Sieving the Agroecology Job Search
Alex and Sara here! In this post we share our opinions of filters that may help navigate the Wild West that is the search for agroecology jobs. Plus, a survey to aggregate our community's wisdom!
Our context
Alex 🧪: I write this as a graduate student who has yet to dip my toes in the agroecology job pool. So, why should you read my input here? It might be helpful to people in mentorship roles and well-acquainted with the job market to know the kind of information that is reaching a first-year PhD student. I would consider myself job-curious at this point. I keep up with the ECOLOG listserv for ecology jobs and ask career-related questions to people I come across at conferences and seminars, and have done my share of considering career pathways because I will finish my dissertation. That's not a threat, it’s a promise;) And though I haven’t been searching for a job in agroecology, I love talking with people about processes for decision-making, so here are my two cents.
Sara 🕸️: As I entered the final stretch of my dissertation writing, I found myself once again in job search mode. I suppose it’s one of those experiences that I both love and hate. The fun of scanning through advertisements, and imagining the many possible future realities that could be. The thrill of hearing good news back from an organization that I’m excited to work for. But of course it can be an emotional roller coaster. There are also inevitably the “we regret to inform you” responses. And the tough interview questions that you know you didn’t nail and play over and over in your head. And the drudgery of writing yet another cover letter, when you really just want to say “look at my CV please, it’s all there, give me a call”. I write this as someone who is mid-career, and wrapping up PhD study, and recently entered the job market with a rather unique combination of experiences in an even more unique time for public sector work. I’m happy to share my ideas, and also think we should gather as much collective wisdom together as possible.
Job availability
Sieve 1: Hiring
Alex 🧪: Without going into the weeds on this one, it is probably safe to say this year has reminded us that funding landscapes can shift rather quickly, and these are directly tied to the types and abundances of jobs available in the public sector.
Sara 🕸️: Other bigger trends influence which organizations are expanding and hiring at any given point in time, and which are not. Pay attention to where the funding is going, who is growing, and who seems the most energetic and happy at conferences (and find out who they work for!).
Sieve 2: Skills
Alex 🧪: Skills and experience are built over time and can shape the jobs that are available when the employment process starts.
I remember a friend in high school was told that she couldn’t catch a job at a cafe without barista experience. How does one get the experience without being offered the opportunity? Also, should we allow the experience requirements to scare us away from applying for jobs anyways? Nonetheless we do consider this a filter, but maybe we have more autonomy than we think when it comes to the actual role this plays in shaping job availability.
Sara 🕸️: I have been that young person who had restaurants tell me I couldn’t get a waitressing job without waitressing experience. I found a small Japanese restaurant that was willing to hire me if I “trained” (i.e worked for no pay) for a couple of weeks while they evaluated my abilities. I took the job, and by the time I left there I was treated like a member of the family.
A smart hiring team will find ways to evaluate you as a full person, but making it past that initial filter or “no” answer is often half the battle. I’ve read a lot of job postings recently, and this line, in a posting for a Senior Agroecology Specialist - Europe caught my eye.
“If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every single requirement just yet, we still encourage you to apply — your unique experiences and perspective could be just what we need.”
I think we can probably apply that idea to every role advertised.
On the other end of things, we also each have the ability to build our set of skills and experiences over time. Some of this will be less planned, as we collect the experience that “happens” to us. But we can use the control we do have to purposefully select training and education, to volunteer for a project that will expose us to a new area we are excited about, and to add diversity to our CV by working in a wider range of locations, types of institutions, and roles.
Values
We have considered the features of the job search that are more or less out of our control. But what about the parts of job search that are entirely within our control? Hellooooo, values…
…for thyself
If jobs are available, we can ask ourselves what we want in a job. A few values categories include:
Sieve 3: Work environment
Alex 🧪: Remote work or in-person? Large or small team? Number of hours you are willing to work per week? A common piece of advice I have heard is to speak with current employees at your desired employer. While I do value this, I also value giving myself the chance to come into a workspace where everyone has a clean slate, and without preconceived notions of dynamics that may actually not play out for me. Therefore, I find keeping conversations with current employees focused on measurable pieces of the workplace environment most productive (maybe it’s the quantitative scientist in me – cringy, I know). This attempt at quantifying work environment health took this to the next level, but I get it.
Sara 🕸️: I have slowly built up my understanding of what I prefer in a work environment. Mostly, by working in so many different contexts and finding out where I thrived…or when I wanted to scream. I have really enjoyed listening to some of the podcast episodes from Jesse Hempel at Hello Monday on the topic of values and work, in particular her interviews with Suzy Welch. Suzy suggests that we can find our area of professional “transcendence” when we work at the intersection of our deepest values, our aptitudes and our interests. If you can’t list your deepest values off the top of your head (I couldn’t), she provides this exercise prompt:
“Identify your THREE TOP VALUES for your career choices. Start broad–make a running list of every value that is important to you. Once the list hits at LEAST ten, put it down for a minute, and then come back to it and circle the top three, This is where it might get hard. Remember, you can always change this in the future. But it’s important to keep it to three–to get real with yourself about what matters MOST.”
