Before I begin, I should acknowledge that I have been criticized for having an insensitive title to this post. It's certainly true that lots of good candidates do not find a job they are happy with on the job market, so in that sense "fail" is a harsh term. But overall, I think candidates will benefit from this blog a lot more if it is blunt and does not sugarcoat things. One of the advantages of doing it anonymously is that I can afford to do it that way. The job market is tough, and almost everyone has some pretty crushing moments. Unfortunately, not everyone succeeds, and history tends to be written by the victors. Most of the job market advice you will get will come from faculty members, which means that they had at least some success on the job market. Personally, I struggled a little bit and had some close friends who struggled a lot. I will try to pass on some wisdom from non-winners. The first piece of advice is to stay on top of things. If things start going...
I think discussion about industry needs to be split further as there are two classes of industry jobs. Jobs which are at places looking for economics Ph.Ds and then jobs which are looking for people with graduate level econometrics training. The former group actually hire through the AEA and includes things like Transfer Pricing, Litigation Consulting, Amazon Etc.
ReplyDeleteThe second group may not hire through the AEA and is often indifferent to whether or not economics Ph.D., M.A. or someone with a strong statistics background. These include many positions at Commercial Banks. In my opinion these are something that candidates should explore only if they are unable to find job through the traditional job market. Generally these jobs are found through just conducting a normal job search and independent of institutions created by the economics discipline.
I wanted to point out this distinction, because Departments often list both types of jobs as industry placements, when finding the second type of job is usually hte result of conducting a traditional job seearch rather than the structured process that is the AEA.