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The purpose of this study is to identify what skills gained during PhD study are linked with preparation and differences between industry and academic positions.

Using student-level data from nearly 2,400 early career PhD alumni from 50 US PhD granting institutions, this study uses a generalized ordered logit model with partial proportional odds to test the main and conditional effects of 14 areas of skill development on perceptions of career preparation.

This study contributes empirical evidence to show that research skills and communicating with non-technical audiences are positively linked with job preparation.

The combination of sophisticated research and noncognitive skills promotes the idea of a well-rounded PhD – a highly skilled and versatile researcher that can interact in both academic and industry settings – as a goal of doctoral education. The knowledge gained from this study will assist scholars and graduate educators, including faculty advisors, program directors, graduate deans, graduate education professionals and career development professionals to reconceptualize professional preparation for work in industry.

For-profit businesses, particularly start-up companies, are vital for economic development and many require PhD-level employees across research and management roles. Developing PhDs with the appropriate skills for industry will better align higher education and economic interests.

The wide scope of doctoral institutions allows for a quantitative approach not appropriate for single-institution case studies of doctoral career pathways research.

Doctoral programs are primarily intended to train new professors and researchers to take positions requiring research competency. This paper aims to observe the scientific production of 734 Brazilian new PhDs in management and the possible link between the scientific output of the graduates and doctoral program rank.

Methodologically, the authors built a database collecting the journal publications of the first six years after doctoral degree of all PhDs in management graduated by Brazilian doctoral programs during the period of 1998-2008. The authors use cluster and descriptive analysis to explore PhD publication.

Results show a great disparity of productivity, where 10 per cent of all new PhDs account for most of the Brazilian research productivity, while most of the PhDs have a very low performance – and that the CAPES (the Brazilian institutional system) qualification of doctoral programs is not a good predictor of the performance of the future graduates. Results are discussed to understand this productivity gap among researchers in a context of a developing country where support institutions are working to improve quantity and quality of publication.

The results are useful for recruiters that need to decide between hiring new PhDs with low productivity graduated from high-ranked programs or new PhDs with high productivity from programs with more modest ranking. At least in part, the authors’ results question the real impact that the doctoral program’s prestige has on the performance of its graduates.

There are implications for the future candidates to a management PhD program, for the Directors of these programs and for the institutional agencies that regulate and promote science and that establish the prevailing rules and norms that researchers and institutions follow.

The results are adamant in pointing out that there is a small group of highly productive new PhDs – that the authors called “stars”. Generally speaking, they may find these “star” new PhDs in several doctoral programs. They have also found that some of the new PhDs have a relatively higher level of international papers published, but not necessarily a larger volume of publications. Meanwhile, most PhDs present a very low level of performance. This has important contributions to the way they perceive the doctoral education in management, especially in Ibero-America, revealing insights about the quality of PhDs and PhD courses.

This paper contributes to the literature on overeducation by empirically investigating the wage penalty of job–education mismatch among PhD holders who completed their studies in Italy; a country where the number of new doctoral recipients has dramatically increased over recent years while personnel employed in R&D activities is still below the European average. We use cross-sectional micro-data collected in 2009 and rely on different definitions of education–job mismatch such as, overeducation, overskilling, and dissatisfaction with the use of skills. We find that overeducation and skills dissatisfaction are associated with significantly lower wages but there is no wage penalty from overskilling. Furthermore, those who simultaneously report overeducation and skills dissatisfaction experience a particularly high wage penalty.

The underrepresentation of women in engineering has important consequences for meeting the need for a larger, talented scientific and technological labor force. Increasing the proportion of women faculty in engineering will help increase the persistence probabilities of women undergraduate and graduate students in engineering, as well as contribute to the range and diversity of ideas toward innovations and solutions to the greatest engineering challenges. This study aims to examine the association among gender, family formation and post-PhD employment patterns of a cohort of engineering doctorates.

Using the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients data, 2001–2010, descriptive and multinomial logit regression analyses are conducted to illustrate the career trajectories of engineering PhDs over a ten-year period.

The career trajectories of engineering PhDs are nonlinear, and transitions between employment sectors commonly occur over the ten-year time period studied. Although women engineering PhDs with young dependents are less likely to be employed initially after PhD completion, they tend to enter the workforce in the academic sector as time progresses. Early post-PhD employment as a postdoctoral researcher or in the academic sector contributes to the pursuit of the professoriate downstream.

While previous studies tend to focus on the early career outcomes of science and engineering students, this study contributes to the literature by focusing on the long-term career outcomes of engineering doctorates. Research findings provide engineering PhD students and PhDs with more information regarding potential post-PhD career trajectories, highlighting the multitude of career options and transitions that occur over time. Research findings also provide higher education administrators and doctoral program stakeholders with foundational information toward designing and revitalizing professional development programs to help PhD students prepare for the workforce. The findings have the potential to be applied toward helping increase diversity by shaping policies and programs to encourage multiple alternative career pathways to the professoriate.

The aim of this paper is to determine whether the accelerated growth of web content during the years 1989-2011 had an effect on New Mexico State University engineering PhD students' use of the library's collections. The research also solicited direct input from PhD advisors regarding their expectations for and perceptions of present day PhD reference lists. If the collections were being used with less frequency, there would be reason to increase outreach to the engineering graduate student population, as well as to review current engineering collection development policies.

