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.

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.