More than a PhD: A Guidance Model to Empower Postgraduate Researchers to Explore their Career Options
The employability and career destinations of postgraduate researchers (PGRs) have become somewhat hot topics over the twelve years I’ve been working in Higher Education. On the one hand, doctoral graduates have been portrayed as strategically vital to economic growth through their contributions to innovation and the knowledge economy. This narrative has, however, been countered by concerns around the disparity between supply and demand for PhD graduates in the wider labour market and resulting underemployment.
Coupling this with evidence suggesting that only a small minority of doctoral graduates will go on to have long-term careers within academia means that supporting PGRs to understand their career options has never been more crucial. In this article, I present a practical career guidance framework to help with this.
Common Career Anxieties among PGRs
In my experience of delivering career guidance to PGRs, some of their common career-related worries may initially appear to align with those presented by undergraduate and master’s students. For PGRs however, these anxieties are often exacerbated by their increased investment of time, energy, and identity into academic research.
For example, fear of making the ‘wrong career choice’ is often heightened by the extra responsibilities brought with age, such as a partner or family who may already have made compromises to enable them to pursue a PhD in the first place. Meanwhile, sustained focus on a specific research project can enhance PGRs’ anxieties around their relevance and value in the labour market by encouraging conflation of their identities and abilities with their research niche.
In my experience of working with postgraduate researchers, this prolonged and intense focus on one specific research area can often leave them feeling either:
That they can only do ‘one thing’, and their skills and expertise are limited solely to the niche of their PhD; or
That they are a ‘Jack of all trades, Master of none’: for example, interdisciplinary PhDs who feel they have ‘dabbled’ in various techniques and methods but aren’t ‘expert’ in any single area.
Both these beliefs can then lead to disillusion when PGRs start to job hunt and feel that there are no jobs coming up ‘in their field,’ triggering anxiety around their employability.
The Importance of Career Guidance for PGRs
Career guidance can empower PGRs to build evidence that they are ‘more' than their PhD niche; they are, in fact, skilled researchers, learners, writers, teachers, and problem-solvers, who are passionate about a range of subjects, actions and causes. This can be especially pertinent for researchers in the arts, humanities, and other subjects where ‘industry’ careers may be less obvious.
To help them to think more widely about their options, a useful starting point is to guide PGRs through ‘splitting’ themselves into three: their specialist expertise; the broader ‘themes’ related to this expertise; and their wider work experience, skills, and interests, including those gained from roles held pre-PhD.
The Framework: How Does It Work in Practice?
Let’s look at an example. PGR A’s research examined the role of coastal imagery in the work of a particular female poet, using an approach known as eco-criticism. This is their ‘expertise.’ The next step would be to work with A to help them to extract some broader themes related to their expertise that could map across to different types of sectors and roles. For A, some of these themes might be literature, environmental concerns, gender issues, and the interaction of humans with the natural world.
The final part of the framework involves helping PGRs to reflect not just on their research degree, but also on the experience they have gathered previous to, and ‘around the edges’ of it, to extract the broader skills that they have enjoyed developing and using. For example, A’s PhD helped them to develop strong qualitative research skills and an ability to quickly get up to speed with previously unfamiliar areas of knowledge. Additionally, during their PhD they set up a research forum with two fellow PGRs, organised a national conference, and worked as a postgraduate ambassador at open days, honing qualities including event management, teamwork, customer service, and an enthusiasm for improving the PGR student experience.
After mapping out a PGR’s expertise, themes, and broader skills/ interests, the next task is to work with them to generate examples of potential employers that might value their experience in each. For instance, employers who may value a PGR’s specific expertise, and offer work allowing them to apply this, could include specific academic departments, research centres or institutes, or other specialist organisations like think tanks. Regarding their ‘themes’ the options are broader, including relevant private sector companies, charities, professional bodies, consultancies, and government departments who share a focus on one or more of these broader aspects relating to the PGR’s research and interests. Finally, considering broader skills and experience can open up options linked to transferable skills rather than subject knowledge. Working with A in this way then, we might devise something like this:
| Column 1: Expertise | Column 2: Theme | Column 3: Broader skills, experience, and interests |
|---|---|---|
| The role of coastal imagery in feminist poetry | Literature, environmental concerns, gender, interaction of humans with the natural world | Research skills (qualitative), Always learning (quickly), Event management, Customer service, Improving the PGR experience |
| Academic departments; research groups and institutes undertaking research and teaching in this field | Literary organisations | Employers valuing research skills, e.g. social research agencies, research consultancies |
| Policy, relevant government departments, e.g. environmental policy | Professional services in higher education, e.g. postgraduate student experience | |
| Organisations and roles with a focus on gender equality and representation | Event management | |
| Mentoring and educational support |
Of course, these options are by no means exhaustive; they could however offer A a start in seeing how their skills and interests can translate to a range of options within and beyond academia. Drawing up a summary like this with the PGR can also help to generate useful conversations around:
Academic job hunting. Column 1 can help to encourage PGRs to identify which academic departments, institutes, and research groups are working in their fields of interest and expertise. This can help to inform targeted networking during the PhD.
Networking beyond academia: If a PGR struggles to think of examples in each column, strategies such as using LinkedIn’s alumni search function to look up what former doctoral researchers with their subject background and/or skills have gone on to do can introduce them to roles and employers they may never have previously considered.
‘Cross pollination’: the columns in the summary table are by no means mutually exclusive. Exploring overlaps between a PGRs’ expertise, themes, and skills can help to generate career ideas which combine their strengths and interests, and for which their unique combination of skills and experience may be especially valued. For instance, A’s qualitative research skills from column 3, plus their experience working with themes of gender and the environment from column 2, could both be applied to working for a research consultancy which offers research services in these particular fields.
Empowering PGRs to see their Value
Many of the PGRs I’ve worked with come to me frustrated after Googling ‘PhD Psychology/ History/ X subject jobs’ and finding few satisfactory, intelligible results. The model presented here, however, helps guidance practitioners and PGRs to work together to generate career ideas based on far more than just the programme title on a PGR’s degree certificate, allowing PGRs to begin to see the value they can bring to sometimes unexpected corners of the labour market.
For more models, exercises, and examples that you can use with PGRs in 1:1 and group career guidance settings, refer to Postgradual: a free resource that addresses some of the most persistent post-PhD careers questions.
About the author
Holly Prescott is a career guidance practitioner specialising in working with postgraduate researchers. She completed a PhD in Literature and Cultural Geography at the University of Birmingham in 2011, and a PGDip (QCG) in Career Guidance from Coventry University and the Career Development Institute in 2016. Holly is currently the Careers Adviser for Postgraduate Researchers at the University of Birmingham; she also acts as an external consultant, delivering careers support workshops and talks for postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers at universities and events across the UK.
Holly is particularly passionate about developing postgraduate researchers' awareness of career routes beyond and adjacent to academic research, helping them to make transitions into meaningful careers. She is a guest speaker for the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE), Vitae, and UKRI. In February 2021 Holly founded the PhD careers blog ‘PostGradual’, which has since attracted 37,000 unique viewers from over 130 different countries.