My boss is letting me choose my job title - How Will This Look Long-Term?
To keep anonymity I changed the country/school names
My long term goal is to go into finance in a specific very developed country whose economy is facing hard times. Let’s say France. I currently work for a professor at the grad school of one of the top schools in international relations (his previous job was a tenured prof at HPYS and he left that to come here, before that he was a professor at a different school HPYS school). He has gotten the highest civilian award from the French government, honored as man of the year by the French Chamber of Commerce, most of the major French companies in the US come to him for advice and he has some high ranking contacts at the major financial institutions doing business in France. Next semester he will be teaching a course on Finance in France with a former head of the French office for a bulge bracket.
I’m 3.5 years out of college and taught English for 3 years in France (Think Teach for America with waaaaay less prestige/name recognition). My current job title is “Policy Research Fellow” and it’s a 2 year program and I’m about 4 months in. I’m planning to go to grad school as a student after the 2 years. I’m supposed to do as the title sounds, conduct research. However, our office administrator/coordinator moved jobs about two weeks after I started so I have been covering her work for the past 3 months. This includes scheduling, processing receipts, and dealing with syllabi and stuff for the registrar’s office (boring back office stuff) it also includes running the departments social media and organizing larger events that have Fortune 500 CEOs coming to speak and the French Ambassador (slightly more front office stuff).
He offered to let me switch to this full time, it has better pay, benefits, 401K, etc. BUT I’m worried about the title “Coordinator” versus Research Fellow. In short term the coordinator position is obviously better because it pays better, has better benefits etc. But long-term, I think “Research Fellow” will look much better on a resume when you are skimming it. It seems like Research Fellow would involve “using your head” and thinking intellectually where as “Coordinator” is just droning on doing mindless tasks.
What do you guys think? Should I take the Coordinator position? He offered to let me change the title to make it sound a little better. What do you guys think? He suggested “Coordinating Director of French Studies” What about Program Associate? Head Associate? Can you guys think of anything else good?
Doesn't matter because you still have to describe your responsibility on the resume.
But doesn't it help to have a catchier job title? Surely "Managing Director" looks better than "Analyst" even if the job duties are the same... Obviously that's an exaggerated scenario, but I'm trying to illustrate the issue.
Anyone else?
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