepared to work hard to find employment that meets their own personal goals. Undergraduates choosing a major field of study have to take into consideration the career paths that are open to them. Students who are considering going to graduate school in philosophy need to take into account career options available to holders of advanced degrees in order to be able to make an informed decision. People on the job market often find themselves considering a wide range of options, some of which surface only during the job search. This booklet is designed to help philosophers with the process of finding and evaluating career options.

At first it may appear as if there are only two possibilities. On the one hand, there is the typical academic career: a position in philosophy in an institution of higher education. And on the other hand, there is everything else. But this is much too simplistic to be any help. The "everything else" option, as this booklet illustrates, has much more variety, and many more options, than appear on the surface. And it may turn out to be more appealing that at first.

Philosophers making career decisions may be tempted to think that their training in philosophy fits them only for an academic career, and that they have no particular skills or qualifications that can be put to use in some other line of work. This is not just too simplistic to be useful, it is not true.

What is true is that there are few signposted career paths for philosophers other than the ones leading to some sort of academic job. The academic job market is wider than it used to be. It includes positions in recently developed fields such as bioethics. It includes some jobs for appropriately qualified philosophers in schools of business and medicine, and in hospitals. There are positions for philosophers as teachers of philosophy in primary and secondary schools. But other than these, visible career options for philosophers that involve something that is recognizable as doing philosophy are few.

And the academic job market, while wider than it used to be, cannot be relied upon to be deep enough to provide satisfactory careers for all those seeking them. According to the National Research Council data for 1993, reporting on responses from 7,900 holders of the Ph.D. in philosophy:

81.5% were employed full time;

7.5% were retired;

8.0% were employed part time; and

3.0% were unemployed.

Of those with full time employment:

77.1% worked in an educational institution, including 1.4% in an elementary or secondary

school;

8.2% worked for a private company;

5.6% were self-employed;

5.6% worked for a non-profit organization; and

3.3% worked for government.

It is safe to assume that some of the 77.1 % working in an educational institution had short-term jobs, and were soon back on the job market.

The APA records the number of candidates and the number of jobs advertised through the APA. The ratio has ranged from a low of 1.4 candidates per job advertised in 1983-84 to 2.6 in 1995-96. The ratio has been 2 or greater in every academic year since 1991-92.

More recent data will be published in the APA Proceedings and Addresses when they become available. Much other information about academic career opportunities is also published in the Proceedings and Addresses, and posted on or linked with the APA website, at http://www.udel.edu/apa.

The harsh fact of the matter is that somebody who aspires to an academic career as a philosopher may be forced to consider other alternatives, or may come to prefer other alternatives. This booklet provides information, and moral support, for philosophers considering their career options. Someone who has succeeded at philosophy has not just training, but talents and skills, and particularly talents and skills that are not universally present in well-educated, intelligent people. Just to mention some of the most obvious ones, philosophers are especially good at formulating questions, distinguishing closely related positions, making good arguments, and exposing bad ones. Philosophers are good at explaining complex matters, and (not without exception, it must be said) good at writing clear and accurate prose. The list goes on and on.

If this booklet has a single message, it is this: these are absolutely fundamental abilities, applicable to pretty much any kind of work at all. A person who has the philosopher's skills and talents, as well as whatever other training and abilities are required, is to a very great extent that much better fitted to succeed in a career outside of the academy.

It is important not to undervalue these philosopher's abilities, and not to overlook them in considering career options. Part of thinking about choosing a career consists in self-examination, making an inventory of training, skills, and talents, and then casting about to find ways in which these can be applied in identifying a career and landing a job. Some of the works referred to in Section IV go in to this process in detail.

Having strong qualifications for a job or a career is one thing: marketing these qualifications is quite another. Potential employers do not in general think of philosophers as particularly well qualified for careers in, say, consulting: it is up to us to convince these employers that we are particularly well suited to the work because we are philosophers. Several of the stories in Section III document successful campaigns to market a philosopher's abilities as job qualifications.

It is also important to realize that the official map of careers for philosophers contains great expanses of blank space. There are those signposted academic career paths, and not much else. The challenge comes in unearthing career opportunities and in applying those philosophers' skills. Many, many philosophers have found (or created for themselves) careers away, in some instances far away, from the academy. And the number of such people who have maintained contact with the profession, and with the APA, is large. Information from, and about, these people shows some of the many ways in which philosophers' skills have been turned to use in non-academic careers. Surely there are many others of whose career paths we are ignorant, whose stories would add to the range of careers followed by philosophers.

And there are signs of new pathways into non-academic employment. At present (March 1999) unemployment in many parts of the workplace (not, unfortunately, including ours) is low, in skilled jobs as well as unskilled. There is evidence that some employers are looking beyond their usual sources for skilled, or just intelligent and trainable, workers. Princeton University has begun a program of bringing Ph.D.s in the humanities into contact with potential employers far outside of higher education, and we might expect other universities to consider such programs as well.

In many cases, non-academic careers require further study or qualification, perhaps several years of study leading to a degree in another discipline or profession. For example, there are many philosophers with careers in law, and more than a few in medicine. But there are many instances of philosophers who found (or created) careers for themselves without any further formal training.

Section I gives some examples of careers to which philosophers have successfully adapted. Section II offers some general suggestions on finding a career outside of the academy. Section III contains responses to a questionnaire circulated by the Committee on Non-Academic Careers from philosophers with jobs other than in academic philosophy, two longer essays commissioned especially for this booklet, and a list, in some instances with very little detail, of other philosophers in non-academic careers.

Many of the items in this section contain stories of how a philosopher's skills were marketed as qualifications for jobs, and of how these skills serve their owners well in their careers. Section IV is a list of print, video, and Internet resources that might be useful to a philosopher considering career options.

Acknowledgements. This booklet is the successor to Careers for Philosophers, which was published in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 58 number 2, in November 1984, and also in booklet form. It draws some of its content, and much of its inspiration, from that earlier booklet. The principal authors of the 1984 booklet were Robert Audi and Donald Scherer, assisted by other members of the Committee on Career Opportunities at the time.

This booklet is principally the work of Stephanie Lewis and Michael Pritchard, respectively the present and immediate past chairs of the Committee on Non-Academic Careers. Anthony Hartle circulated the questionnaire. Julie Gowan revised the bibliography in Section IV. And finally, many people helped to identify and find philosophers in non-academic careers, and provided helpful comments and suggestions. [NOTE: In April of 2002, this booklet was edited for web site publication, and the Internet sites were double-checked, by Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D. (Anthropology), Assistant to the Executive Director.

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