Symposium on Employability and the Future of the Doctorate
12 March 2025
On 12th March 2025, the ISCDE hosted an online symposium on the theme of ‘Employability and the Future of the Doctorate’. The symposium was convened by Stan Taylor and attended by 17 members of the Centre, including six who gave presentations.
Introduction
Professor Stan Taylor, University of Durham
He noted that, historically, the doctorate was primarily viewed as a stepping stone to an academic career. However, in recent years, the automatic link between the doctorate and academia has been decoupled and now in most systems of doctoral education only a minority of doctoral graduates become academics. The question which then arose is how far doctoral education should or could be adapted to prepare doctoral graduates for careers outside as well as inside academia, and this was the central theme of the symposium.
Exploring the Career Readiness of PhD Graduates
Professor Rachel Spronken-Smith of the University of Otago, New Zealand.
Her extensive research included surveys of and interviews with doctoral graduates who had entered non-academic employment from one university in New Zealand and two in the United States. Her findings indicated that most interviewees were fulfilled and stimulated working outside academia, but they felt that they could have been offered much more support preparing for careers during their doctoral studies, particularly in relation to teamwork and oral communication skills. She noted three initiatives that had been introduced in Otago for this purpose, namely personal development plans, an explicit statement of the attributes that doctoral graduates acquired as a result of their studies, and a career readiness course. Her primary recommendation was that personal development plans offered a way for students to benchmark their acquisition of skills and ultimately provide evidence of them to prospective employers.
Employability and the Future of the Doctorate
Dr Nigel Palmer, Senior Policy Manager for Skills and Education with Business NSW, and Visiting Fellow with the Australian Studies Institute at the Australian National University.
He reviewed the origins of the modern doctorate in Germany in the early 19th century, when it was the only non-professional degree and was intended to equip candidates for a variety of roles inside and outside academia, including professions/vocations in law, medicine and ministry. He argued that there is evidence in Australia that employers are satisfied with the skills graduates have and that there is a danger of displacement i.e. of originality in the doctorate by performativity. He then pointed out that the traditional PhD had been remarkably successful in establishing common international standards for attributes including those promulgated by the Carnegie project on the doctorate in the US, the Salzburg principles in Western Europe, and the Researcher Development Framework in the UK. His view was that the traditional doctorate was effective in supporting the overall employability of doctoral graduates and that adaptations were unnecessary.
Chinese STEM doctoral students’ preparation for academic and non-academic careers: Reflections and implications
Dr Shuhua Chen, Assistant Professor, School of Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.
She had undertaken a major survey project on STEM doctoral students’ career preparation which was funded by the Ministry of Education of China. The survey had identified the career intentions of doctoral candidates and reviewed institutional support for their career choices. It found that, for PhD candidates seeking non-academic employment, such support was lacking both from supervisors and from the careers services in institutions. This had now become a crucial issue given the startling decline in the availability of academic posts relative to the numbers of candidates, with the percentages of PhD graduates entering academia in the world-class universities diminishing from 50% in 2017 to 38% in 2022. In China, the alternatives include an expansion of professional doctorates to support employment in specific sectors.
Research Careers Within and Beyond Academia: Lessons for Future Education
Professor Montserrat Castello, Ramon Lull University, Catalonia, Spain
As part of a wider project, she had undertaken research on doctoral employability in Spain, where in all 67% of doctoral graduates found employment outside academia. Her research identified a number of ‘push’ factors leading graduates away from the academy, including precarity, conflict of values, toxic work environments, and the lack of an appropriate work life balance. ‘Pull’ factors leading graduates to non-academic employment included stability of employment, alignment of values, and the desire to have impact. She noted that there were a number of features of the PhD which graduates felt supported their preparation for non-academic employment, including the acquisition of research and transversal skills as well as academic communication. But graduates also identified areas where support for preparation was lacking, including interpersonal skills, communication with non-academic audiences, project management, and career literacy.
Global Transformations and Doctoral Agency
Dr Sónia Cardoso, Assistant Professor Lusófona University (Porto University Centre)
She had undertaken a comparative study of doctoral graduates employed outside academia in Australia, Germany and Portugal. This was within a framework of macro-variables (the drive for non-academic employability), meso-variables (national doctoral educational frameworks), and micro-variables (doctoral non-academic employability outcomes). Her findings strongly indicated the importance of national frameworks for doctoral education; in Germany, the doctorate was seen as a career asset both within and outside academia, while in Australia it was only acknowledged outside academia, and in Portugal there was uncertainly outside academia as to what it was and what a graduate could contribute, particularly in a country where most businesses were medium-sized or small. In the latter case, she noted that, in response, the government had intervened by funding industrial-academic partnerships as a means of making the doctorate relevant to external employment. She also raised the issue of the number of doctoral graduates who were international – mainly from Portuguese-speaking countries in South America – and raised the issue of potential brain drain if they do not return after their studies to their country of origin.
Revisiting The Salzburg Principles: 20 years of Reforms in Europe
Professor Alexandra Bitušíková, Matej Bel University, Slovakia
She had been involved at the supranational level with the development of policy on the doctorate across Europe, starting with the first European conference on doctoral education at Salzburg in 2005 and continuing through the foundation in 2008 of the European Universities Association Council for Doctoral Education. She noted that the EUA/CDE offered a pan-European platform to discuss reforms in doctoral education, to promote collaboration and the exchange of good practices among its members, and to disseminate the outcomes of its work. From 2010 onwards, agendas had included the development of doctoral careers inside and outside academia and the embedding of transversal skills in doctoral programmes. In 2011, the need for transversal skills training was embodied by the European Commission in its Principles for Innovative Doctoral Training, and this had been taken forward in 2016 by the EUA/CDE Taking Salzburg Forward Policy Initiative. She noted that, while this initiative had been influential in a number of European countries in establishing transversal skills programmes, it had only had a very limited impact in her own country of Slovakia where the vast majority of doctoral graduates found work outside academia but received little support during their studies. She evidenced this as another example of the importance of national contexts in explaining the impact of employability upon the doctorate.
Key discussion points
Key discussion points during and after the presentations included variously:
- Whether the traditional doctorate really prepared graduates for employment across the board and whether interventions were really necessary;
- The importance of supranational and national contexts of doctoral education in mediating responses to the employability agenda;
- The range of different initiatives available to support non-academic employability including transversal skills training, industrial doctorates, and professional doctorates;
- The evidence that, for many doctoral graduates, non-academic careers were a first choice because of push-pull factors and that they were happier in such careers;
- The neglect of the position of international candidates in the debate over employability and the doctorate.
Follow-up It was agreed to establish a working group of members of the Centre to investigate the position of international candidates with regard to employability, both in terms of how they were supported to prepare for employment and in terms of ‘brain drain’ vs ‘brain circulation’.