Reference lists from College of Engineering PhD dissertations produced 1989-1991 (pre-web), 1999-2001 (web-emergent), and 2009-2011 (post-web) time periods were analyzed using descriptive statistics. PhD faculty advisors from the College of Engineering were interviewed about their expectations for, and perceptions of, research resources used in PhD dissertations.

The number of resources cited, percentages of type of resource (e.g. book, journal, patent, etc.) and age of citation did not vary substantially over time, although the percentage of journal articles cited to total number of citations per dissertation increased post-web. Some websites were cited in the post-web period, but not in significant numbers. Engineering faculty expressed concerns that some PhD students were not critically evaluating and fully synthesizing the information they were citing in the literature review sections of their dissertations.

The results of the citation study provided PhD faculty advisors with the positive news that there appears to be no degradation in the quality of references post-web. However, the expressed faculty interest in seeing some dissertators undertake a more robust analysis of the literature created an outreach opportunity for the engineering librarian: a graduate student workshop in how to use the library collections to perform a thorough survey of the relevant research in order to write an effective literature review.

Employability has been the focus of much activity at both research and policy levels within higher education. Initially focused primarily on undergraduate students, in the past few years this area has broadened to include the employability of doctoral candidates discussed within a larger debate on development of researchers. Despite a strong focus on this aspect of researcher development, discourse in this area still lacks evidence of the views of postgraduate researchers themselves on the issues of employability. In an attempt to address this gap, this paper seeks to explore the perceptions of social science doctoral candidates on a range of employability‐related issues.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 15 full‐time doctoral candidates in different social science disciplines at a single UK university.

The paper presents the views of social science doctoral candidates on three aspects of employability: the concept of employability and its meaning for doctoral candidates; the way they perceive their own employability skills, knowledge and attitudes; and their awareness of labour market requirements. The study highlights the importance of original motivations, goals and expectations of doctoral candidates related to doing a PhD degree with their perceptions of employability and the skills, knowledge and attitudes they expect to develop.

The current paper helps to shed light on the ways doctoral candidates perceive employability and identify the gaps in their awareness of the skills, knowledge and attributes required by the labour market. Addressing an important aspect of doctoral education related to development of employability, the paper argues that in order for the researcher development initiatives to be successful there is a need to account for the role of “personal”, namely motivations, intentions and views of the participants of the learning process.

Program evaluation stands as an evidence-based process that would allow institutions to document and improve the quality of graduate programs and determine how to respond to growing calls for aligning training models to economic realities. This paper aims to present the current state of evaluation in research-based doctoral programs in STEM fields.

To highlight the recent evaluative processes, the authors restricted the initial literature search to papers published in English between 2008 and 2019. As the authors were motivated by the shift at NIH, this review focuses on STEM programs, though papers on broader evaluation efforts were included as long as STEM-specific results could be identified. In total, 137 papers were included in the final review.

Only nine papers presented an evaluation of a full program. Instead, papers focused on evaluating individual components of a graduate program, testing small interventions or examining existing national data sets. The review did not find any documents that focused on the continual monitoring of training quality.

This review can serve as a resource, encourage transparency and provide motivation for faculty and administrators to gather and use assessment data to improve training models. By understanding how existing evaluations are conducted and implemented, administrators can apply evidence-based methodologies to ensure the highest quality training to best prepare students.

While postdoctoral research (postdoc) training is a common step toward academic careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, the role of postdoc training in social sciences is less clear. An increasing number of social science PhDs are pursuing postdocs. This paper aims to identify factors associated with participation in postdoc training and examines the relationship between postdoc training and subsequent career outcomes, including attainment of tenure-track faculty positions and early career salaries.

Using data from the National Science Foundation Survey of Earned Doctorates and Survey of Doctorate Recipients, this study applies propensity score matching, regression and decomposition analyses to identify the role of postdoc training on the employment outcomes of PhDs in the social science and STEM fields.

Results from the regression analyses indicate that participation in postdoc training is associated with greater PhD research experience, higher departmental research ranking and departmental job placement norms. When the postdocs and non-postdocs groups are balanced on observable characteristics, postdoc training is associated with a higher likelihood of attaining tenure-track faculty positions 7 to 9 years after PhD completion. The salaries of social science tenure-track faculty with postdoc experience eventually surpass the salaries of non-postdoc PhDs, primarily via placement at institutions that offer relatively higher salaries. This pattern, however, does not apply to STEM PhDs.

This study leverages comprehensive, nationally representative data to investigate the role of postdoc training in the career outcomes of social sciences PhDs, in comparison to STEM PhDs. Research findings suggest that for social sciences PhDs interested in academic careers, postdoc training can contribute to the attainment of tenure-track faculty positions and toward earning relatively higher salaries over time. Research findings provide prospective and current PhDs with information helpful in career planning and decision-making. Academic institutions, administrators, faculty and stakeholders can apply these research findings toward developing programs and interventions to provide doctoral students with career guidance and greater career transparency.

In this final chapter, the major findings and themes from the book are presented. Linking the discussion of the book to the changing context of doctoral education and training, the chapter will ask the readers to reflect on how doctoral education may change for them and provoke them to reflect if they are ready for such changes. Themes from the book, including that doctoral education is a shared responsibility, that students must take advantage of opportunities that come their way and make them when they don’t and that research is a social activity will be further teased apart. Through this conclusion, the chapter will encourage students to be independent within their doctoral education, while seeking out and retaining important networks that will connect them with their community and support their well-being.