Try it out! If you need some ideas to get you started, check out this list of values from Brené Brown. And consider re-doing this activity every few years, especially during times of change. Some of my work values have stayed the same (collaboration with great colleagues, make a difference in the world), and some have shifted (explore new places…gave way to the need for flexibility, and…may shift back to exploration again?).
Sieve 4: Salary
Alex 🧪: How important is your wage? Is there a minimum/maximum amount that you would need and/or want? And benefits? I found this review of agricultural jobs by Purdue insightful for pulling out trends in salary by subsector and region and also highlighting job openings and requirements (Table 1). I would be curious about what the ranges of these subsector salaries look like, and what organizations or roles make up the upper and lower quartiles.
Table 1: Average and median salaries by subsector reported in the Agricultural Job Market Report by Purdue University.
Sieve 5: Location, Location, Location
Sara 🕸️: Now that remote and hybrid work is so much more common, this part actually becomes…trickier, because we have more choices. We can think about the location we want to live in, and try to match that with our personal values and preferences (i.e close to family or friends, outdoor recreation, urban culture, snow or no snow…etc.). But we equally may want to consider the connection between our work values and location - do we want to work in-person with our collaborators? Do we need to be close to centers of government so that we can do the connected policy work that we care about?
My experience is that it is nearly impossible to find a situation where you get everything you want in one location. So the challenge is deciding in what ways to compromise, and in what ways not to.
Values…beyond thyself
Sieve 6: Collaborators and funders
Alex 🧪: If this matters to you, you may consider the upstream funding sources of jobs you are interested in. As a student, I am still in the phase of navigating how my personal values translate to my purpose in agroecology. For example, I see my values of placed-based work conflict with the structure of farming conglomerates, which are vertically integrated and often multinational. So what does this mean for me when I search for jobs? To what degree am I interested in engaging with conglomerates? There is no neutrality in food systems work, after all.
Sara 🕸️: Over my two decades as a professional, I have slowly learned, sometimes the hard way, how important it is to me to work with an organization that is aligned with my professional values. I personally believe in honoring the knowledge and ingenuity of farmers and other natural resources managers. I believe that we need to integrate collaboration, transparency, equity…and kindness into our work. I’ve also come to realize that organizations that appear to embody these principles, in their slogans and written mission statements, aren’t always what they seem to be. When it comes to the nitty gritty of everyday work: the incentives, the promotions, the budgeting, the allocation of time - the real culture and priorities are revealed. Can we know all of this as a job applicant? Often not. But I’ve found that we can take just a bit longer, ask a few more questions, spend more time digging into any materials we can find, and if possible, talk to people with experience working there. Listen not only to what is said, but what is not said.
Sieve 7: Type of agroecology
Is this job targeting agroecology as a science, practice, movement? Which do you see yourself fitting or bridging?
Alex 🧪: As someone who entered agroecology through ecological research, I have found agroecology as a science the most conventional to execute in my current academic setting. Science is already integrated into academia, so there is less reconstructing to be done for this work to fly. Other sub-sectors which I can speak less to (but am an admirer of) lend themselves more to the practice and movement. I also have several academic colleagues who extend their science to a practice and movement on their own time as a part of their greater purpose. This brings up another point of whether you desire a clock-in, clock-out job or a job that is tied to your way of moving through the world.
Sara 🕸️: I have personally jumped around these areas over the last twenty years, somewhat unintentionally. And that has worked well for me. Or, at least it has allowed me to pursue what I’ve been most interested in. It does make it harder to write a catchy one sentence professional bio! Another advantage is that I see how I can now act as a bridge-builder between science and practice. As we said when we started this blog, there is a need and a space for people working in or across each of these areas within agroecology.
That’s all we got. And as we reflect on the filters we have suggested, we see how unlikely it is that a dream job will pop out at the base of your agroecology sieve tower because c’est la vie. Our hope is that the filters will help you think about what is important to you.
To bring this home, we want to hear from you to help create clarity on how these filters connect to real agroecology jobs. If you are willing to answer some very brief questions about your experience in one or more jobs that you have held…
We have questions about sector, role and values. You can skip any that you don’t want to answer.
We plan to take all of the responses we receive, aggregate them (!), and create a page on our website where we share that information. The more responses we receive, the better that information will be.
Happy searching job-hunters and job-curious alike.
Relevant reading:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185023
https://blog.dol.gov/2024/03/08/fast-growing-science-occupations
https://ag.purdue.edu/commercialag/home/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/agjobsreport_2024Q3.pdf