Daily Junction

They say that students, academics and researchers live in a world of ideas. Well, yes we do – and what a dynamic world it is - so it is about time we broadcast them to the world. Daily Junction offers a line-up of different interactive discussion sections for each day of the week. Browse, select and/or interact with your favorite daily forum, ranging from the latest news in academia, news and global affairs editorials, and interviews with featured Graduate Junction researchers as well as other individuals making an impact upon your graduate community. You can subscribe to the whole blog or just your favorite days with the RSS feed in order to keep up to date with all the latest goings-on at Daily Junction.

If you have an important piece of information or news you would like to see featured here then please, please get in touch with the team.

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Beyond the PhD

Beyond the PhD is a web-based careers resource tailored specifically for arts and humanities PhD researchers. Click here to visit their website.

The Beyond the PhD resource is built around the premise that there is no clearly defined career path for PhD students. Rather, we must each find our own way by choosing from amongst the multitude of options available to us. So instead of including articles and tips on how to make the most of your career, the Beyond the PhD website features the career stories of 28 PhD researchers as they moved through their PhD and into the world of work. (Almost 50% of Arts and Humanities PhD students leave academia after their PhD's).

Despite some direct connections between their PhD experience and their new environments, the transitions
described by these personal narratives have sometimes been turbulent especially as the individuals adjust to their new roles.

Narratives on the website, which are available in a variety of audio and visual formats, provide a thought provoking experience for people considering their own career path.

Personally, when I was considering my career route I did not take the time to access resources such as this. However, on reflection and listening now that I have completed my own PhD I am struck by the number of parallels between the narratives and my own experience. Despite the fact that I have a science background and Beyond the PhD focus on Arts and Humanities, the stories available show how many shared factors exist across many research lives.

Although nobody can (or should) try and tell you what your future may hold as you work through a PhD, listening to others does generate ideas in that big empty space marked 'the future' - at least it does for me.

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The Speed PhD

'The Speed PhD' outlines an innovative approach to postgraduate induction events. Rather than a mixed bag of lectures, handouts and library tours, Dr. Tony Bromley of the University of Leeds discusses the concept of walking postgraduates through a complete PhD in just 2 days!

By splitting the participants into teams and assigning each a research project, it is possible to get each team to accelerate their way through each key event they may encounter in a PhD. True to real life, each group also has a 'supervisor' in the form of one of the course facilitators and culminates in a mini-viva at the end.

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What does the future hold for employability training?

The most recent edition of the Higher Education Academy Exchange Magazine focuses on the the Postgraduate Student Experience.

Dr. Janet Metcalfe, the head of Vitae, writes on the development of employability skills amongst doctoral candidates to benefit all employers and the economy. As the UK transitions towards a knowledge economy in order to compete with the emerging Asian economies, Dr. Metcalfe suggests that all employment sectors will need the types of skills that are developed during postgraduate study. This view is certainly in line with findings of other work, such as the CIHE Talent Fishing Report and Vitae’s own Survey of Employer Practice which forms the basis for much of the article.

The survey undertaken by Vitae collected views of over 100 non-HE employers on recruiting doctoral researchers. This research is vital since more than half of UK domiciled postgraduates leave the high education upon completion of their postgraduate degree. The survey found that employers have a diverse range of views on the value of early-career researchers as employees in their companies. Employers who have recruited from the postgraduate talent pool in the past tended to be much better informed regarding the high level of transferable skills of postgraduates, especially problem solving abilities, motivation, leadership and project management. However, employers who had not recruited postgraduates in the past tended to assume a more stereotypical set of characteristics such as having narrow interests and poor interpersonal skills.

Universities in the UK have been responding to research such as this since the 2002 Roberts Report which made several recommendations relating to the development of employability in doctoral candidates in the UK. These recommendations related specifically to embedding transferable skills training within research degree programmes. Since that report doctoral programmes in the UK have evolved to include more formal training practices and monitoring systems. Each university has different systems and Vitae has a database of more than 600 different skills development practices being used around the UK!

But there is one consistent element of all of these practices – uncertainty over future funding. As of next year the Roberts funding which supports many of these practices will no longer be ‘ring-fenced’, meaning that universities can spend it on other things if they choose to. Therefore it is unclear what the future holds for postgraduate employability training. Of course higher education institutions will continue to support it, but to what level is unclear.

What does this mean for today’s early career researchers? In my opinion there are two courses of action available to early career researchers who are current studying. The first is that postgraduates in the early stages of their research degree should seize opportunities now, while support is strong. The second is that all postgraduates who value training in employability skills should make their views clear to their graduate school to help protect their funding in these uncertain times.

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