A recent study commissioned by Vitae, entitled What do researchers want to do? The career intentions of doctoral researchers, suggests that a sizeable majority of you don’t.
The study, which surveyed 4500 current postgraduate researchers, revealed just 34% had definite career plans, 50% were undecided and 16% had little or no idea about what they wanted to do. Of those who did have definite intentions just under half envisaged a role in HE, while just under a quarter were targeting a career in research outside of HE.
This didn’t come as surprising news to me. If I’d been asked in the midst of my PhD what I wanted to do I would have probably mumbled something about wanting to be a lecturer but not really being sure about that and I think most of my immediate peers would have said much the same. PhD students are often from the outset much more focused on their project and their subject, and their love of study itself than on how the doctorate fits into their personal and professional development. This is borne out by this same study which shows that, while nearly three quarters of students did a PhD because they were interested in the subject and around 60% because they wished to study to a higher level, less than half saw it as vital to their career plans and just 32% thought it would help them get the job they wanted.
It is interesting to match up this survey with Vitae’s various studies of doctoral career destinations. The most recent of these, What do researchers do? First destinations of doctoral graduates by subject, makes interesting reading. Of PGRs surveyed between 2003 and 2007, 35% of UK-domiciled doctoral graduates were employed as researchers with about two thirds of those in the HE sector. 22% were in teaching professions with just under two thirds of those being lecturers in HE. The remaining 43% were spread across a range of careers such as managers in the industrial or commercial sector, health professionals and marketing, sales, media and advertising professionals.
This study also reveals just how much variation there is between disciplines. Arts and humanities students are much more likely, it would seem, to end up as a lecturer or teacher (48%) than the average PhD student, while just 9% of biological scientists end up in teaching professions but 64% as researchers (both within and outside HE).
You might wonder why I’m bombarding you with all these statistics. The main reason is that one of the obvious outcomes of Vitae’s study of what researchers want to do is that research students would benefit from more career advice and information at the beginning and during their research degree. And yet, another study from the Higher Education Careers Services Unit (HECSU), entitled From PhD to Researcher: becoming a researcher in HE, shows that the significant majority of PhD students either found advice from career’s advisers or focused training events unhelpful or simply not applicable to them. In contrast, the study suggests that a significant majority (62%) found career-related advice from their supervisors helpful or very helpful. It is fantastic that supervisors are providing such advice to their research students and that the students find this advice valuable. But two things strike me: first, supervisors are not trained career’s advisers; and second, they are much more likely to envisage a career path within the university sector rather than outside it. This is only anecdotal, but talking to some supervisors recently they were very surprised at just how high a percentage of doctoral graduates end up working outside of HE.
All of which means what? Well, firstly that we should be encouraging research students to make greater use of the University’s Careers Advisory Service – so consider yourself encouraged! Secondly, that we need to be supporting our research degree supervisors as the front line of career’s advice for PhD students– this is something we started to do a while ago by making careers advice a focus of our Research Supervisor Forum and embedding it in training for our research supervisors but there is still more to be done. Thirdly, we need to expand our programme of training workshops around the issue of employability and careers. There are a number of such workshops in the current research training programme – ‘Career Horizons’, ‘Beyond the PhD’, ‘Funding for Early Career Researchers’ – so please do come to these sessions but we need you to help us develop this aspect of the programme further. So come on tell us what kind of workshops, activities and support you would find helpful…
