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This paper aims to investigate existing practices of transversal skills training in doctoral education and provide recommendations for improvement for universities, industry and doctoral students in Europe. The results offer a detailed picture that has implications for the design of doctoral education programs that aim to support transferable skills development and graduate employability.

A qualitative research method was used for this study; thus, data gained from existing literature were the most significant aspect of this study, serving as the key approach to answering the research questions. A literature review approach, which involved synthesizing and analyzing existing literature, was adopted in this study. Essential themes were identified and collected from literature through an inductive coding technique to find answers to questions in this study.

The research highlights the importance of coordinated efforts to improve transversal skills training in doctoral education programs. Universities must adapt their curriculum to meet industry skill requirements and provide enabling support for faculty innovative teaching. Private enterprises must continue to provide training for doctoral graduates employed in the industry because not all skills can be taught and developed in the university. Doctoral students themselves must be intentional about creating industry networks for acquiring transferable skills needed in nonacademic jobs.

In response to industry demands, a university should not be seen as a place where doctoral students formulate a theory about the net ideology of a discipline but as a place for socializing, interacting, arguing critically and developing transferable skills for various careers. The advocacy for transversal skill training in doctoral education positively impacts society, producing doctoral researchers with an innovative mindset. Universities must continue improving existing skill-based training and work-integrated learning practices while seeking new collaboration with various industry sectors.

This study provides relevant ideas for faculty, industry and doctoral students on enhancing the employability of doctoral graduates through the development of transversal skills.

How frequently may be advisable for a supervisor to meet a PhD student? Are PhD students more satisfied if supervised by someone of the same gender, nationality or with common research interests? Thus far, we lack quantitative evidence regarding similar crucial aspects of managing PhD supervision. The goal of this study is hence to investigate what factors affect Ph.D. students' satisfaction about the professional and personal relationships with their supervisors.

We focus on the characteristics of the interactions between the student and the supervisor, controlling for other important factors, namely, the supervisor's and student's traits, and the characteristics of the context. We employ survey responses from 971 Ph.D. students at two public, research-oriented and internationally renowned universities in Hong Kong and South Korea.

The results show the importance of meeting the supervisor at least once per week. Students are more satisfied of the relationship with their supervisor when they have similar research interests, whereas a key finding is that similarity in terms of gender or nationality does not matter. We also found remarkable differences between disciplines in the level of satisfaction (up to 30%), and that students are more satisfied when the supervisor is strongly involved in international research, whereas satisfaction is negatively affected by the number of Ph.D. students supervised.

The article's findings suggest that students are not more satisfied of their relationship with their supervisors when they have the same gender or nationality, whereas it is other traits of their interaction, such as the frequency of meetings and the similarity of research interest, which matter.

Given declining tuition funds and government grants, Kenyan universities need to develop strategies, including increased research grants and collaborations, to diversify their income sources. Well-managed doctoral students can boost a university’s teaching and research outputs. However, numbers of students enrolled in doctoral programmes at Kenyan universities are low, and graduation rates and time-to-graduate statistics are disturbing. Research undertaken elsewhere underline the important role played by supervisors and peers in facilitating students’ sense of belonging and their success. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the influence of supervisory and peer support on PhD students’ sense of belonging and their success at Kenyan universities.

In this cross-sectional study, data were gathered through an online questionnaire from 614 students admitted to doctoral programmes at Kenyan universities between 2010 and 2018. We used multi-item scales to collect data on PhD students’ self-efficacy, supervisory and peer support and a sense of belonging.

Structural equation modelling results revealed that PhD students’ modes of study and self-efficacy were significantly associated with the quality of supervision, peer support and a sense of belonging. However, only age, a sense of belonging and the quality of supervision were directly linked to their success.

This study contributes to the literature on doctoral-level education, responding to the need for research on the influence of relationships with supervisors and peers on PhD students’ sense of belonging and their success, especially in developing countries.

This paper aims to describe the “InDO: Institute Demographic Ontology” and demonstrates the InDO-based semiautomated process for both generating and extending a knowledge graph to provide a comprehensive resource for marginalized US graduate students. The knowledge graph currently consists of instances related to the semistructured National Science Foundation Survey of Earned Doctorates (NSF SED) 2019 analysis report data tables. These tables contain summary statistics of an institute’s doctoral recipients based on a variety of demographics. Incorporating institute Wikidata links ultimately produces a table of unique, clearly readable data.

The authors use a customized semantic extract transform and loader (SETLr) script to ingest data from 2019 US doctoral-granting institute tables and preprocessed NSF SED Tables 1, 3, 4 and 9. The generated InDO knowledge graph is evaluated using two methods. First, the authors compare competency questions’ sparql results from both the semiautomatically and manually generated graphs. Second, the authors expand the questions to provide a better picture of an institute’s doctoral-recipient demographics within study fields.

With some preprocessing and restructuring of the NSF SED highly interlinked tables into a more parsable format, one can build the required knowledge graph using a semiautomated process.

The InDO knowledge graph allows the integration of US doctoral-granting institutes demographic data based on NSF SED data tables and presentation in machine-readable form using a new semiautomated methodology.

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.

Policy makers, professional associations and scholars continue to advocate for the integration of enhanced clinical experiences for future teachers’ preparation. These recommendations reflect the growing recognition that few events in preservice teachers’ education are more significant than their experiences in the classrooms of veteran peers. Aware of the fact that the field of teacher education needs examples of effective clinical experiences, the authors examined the “critical, project-based” (CPB) model, employing Photovoice activities in a dropout prevention course in a secondary education partner school at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.

