The employability and professional development of PhD graduates have become somewhat hot topics in recent years, driven by an increasing association of doctoral-level skills with economic growth (for example, Kehm, 2007). Consequently, since 2020, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the non-departmental public body of the UK Government that manages investment in research and innovation, has been working on a ‘new deal’ for postgraduate research to ensure that doctoral training can sustainably deliver the highly skilled researchers needed to support both UK and global societies. In September 2023, UKRI launched a report outlining responses to their call for input into the new deal, shortly followed in January 2024 by a new Statement of Expectations for Doctoral Training.

In response to key recommendations made in these two UKRI documents and also in the OECD’s 2023 report ‘Promoting diverse career pathways for doctoral and postdoctoral researchers’, this post will outline two priorities for future research into doctoral-level employability and professional development.

1. Barriers to student engagement

To ensure that doctoral researchers graduate with the skills required for a diverse range of careers, UKRI’s Statement of Expectations states that research organisations (including universities) need to ‘provide high-quality professional development options which recognise and promote the diversity of careers open to students’. The OECD also argues the need for wider doctoral skills development through ‘skills training programmes, mentoring and leadership programmes, collaborative projects … and placements.’

‘What is currently lacking, however, is robust research into the barriers that might inhibit postgraduate researchers from taking part in such professional development activities in the first place.’

What is currently lacking, however, is robust research into the barriers that might inhibit postgraduate researchers from taking part in such professional development activities in the first place. I recently posed this as a question to over 70 students and staff from UKCGE member institutions and three key themes emerged:

• Time: the push to complete on time allowing little time for career exploration and self-reflection.
• Relevance: uncertainty among doctoral researchers as to the immediate value of professional development opportunities.
• Culture: widely varied attitudes towards professional development, with some doctoral supervisors supporting and others discouraging engagement with training and development opportunities.

Only with a more comprehensive understanding of these barriers can we implement and embed training and development opportunities into doctoral researchers’ experiences in ways that are accessible, impactful, and have lasting value.

2. Supporting supervisors

UKRI notes that some responses to their call for input, ‘including from some supervisors, suggested that the focus of [postgraduate research] should be solely on the research project’. In response to this, they expect institutions to better ‘enable supervisors … to support students to engage in their own professional and career development’; again, the OECD agrees, deeming that ‘career development should be recognised as one of the responsibilities of research supervisors’.

Two areas of future research that would contribute hugely to this end are:

• Research into the barriers that supervisors face in supporting their doctoral researchers’ professional development.
• Research into the benefits of undertaking professional development activities, for doctoral researchers and their wider research teams.

The former would help to identify how best to equip supervisors with the tools needed to support their doctoral researchers’ employability. Crucially, however, the latter would provide useful evidence for researcher developers and other practitioners involved in PhD supervisor training to assuage supervisors’ reticence, and to help supervisors understand how they and the project might benefit from doctoral researchers’ engagement in employability and professional development activities. 

The ASET Report on ‘The impact of the placement experience on returning doctoral students’ (Garza & Jones, 2015) already suggested a trend in which doctoral researchers returning from placements were more effective and better able to structure their work and manage their time, with no supervisors who responded stating that their students returned demotivated. Further research in this area, especially around the impact of development programmes like placements and mentoring on PhD submission rates, would help to inform the design of such programmes to minimise this impact and/or to alleviate supervisors’ concerns.

There are other pressing research gaps in the field of doctoral employability, not least including work to refresh findings from now out-of-date studies (for example, CIHE, 2010) investigating employers’ attitudes and practices around hiring candidates with doctoral degrees. Nevertheless, the two areas outlined above are foundational to the implementation of the recommendations from both UKRI and the OECD for better supporting doctoral researchers’ employability and outcomes.

References

Council for Industry and Higher Education [CIHE]. (2010). Talent fishing: What businesses want from postgraduates. https://www.ncub.co.uk/insight/talent-fishing-what-businesses-want-from-postgraduates/

Garza, T. G., & Jones, H. M. (2015). ASET Report: The impact of the placement experience on returning doctoral students. https://www.academia.edu/20389695/ASET_Report_The_impact_of_the_placement_experience_on_returning_doctoral_students

Kehm, B. M. (2007). Quo vadis doctoral education? New European approaches in the context of global changes. European Journal of Education, 42(3), 307–319. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-3435.2007.00308.x