Beyond the PhD: What Skills Best Help Graduates in the Job Market?
Cambridge ThinkLab will be hosting a roundtable discussion event on the future of post-academic PhD Careers on January 23, 2023. Beyond the PhD: What Skills Best Help Graduates in the Job Market? will be both in-person and online. All registered attendees will receive the joining information before the event.
Beyond the PhD: What Skills Best Help Graduates in the Job Market?
New research shows how significant both career and personal value is to graduates when thinking about whether their doctorates were worth it. But we simply still do not know enough about how non-academic employers recruit, motivate and value doctoral graduates, or how best to support graduates in getting into those jobs. There is no centralised proactive force in the UK that both produces best practice research for doctoral employability outside academia and bridges the gap with non-academic employers. A full supply chain style support mechanism is needed to solve the problem of poorly understood doctoral career paths.
PhD holders contribute significantly to British industrial performance and improved economic productivity. Their potential to make an impact in the modern knowledge economy, R&D focused industrial strategies and grand challenges like climate change makes them valuable ‘commodities’ in the job market. Most doctoral graduates flow from academia to industry after they graduate. Many of the UK’s, and world’s, most innovative companies hire people with PhDs. Companies like Google, Microsoft, AstraZeneca do this because they want to push the boundaries of what is possible in their field. Companies also get collective knowledge, skills, networking, and prestige benefits from doctoral graduates.
This event brings together people with skin-in-the-game (students, policy, employers, career developers) to discuss the biggest issues in doctoral careers today and come to a set of actions we can advocate for going forward to support students in their journey post-doctorate.
Link to relevant research article here.
