A 5th year PhD student asks—

I am having a hard time making progress on my job search. I keep getting interrupted by research and life obligations, and I feel like I never have extended blocks of time to sit down and focus. I’m usually looking at job postings for an hour or less before being pulled away for something else, so when I pick up the search again, I’m starting over from the same spot. How do you keep making progress when you are trying to fit job searching into small chunks of time here and there?

The job search process can certainly feel like endless scrolling of job postings, especially when you’re looking at aggregators like LinkedIn or Indeed—the list is frequently updated and truly endless. You’re definitely onto something that your progress might be more evident if you had more discrete tasks. Time-bounding your job post scrolling could be one way, for example, you could look at postings for 20 minutes and decide if any are worth applying to (that’s one chunk). If they are, they go into a spreadsheet. Once you have 5 jobs in your spreadsheet, you can pick the one you are most interested in and apply for that one (that’s another chunk). There are other activities that can contribute to the success of your job search too—like doing an informational interview with someone in a position or company you’re interested in, or letting your network know what you are looking for (chunk, chunk!). If any of these things are taking longer than the chunks of time that you have, come talk to us and we’ll help get you unstuck.

-Ray Care, Program Director, Career Development Team for Researchers