One of the last things I realized when I was applying to grad school was one of the first things I realized once I was preparing to teach graduate students: that professionalization and placement are not the same thing.

I started in this profession naively thinking that professionalization meant placement, that a school with good professionalization programs also had good placement, and that preparing for the job market (conferencing, doing the work, making the spreadsheet, workshopping your materials) would mean that you would get the job. At that time (back in 2013), I thought that students who didn’t get jobs didn’t professionalize enough, didn’t attend enough conferences or go to enough departmental events. They weren’t buying into the university experience — never mind that “buying in,” being present for those events and paying for those conference out of pocket, often implicitly meant that the most “professionalized” students were also the most financially secure, the whitest, and the most able. I remember 2013 being a “bad year” on the job market, but it still seemed like getting a job, for most people, was possible. Of course, we now know that 2013-2014 was actually the best year we would have for a decade and a half. What constitutes a “bad year” changes every year. The current year is always the worst one.

But I see now, and as I’ve come to learn from researching campus graduate student opportunities while on the job market, all universities have bad placement, but some (and still only a few) have good professionalization. It is this distinction that needs to be itself part of the institutional zeitgeist because it helps to push universities themselves away from the idea that they can workshop their students into getting jobs. When we distinguish between professionalization and placement, we begin to see professionalization as a means of providing job services to students, regardless of whether or not they’re “placed” in a job or even in a university setting. Job services could include the traditional workshop model, or the mock job talk, or faculty interviews. But it could also include internship opportunities, a session on how to turn your CV into a resume (a skill I learned in my last year, with great difficulty, when I went to apply for a tutoring job), and, most importantly, acquiring the translation skills to confidently convince employers outside of the academy that your academic career was worth having: that it gives you marketable abilities that are valuable in non-academic settings. All of these constitute professionalization, but they may not have a tangible impact on placement.

Professionalization should also include resources (conceptual, mental, emotional) for students transitioning out of the degree. Late degree, especially for students on the job market (including the alt-ac and alt-track job markets which are, yes , actually job markets you need to create dossiers for), is an isolating and anxious time. It is a time when students within cohorts are newly competing for departmental resources in the form of grants and time extensions. It is also a time when students are having difficulty envisioning themselves in the next stage of their lives, preparing themselves to be financially independent of the university, or setting up temporary positions within it. This is precisely an opportunity for programs to make mental health support and mentorship a crucial part of professionalization, to institutionalize these resources and to connect students to peer groups and transition mentors so they can make the final push to finish. In other words, instead of pouring resources only into professionalization opportunities that result in placement, universities can and should see professionalization as a broader support system that helps students not only finish their degree in the first place, but also encourages them to see their degree as a resource, a resource that they can then turn into a job.