Many people who visit the jobs.ac.uk website are doing so because they want to look for an academic job. However, there are a number of postgraduate students who come to realise that they don’t want to work as a university lecturer or researcher. Where does that leave them?
The debate over what a postgraduate degree (especially one in the Humanities) is for is a very important one. Many people assume that if you embark on a masters or PhD then you must automatically want an academic career. This might be the case at the start of the degree but many people change their minds, because of personal circumstances or fear of a dwindling job market.
An article in Chronicle this week points out that there is very poor provision for PhD students who decide that they wish to seek jobs elsewhere. They are offered little guidance or advice on how to maximise their skills base. I happen to think that there is often very little help offered to those postgrads who DO want to pursue an academic career, so it must be even worse for those who have chosen to move away from university life.
Why is this happening? Partly because academic staff are not trained to offer careers advice, which is a specific knowledge set that they may not have. Also they often had no personal experience of the job market outside academia and so cannot even offer stories of their own time on the nonacademic job market.
In order to correct this problem universities need to strengthen their postgraduate alumni relations and ask former students what would have helped them, and also invite outside speakers from different industries to offer guidance to those making their career decisions. This is very important in an era where entering the academic job market is such a struggle. Postgrads needs to be aware of everything on offer for them.
The category of people not included here is those who DO want academic careers and even secure fixed-term contract research positions after their PhDs, but who then find that their own academic career peters out because of the sheer numbers of applicants for lectureships. This is particularly so in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. These people end up in a particularly difficult position, as they are usually over the age of 30 and are often unable to afford the luxury of returning to the parental home to work on academic outputs (e.g. journal articles) whilst working part-time in a non-demanding temp job. Such people are effectively compelled to find alternative work, having rarely had to confront this prospect, and withotu the knowledge of undertakign a propoer skills audit – consequently, such people often end up in employment positions that are unsuitable for their level of qualification, and where their particular knowledge base (gained through years of study and postdoc research) is entirely unused. Full-time academics have a habit of avoiding having anything to do with such people because they cannot offer them any useful advice appropriate to their own period of life and immediate need for full-time employment. “Keep publishing” is not useful advice for people in this position. Once one enters full-time work outside of academia, the stresses inevitably make publishing academic output virtually impossible. Furthermreo, the number of research jobs in non-academic settings in itself quite limited; there sometimes seems to be an unspoken assumption among academics that think-tanks, the public sector or research agencies can absorb an infinite number of PhD graduates who are unsuccessful in their search for academic jobs. This is not the case. In my experience, it is increasingly advisable to undertake a vocational MA/MSc course after the undergraduate degree and then undertake 1-2 years of part-time or unpaid work experience in that vocation when one is still young enough to do so. I certainly wouldn’t advise anynoe to undertake a PhD at this point in time, unless the research will lead directly to a position outside of academia (e.g. the PhD is undertaken for a government department or private company, where the knowledge output is sufficiently valuable to promise decent, full-time employment directly afterward).