I have been out of academia for over a decade, and I have pretty good success interviewing for jobs when I'm looking. But here's an iron law: if someone brings up my PhD, no matter where I am in an interview process, I will be rejected.
I recognized this on one occasion when I was in the fifth round of interviews, four meetings back-to-back for 30 minutes each, and the only thing the final person wanted to talk about was what made me decide to get a PhD, why did I leave academia, what was my research about. I had no good answers because I was five rounds in, 90 minutes into this round, and had prepped for the work I had recently been doing. And, in all honesty, the answer to "why did I leave academia?" is a bit like "why did I leave Dunkin' Donuts?" in that it was grossly overdetermined and also kind of obvious.
In the years since I have tried a variety of ways of talking about it--not wanting to focus on research, not wanting to have to live in a town of 300 (like the very real job I once interviewed for), not liking to only interact 13 weeks at a time; more positively, deciding one day that I needed to learn international law and learning it well enough that I could probably still throw together an Intro to Public International Law if needed, seeing something through from beginning to end over multiple years, being able to pick up new areas of knowledge pretty quickly--but none of it has ever resonated. (Or resonated enough.)
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