Aware that the field of teacher education needs examples of effective clinical experiences, the authors examined the CPB model, employing Photovoice activities in a dropout prevention course in a secondary education partner school at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article they detail a practitioner research examination that explores the experiences of 12 preservice middle/high school teachers, reporting on these individuals’ considerations of general pedagogies, writing instruction strategies and teaching personas.

Results suggest that preservice teachers might best identify pedagogical practices that are consistent with their nascent teaching identities via experiences that occur in school-university partnerships in which future teachers are positioned as pedagogues.

This manuscript explores the use of the “CPB” clinical experience model, identifying the impacts of this approach for preparing future teachers.

This paper aims to explore the support experiences of 381 PhD students within the humanities and social sciences from three research-intensive universities in Denmark (n = 145) and Finland (n = 236). The study investigates the cross-cultural variation in the researcher community support and supervisory support experiences, factors associated with their support experienced and the perceived support fit.

The study used a mixed methods design, both quantitative analyses and qualitative analyses (open-ended descriptions) were used.

The results showed that students in both Danish and Finnish programs emphasized researcher community support over supervisory support. The Danish students, however, reported slightly higher levels of researcher community support and experienced lower levels of friction than their Finnish counter partners. The results also indicated that the only form of support in which the students expressed more matched support than mismatched support was informational support.

The results imply investing in a stronger integration of PhD students into the research community is beneficial for the students’ progress. Building network-based and collaborative learning activities that enhance both instrumental and emotional support and a collective form of supervision could be further developed. The possibility of Phd student integration in the scholarly community is likely to lead to more efficient use of finacial and intellectual resources in academia and society more broadly.

This study offer a unique contribution on doctoral students’ academic and socialization experiences in terms of explicationg the sources of support, support forms and support fit among Danish and Finnish doctoral students. Both invariants and socio-culturally embedded aspects of support experience among the students were detected.

Empirical evidence on how supervisors have perceived the changes and the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on their supervision is scarce. This paper aims to examine how the changing landscape of doctoral education has affected supervision from the supervisors’ perspective.

This survey addressed change, challenges and impact in supervisory responsibilities due to COVID-19 pandemic. The survey was completed by 561 doctoral supervisors from a large multi-field research-intensive university in Finland.

Results show that supervisors estimated that their supervision had been negatively affected by the pandemic, but to a lesser extent than their doctoral candidates’ progress and well-being. In the changed landscape of supervision, the supervisors grappled with challenges related to recognising doctoral candidates’ need of help. Supervisors’ experiences of the challenges and the impact of changed circumstances varied depending on the field and the position of the supervisor, whether they supervised part- or full-time candidates, and the organisation of supervision.

The slowed-down progression and diminishing well-being of doctoral candidates reported by supervisors is likely to influence supervision in a delayed way. Supervisors may be anticipating some issues with stalled studying and stress, but the question is the extent to which they are prepared to handle these as they emerge in supervision encounters. The fact that the experiences varied across field, position, organisation of supervision and the type of candidates (full or part time) suggests that support provided for supervisors to overcome challenges needs to be tailored and engineered.

This study contributes to the literature on doctoral supervision by exploring the impact of transitioning to online supervision and the rapid changes in doctoral supervision as a consequence of the recent global pandemic.

The purpose of this study is to explore the benefits and barriers for learning in industrial PhD education through the perspectives of industrial PhD students. A work-integrated learning (WIL) approach is applied to highlight key issues that university and industry need to consider promoting mutual learning.

The empirical context is a Swedish university profiling WIL offering PhD programs in three disciplines for industrial PhD students from both the private and public sectors. Data was gathered using qualitative methods; 19 semistructured interviews with industrial PhD students.

Findings show that industrial PhD students are developing practical and transferable skills, hence, contributing to research of interest for academia and work–life. Identified benefits for learning include proximity and access to data, project and networks and contextual understanding and tacit knowledge. Barriers for learning are the perceived limited understanding of employers, the dilemma of balancing and switching between different roles, lack of belonging and identity, deficient collaboration agreements and ethical dilemmas.

Contributes insights into an industrial PhD education transforming along with societal needs promoting a future workforce of researchers with skills, new work practices and learning capabilities applicable in the work–life of contemporary society.

This study contributes to the emerging field of studies of alternative doctoral educations by identifying benefits and barriers for learning and providing recommendations for how university and industry may promote learning in a resilient industrial PhD education collaboration.

Doctoral students’ ill-being in terms of stress, exhaustion and high levels of mental health problems has been well documented. Yet, the well-being of doctoral students is more than the absence of these negative symptoms. The number of studies exploring the combination of positive and negative attributes of doctoral students’ well-being is limited. Therefore, this study aims to focus on exploring individual variation in doctoral students’ experienced engagement and burnout across two distinct socio-cultural contexts in Finland and in South Africa.

A total of 884 doctoral students from Finland (n = 391) and South Africa (n = 493) responded to the cross-cultural Doctoral Experience Survey. The data were quantitatively analyzed.

Altogether four distinctive engagement–burnout profiles were detected, including engaged, engaged–exhausted, moderately engaged–burnout and burnout profiles. Differences between the Finnish and South African students were identified in profile emphasis. The profiles were also related to several study progress attributes such as drop-out intentions, time-to-candidacy and satisfaction with study.

This study provides new understanding on doctoral students’ well-being by focusing on both positive and negative attributes and exploring doctoral students’ discrepant profiles with a cross-country design.