° FrontPage • Interdisciplinary research and outreach • Non-academic work

Intro/Background

• something to put here ?

Areas

Each one of these bullets could become a link to a separate page, if there are lots of resources. Also, the categories in the "Linguistics Wheel" in the University of Wellington's Where do linguistics graduates work? (pdf) could be a starting place for organizing and developing these ideas.

• Translation
• Editing
• Software development, speech recognition
• Writing
• Communications
• Usability engineering / user interface design

Nitya's "Ideas for Jobs for Linguists outside Academia"

• analysis of text corpus
• development of linguistic systems
• creation of new linguistic software
• research in development of linguistic products
• development and optimization of linguistic components
• formalization of linguistic concepts
• collection/preparation of linguistic material for prototypes and software testing
• organization and presentation of new concepts in linguistic engineering
• implementation of grammar formalisms
• email routing
• making search engines more efficient
• analysis of medical transcripts for insurance purposes
• machine translation
• automatic resume parsing (to make resumes standard for employers to search on)
• automatic syntactic parsing of large corpora
• analysis of people's behavior, to sell to companies marketing products
• coming up with catchy names for products
• searching on multilingual texts
• anticipating questions/responses for automated customer service help line
• teaching (high school, comm college, university)
• publishing companies, especially ones that specialize in academic textbooks
• linguistics librarian
• language libraries
• companies that create language-learning materials
• US state department
• web companies seeking to improve language-based searches
• software publishers, including those who do reference works
• consultant for companies on sexual harassment issues
• legal firms, for dealing with harrassment issues?
• law consultant (analyzing language)
• ad companies, esp. those looking for trade names in international markets
• companies that do research for others
• Disney, Star Trek, etc. with naming characters or creating languages
• public works depts in large cities, creating signage for different language groups
• people who make indexes for others
• travel industry
• teaching seminars on language use
• speech pathologist
• "fixing" accents, speech impediments, accent coach, changing voices
• teaching reading and writing to adults
• teaching English to adults and second-language learners
• speech recognition
• writing documentation
• writing style coach
• academic administration
• grants administration, foundation work
• businesses geared at academic consumption
• translation and interpretation
• telecommunications (Cisco, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, Nortel)
• software localization
• business translation
• English as a Second Language (ESL) Teacher
• Bi-lingual Education Teacher,
• Intelligence Specialist,
• Researcher
• Foreign Service Officer
• Peace Corps Worker
• Librarian
• Interpreter
• Immigration Officer
• Lawyer
• Customs Inspector
• Import-Export Agent
• Philologist
• Writer
• Editor
• Sales Representative
• Consultant
• government agencies
• colleges and universities
• publishing companies
• social service agencies
• law enforcement agencies
• advertising/public relations firms
• public/private schools
• travel/transportation industry
• radio/TV industry
• scientific agencies

Links

Career advice, job ads, relevant professional associations

Advice written for linguists

Linguistic Enterprises -- "...is a nonprofit site that aims to help academically trained linguists find private sector employment. It offers down-to-earth advice, how-to information, and an opportunity to discuss prospects and problems with others who have found work or are seeking it."

Naomi Nagy's suggestions

Computational linguistics

Cathy Ball's suggestions

Translation

Translators Association

\"helping translators do better business\"

National Virtual Translation Center

Other

wrk4us -- "An international email discussion list on nonacademic careers for people with graduate education in Humanities, Education, and Social Science disciplines." Their Guest Speaker Discussions archive is an amazing and uplifting resource.

PhDsWork -- "PhDsWork was launched to help recent PhDs and doctoral candidates think about career opportunities in business. The site was managed by four literature PhDs from SUNY Stony Brook who had moved from academia to business. "

Idealist, a project of Action Without Borders -- "The best Nonprofit Career Center on the web, with hundreds of job and internship listings."

Four steps to succeeding outside the ivory tower

Prepare for the Non-Academic Job Market

European Telework Online

Tutor Nation -- Since 1999, TutorNation.com has led the path in connecting learners of all ages with local private and in-home tutors and teachers specializing in one-to-one tutoring in the United States and Canada.

The Intercultural Professional, 2004 -- a report from SIETAR Europa Communications Committee on "The Intercultural Profession: its profile, practices & challenges "

Examples (what is a better label for this section?)

Words@Work

Rockridge Institute

Charlotte Linde, Socio-RocketScientist at NASA!

Language exhibitions / fairs

Expolangues -- Paris, January 2007

The Language Show -- London, November 2006

Language conferences, exhibitions, and events -- Says: "Diary of the main language conferences, exhibitions and events taking place around the world in the coming months", but it doesn't look complete. Does anyone know a better metasite to list here instead?

Just starting out?

If you have just decided to leave academics and aren't sure what to do, but need to do something, temping may be worthwhile. There are a lot of temp agencies out there with some of them specializing in certain types of workers. Temping can give you a chance to see how different companies fucntion and to try out different jobs. Sometimes it can also lead to a permanent position.

This page has been viewed times.