Watch your academic accent

You can’t hear your workplace accent but it may be stunting your growth.

Earlier this week, I was helping a post-doc prepare for a few upcoming interviews, mostly at big tech companies. And as we role-played her answers, I noticed a recurring pattern: no matter what question I asked, she consistently sounded academic.

An easy example is describing the outcome of research. She emphasized the insights because for her, like most academics, the point of study is knowledge. But in business, insights are simply a pathway to impact; knowing doesn’t do us any good if we can’t find a way to apply it.

Everyone has a workplace accent: patterns of terminology, modes of explanation, and linguistic shortcuts that derive from the role and industry we’re immersed in. And often, the diversity that comes along with multiple accents on a team can be an asset, because creative collision and varied viewpoints unlock more value.

But when your workplace accent is so strong that it prevents you from being understood, like when you’re making the transition from academia to industry, you have to learn how to regionalize or risk losing out on opportunities. Fortunately, just as with intonation, accents are learned and therefore can be modified; all the things you do to train yourself to speak with a particular tonal accent can be effective at changing your workplace accent.

The first step is recognizing you have an accent; most of us can’t truly hear our own. If you grow up in the South, you don’t think of yourself as having a Southern accent because that’s how everyone you know talks. One of the things I hated about my PhD program was the bubble – you spend all your professional and personal time around other grad students and homophily does the rest, driving you toward a particular monoculture.

It is only when I left the bubble that I realized that non-PhDs couldn’t always understand me. If you want to change your workplace accent, you have to be willing to accept that people from other industries and roles don’t perceive you the way you perceive yourself.

Once you’ve acknowledged your workplace accent, you can learn how to hear it and the best way to do that is to listen to other people’s accents. Podcasts, books, 1:1s…anything you can do to expose yourself to the accent of where you want to be instead of where you are will help you appreciate the difference.

And eventually, there is no getting around the fact that you have to practice speaking differently. The hardest part of any linguistic change is moving from listening to talking but since the whole goal here is to be able to fluently switch, there is no path forward that doesn’t involve actually doing it. Find a low stakes environment (you don’t want to be doing it for the first time during an interview) like a local industry meetup, and try consciously and deliberately stepping outside your normal, accented comfort zone.

This is where diversity in your friend group becomes so important. Whether it is hearing your own accent, listening for theirs, or practicing bridging the gap, the reality is that who you are around is going to have a huge impact on your ability to move between accents. So if you’re an academic with no industry friends, let this be the wake up call: time to hop on Bumble Bizz, LunchClub, Meetup, or LinkedIn.