For Tony Fong, storytelling isn't just an academic exercise—it’s a practical tool he uses every day as Senior Communications Business Partner for Organizational Development at McCain Foods. Whether he's rebranding internal messaging or launching a podcast to keep teams engaged, Tony draws heavily on the skills he honed during his PhD in English.
Recently, we spoke with Tony to discuss how he made the pivot out of the academic space and what he has to say to today’s PhD students about to hit the job market.
Could you tell us a bit about the work that you do? Any specific projects you can talk about?
I manage and strategize on communications projects involving a few main functions like Engagement, Learning, and Leadership Development within the enterprise of McCain Foods. When enterprise-wide internal communications are needed, I’m the one tapped for Organizational Development.
There are always different tactics to keep major campaigns at the forefront of team consciousness. And these days, one of those tactics would be a podcast that I’m producing. My job demands that I make important material interesting for a variety of audiences. Nobody is going to listen voluntarily to corporate jargon. That’s why we bring in storytelling, visual elements, engaging details, and even jingles to capture attention. It can be as creative as you want it to be, and as creative as your own capacity and capabilities allow it to be.
Your focus on storytelling really clarifies the tie between the work you do now and your training as a PhD student in the English Department. Do you remember what your initial job search looked like when you were making your way out of the department?
I wasn't set on an academic position. When I started, I knew that securing a tenured professorship was unlikely. So, while I was doing my PhD, like everyone else, I was teaching, I was attending conferences, but I was also doing PR work, external communications, thanks to connections with friends working in those fields who knew I could write. They gave me opportunities to write press releases, copyedit, and other writing-type work, which allowed me to build a non-academic portfolio as I was completing my PhD. Funnily enough, I think my non-academic writing helped my academic prose and my academic writing helped my non-academic work.
Could you elaborate a bit more on the trajectory of your career after the PhD?
Marketing and communications were two main paths of my job search, partly because I wasn't that creative in exploring other options. I knew I could probably figure those markets out on my own without taking courses. I’d had enough of formal schooling after graduating. And I thought, “as long as I can build my skill set and credentials, I should be able to do one of the two.”
I got a fellowship at The Walrus to build those credentials, because often, people in communications come from a journalism background. Knowing that I didn't want to go to journalism school or study communications at a college, I thought a fun shortcut would be to work several months at a magazine.
I love this idea of building credentials and skills as you develop your career. What are some of the skills that you developed from the PhD that ended up supporting some of your career prospects?
Lecturing and TAing transformed my ability to communicate. When working with executives, you need confidence, engagement, and the ability to command an audience—the same skills you develop in the classroom.
Calls for papers and pitching articles: those are immediately relevant to my job. Successful academics are also successful salespeople. They're great marketers. Experiences at conferences, responding to calls for papers and writing different versions of your dissertation in various lengths: these are all things that you will have to do as a communications professional, again and again.
Looking at the current generation of PhD students in the department, what advice would you give to them as they embark on their own career journeys?
Don’t close off your network. Academia often leads to siloing—your social circle becomes mostly academics, and for a couple of years, literary theory feels like the only thing worth discussing. It’s new, it’s exciting. But narrowing your focus too much can close you off to opportunities. This isn’t to say keep your network open for opportunistic purposes. I mean that keeping yourself curious is important and part of doing that is wanting to be friends with people outside of academia. I think staying open and conscious and curious is necessary for maintaining your mental health.