PhD students ‘lack support for careers outside academia’

A third of PhD students are unhappy with the careers advice offered by their supervisors as more consider jobs outside academic research, a new report has found.

Highlighting how the number of research positions has failed to keep pace with the growth in PhD students in the UK, the study, from the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi), argues that universities must do more to support their students into a range of careers.

Fresh analysis of a survey of PhD students conducted by Nature shows that 46 per cent still name academia as their first-choice sector. But 31 per cent said they wanted to work in industry, with the rest split across non-profits, government and medical sectors.

Despite this, many respondents said their supervisors did not support them to consider careers beyond academia.

Thirty-five per cent felt their supervisors did not make time for frank conversations about their future careers and only 27 per cent thought their supervisors had useful advice for careers in other sectors.

The study says there remains a perception that “non-academic career routes equate to failure” and “changing this mentality is of critical importance”.

Charlotte Fawcett, policy intern at Hepi and the report’s author, said a change is needed in how institutions support students. “A PhD should open doors, not narrow them,” she said. “As more PhD students pursue careers beyond academia, universities and funders need to ensure they have the support, confidence and opportunities to turn their expertise into impact across society and the labour market.”

With PhD enrolments continuing to climb and the academic labour market showing little sign of expansion, the report suggests that universities’ career support structures, many of which are still built around an assumption of academic progression, are increasingly out of step with where graduates actually end up.

It calls for national tracking of doctoral graduates’ career outcomes to be carried out by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, alongside dedicated postgraduate careers support at every institution, mandatory training for supervisors and expanded, better-advertised non-academic internships.

It also recommends clearer institutional separation between academic and professional development, so that students are not left relying solely on supervisors for advice on careers outside research.

In her foreword to the report, Bethan Cornell, who authored a Hepi policy note on the same subject in 2020, said the pattern has proved durable. “Fewer students now rank academia as their first choice,” she writes, but “the persistence of certain findings is harder to ignore than the progress”.

Hepi chief executive Nick Hillman argued that the sector needed to abandon outdated assumptions about the purpose of doctoral training. “We used to talk about a ‘leaky pipeline’ as if it were a bad thing that PhD students do not all stay in academia for evermore,” he said. “Yet those with doctorates bring enormous benefits to employers of all types as well as to society at large.”