Note: All answers are the opinions of graduate students and faculty members and may not reflect the current state of the job market. However, some answers may be relevant to different job climates.
Questions and answers below are from the panel discussion held on April 10, 1997.
One way to meet people is to talk to people at conferences. Also, consider talking to people that come to speak at colloquiums in the department or elsewhere.
Expect to produce different versions of your resume that stress what a particular employer wants to see. You may have the opportunity to provide a short cover letter. Cover letters give slightly more personal statements about what you hope to do at a potential employer and why you are well qualified.
While a resume for academia and for industry may share the same parts, these job arenas stress different skills.
Academia
The academic form of a resume, known as the Cirriculum Vitae (CV), focuses more on research (and possibly teaching) experience. You should emphasize your publications as part of your research record.
With a CV, expect to provide a short cover letter. The cover letter may be a good opportunity to write a research statement emplaining what you've done. Include a teaching statement if teaching skills are important to the institution.
You are usually allowed to write a longer CV than you would a resume.
Here is Mark Crovella's CV as an example.
Industry
Industry resumes should focus more on skills and prior experience on projects, such as software systems or even school projects. Typically, knowledge of operating systems and programming languages follows your experience or accomplishments.
Limit your resume to 2 pages.
Here is Arif Bhatti's resume (in Postscript) as an example.
Academia
Positions in theory are particularly hard to find now. The academic applicant can expect to send out between 30-100 applications. Institutions typically receive between 100-1000 responses to openings.
For academic positions, it is very useful to know someone in the department to which you are applying. They can introduce you to people, give you information about the department (such as who looks at applications during the search process), and be your internal advocate during the search process.
Academia
For an academic position, you should be aware of the relative importance placed on research vs. teaching as part of your job. A separate issue may be the importance of research and other accomplishments in the tenure process. Be aware at what level tenure is decided (department or college level) since the kind of research required as part of your job and as part of the tenure process can be different.
Industry
In industry, the question is your employer's attitude toward research vs. development.
Be aware that an important part of research is publications. Industry employers may have different attitudes about publishing internal research because of competition and patent issues. Ranges of policies might be:
Academia
Statistics on salaries are available from the Computing Research Association.
Industry
Headhunters can tell you what you are worth. You can also discover ranges of salaries from job descriptions in the newspaper.
You'll benefit from knowing someone already working for a potential employer who can give you some information about the place.
Academia
Find out what kind of research is being done in the department. How will your area of interest fit in? Do you fill in an area where the department is lacking? Will your work complement the research others are doing? Are there opportunities for you to collaborate with members of the department?
How big is the department? What are typical sources of funding in the department? The strength of the chairperson is often an indicator of the strength of the department.
Tenure. Do you have any chance of getting tenure? Some places only give tenure to the top people on the planet.
Industry
Many companies now have web pages that tell about the company.
You may want to know about the health of the company by looking at their annual report or by their perfomance on the stock market.
How big is the company? What is the corporate culture?
Interview Process. If you know someone already at the company, ask what to expect during an interview...What is the person giving the interview like? What will happen during the interview? Will they test your skills?
Be professional. You can expect to be and dress a little more formal than you would going to work every day.
Have a list of questions you'd like to ask.
Academia
For an academic position, you can expect to give a talk on your research. Make sure you practice this talk in front of an audience ahead of time, and get some feedback on how your talk can be improved.
Talk tips
Make sure that your accomplishments are crystal clear. It is bad if you end your talk and the audience isn't sure what stuff you did and what stuff other people did.
Industry
During the interview process, you may have the opportunity to meet with other people at the company. If you meet with potential coworkers, are they people you'd like to work with? Remember that the people you'll work with may be different than the person who interviews you.
Representatives from a company's Human Resources department can give you information about expectations of employees, such as proper attire.
If you get to tour the place and meet company employees, how do you feel about the atmosphere at the company.
Academia
Once you get your first job offer, pressure other institutions to give you a decision. Institutions may want an answer from you fairly quickly and it is better to have all your eggs together to choose from.
To help prevent this, avoid the trap of producing just a few more results. Budget time to write up your dissertation.
If you must continue your degree work while working, find out how flexible a potential employer might be about this. Will they let you start out part-time while you finish your work and then switch to full-time when you are done?
Traditionally, companies doing technical work have 2 work tracks. The technical track is the progression of jobs by which technical people can advance, from lowly worker to some kind of lead technical person. The managerial track represents the positions that managers can progress through.
Essentially, this just means that there are different sets of jobs that technical people and managerial people can be promoted through. In the past, some companies only provided higher advancement through management positions, meaning that techies might have to become managers to advance beyond a certain point. However, many companies are getting better about not ignoring their technical people. Nonetheless, you may find that there are still more opportunities to make more money and/or advance more quickly via a managerial track. If you are only interested in doing technical work, think about how far you can advance in the technical track.
In addition, you should be aware of the trends in job security at a company or in the industry in general. Buyouts of companies can occur that result in layoffs of employees, including consolidation of management after mergers. Techies will want to keep there technical skills sharp in case that they need to find a new job some day.
There may be slightly more resistence in academia, where relevant questions are "Can they teach and convey ideas in English?" or "Do they have a strong accent?"
You can avoid wasted effort by finding out what companies accept foreigners as applicants and by clearing stating your foreign status on your resume.