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Career Sense is a blog for academic job seekers.
- Read full bio: Carolyn Steele (formerly our “Dr. Jobs” columnist), is a career adviser of 10 years, and a PhD candidate herself.
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Who should provide career support for PhDs?
Please note From Aug 4 to 25th I will not be on vacation. Actually, I will be writing my comprehensive exams. Wish me luck and I’ll be back in three weeks!
There is a debate that has been humming in the background of many PhD-granting university campuses for some years now. The topic concerns the career development of PhDs and the issue revolves around deciding whose job it is to provide such support.
One school of thought thinks this should be the responsibility of dissertation supervisor. The 2008 CAGS publication “Guiding Principles for Graduate Student Supervision” expressly supports this position:
“supervisors should be responsible for mentoring students in areas such as, but not limited to, the development of appropriate professional skills; applications for funding; networking opportunities with colleagues in academia and beyond; assistance with publications; and career development.”[p. 4]
The problem of course is that the knowledge most supervisors have of the job market outside academe is scant, to say the least. With so many PhDs setting their sights outside the ivory tower this is no small gap. But even those PhDs focusing on academic positions will be hard put to get much more than targeted reference letters from their time-strapped supervisors, let alone substantive advice and support.
This is why another group think that university career centres would be a good alternative. After all, this is where relationships with employers are fostered and the most up-to-date information about work opportunities and job search techniques can be found. In many career centre in Canada’s largest universities, you will find services and support aimed specifically at PhDs. Smaller universities simply don’t have the resources to do this. However, recruitment-related events and programs are almost exclusively aimed at undergraduate students, particularly at those in professional programs, so there is little a career counselor can do in that regard beyond providing you with lists of employers in various fields, which is a good starting point, but after that you’re on your own. Then there’s the issue of legitimacy, especially regarding the ability of non-academics to provide accurate advice regarding the academic job market.
In the States, some universities have opted for a third option: to house the professional development of PhDs under the umbrella of the Faculty of Graduate Studies. This centralized resource has the advantage of reducing replication of services across programs while maintaining a sense of integrity concerning quality control. However, a pan-university resource may not provide very specific information about idiosyncratic application and hiring practices in specific fields. It also makes it difficult for students to anonymously inquire about ‘alternative careers’ before you’ve decided which direction you are heading in. In fact, at some universities with this arrangement, career fairs for grad students need to be housed in off-campus locations so that grad students don’t need to worry about whether someone on their committee will see them entertaining non-academic options for fear of being labeled ‘non-serious’ about their commitment to scholarship.
The inability to reconcile ‘who’ is ultimately responsible for the career success of PhDs is one of the biggest impediments to providing accessible quality career education to Canadian PhDs. This at a time when there is intense pressure to radically increase the number of grad students in Canada.
Ultimately though, making sure you have the information and support you need to create a career path that works for you is your responsibility. Yes, your program, supervisor and career centre are valuable resources, and you should use all of them as often as you can. But it is rarely the case that any one of these resources will be able to give you all the support you need when you need it.
The challenge for universities is to ensure these resources are as up-to-date and accessible as they can be. The challenge for grad students is to take the intiative to use these resources creatively and intelligently to transition successfully in to the workplace.
It’s time to stop finger-pointing and start focusing on how best to successfully integrate the skilled and able graduates our country produces — like you — into positions that reflect your abilites and aspirations.
It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes a country to help a PhD reach their potential. We can’t afford to wait for the economy to strengthen to do that.
Some ideas on how some of that can work…
For career dev support from the supervisor related to academic skills (including those on the list) asking specific questions can sometimes help. Ask for advice on presenting work in progress at a specific conference. Ask for advice on the best journal to submit a revised version of that conference paper to. …
And academics are applying for money to take students to conferences as part of their own grants, so if you get a grant funded RA, sometimes that sort of thing is going to be included. Some academics are doing research in collaboration with non-academic organizations and getting an RA with them can help with networking outside academe.
Great discussion!
After all, brand new doctorates are responsible for finding the job they wanted to do. One of my colleagues said that many new doctorates undergo through serious postdoctoral depression (a.k.a. postpartum depression as if we delivered a baby – ‘the dissertation’ after four or five years of painful pregnancy).
In such difficult times, the services that new doctorates can turn to for career counseling is rarely available expect wonderful supports from advisor and committee members; for example, the pain of writing reference letters for each and every academic job that is applied. However, there are career service agencies for both on campus and off campus, often at the pace of mushrooming, specifically targeted to non-academic job search. Most of them are not specialised for academic job search.
One way to fill this void is to integrate career support services as a part of the doctoral program, such as mandatory teaching before graduation, affiliation with professional associations, speaker series so that PhD candidates can directly interact with people in their field of studies, enough support for attending national and international conferences, a dedicated Internet site to showcase graduating doctorates so that employers can pick them up if they like to do so, institutional support for publishing dissertation (for example in the Netherlands all PhD dissertations are published as a book), and, of course, publication grants to support new doctorates at least for six months after graduation. However, such supports are rarely available in Canadian universities except the initiative of individual students and divisors.
In conclusion, one additional criteria to evaluate Canadian PhD programmes would be whether they have career support services as a part of doctoral training.