It seems that the INEM (Spanish National Agency for Unemployed People in my improvised translation) is recommending people to hide the fact they have a PhD when applying for certain jobs.
In some countries, companies appreciate PhDs and they even require it depending on the position. In Spain, well, if you want to use your PhD then you better find a job in the academia. Maybe it’s good I’m in France now 🙂
Isn’t a 4 year hole in your CV a bigger problem than saying you have a PhD?
I like the fact that you assume PhDs are finished in 4 years 🙂
This is not new, it was like that 20+ years ago in France too, and I am sure it has even gotten worse.
In many ways employers don’t understand what they can get from a PhD, all believe that innovation is linear, you hire a project/product manager, you give him some requirements (you pretend they are based on some user “research”) and at the end, you get what you wanted.
Long gone is the time where companies had a research lab and researchers had some freedom to create the next big thing, be it a laser, a blue diode, the Internet, or Unix.
It is possible to ‘hide’ a four year gap. In my case, I simply stated that I was a ‘Senior Research Assistant’ for that period. My referees even supported the idea. The important thing was I found a job.
If you have to hide what you are, and probably you are proud of, then: that’s job is not for sure what you are looking for and make you happy in the long term.
Sure, but I’m afraid not everybody can have the luxury in thinking in the long term
Hi Jordi,
For long time this problem is sadly popular in many spanish companies… but INEM also??? 🙁
Let me know if you have any link more about this I’m very interested
– Javier Garzas
Unfortunately I don´t have /can’t find the link (and I guess I didn´t link to the page where I read this because it was in Spanish). Anyway, as far as I can remember, the newspaper article said that INEM was recommending unemployed people to adapt the CV to the job they were applying and this included academic titles like the PhD to avoid seem too qualified for the job to the eyes of the potentila employer