How to move on from dream academia job?

There's a lot of learned helplessness and tunnel vision in academia. If you don't know how to prepare for and look for jobs outside of academia and that's what you need to do, then find out how. How did you make it through a PhD program without the ability to learn things that you didn't previous know? Presumably you're quite good at learning things.

There are all kinds of resources for finding alt-acc or non-acc jobs or you can forge your own path. Lots of people have really successful careers because they took unexpected paths, brought their expertise to other areas, and learned to do a wide range of things well.

I left my humanities program ABD and, like you, initially had no clue what to do. I didn't even know about alt-acc groups then. I figured I'd distance myself from academia completely and try to do something in software development because it's a hot job market. So I taught myself how to program. Along the way, I became a FT faculty member in a CS department, sat in on classes next to my students, interned at some tech companies, but never did make it to a software dev job. I'm now a senior researcher in the tech industry, write some code, give talks, and continue to teach both CS and humanities classes.

Go find out what you might like to do, work toward it, and have an open mind about opportunities. Maybe it won't pan out exactly as you expect it, but there will always be opportunities for people who are smart, focused, and can learn quickly (PhD graduates).

/r/AskAcademia Thread