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Is it just me, or does the end of the PhD sometimes feel like you\u2019ve missed out on three (or four, or five) years of the career ladder that your non-academic friends have been busily climbing? Sometimes, when I occasionally contemplate leaving the academic bubble, I worry about having to start again from the bottom.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019m not sure I should. In fact, I think a PhD gives you a whole bunch of the sort of transferrable skills that are really valuable to employers. It might be difficult to see this from outside academia \u2013 a PhD can be a bit of a mysterious thing to the uninitiated \u2013 but that just means that we students need to make our case more clearly. So I\u2019d like to start a conversation about what kinds of skills a PhD gives you that can be taken into the outside world \u2013 and that employers should value.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s my list \u2013 feel free to add more in the comments!<\/p>\n
Self-management<\/strong><\/p>\n In a lot of disciplines, as a PhD student, you\u2019re pretty much on your own most of the time. Apart from friends and family, nobody much cares where you are, how you dress, what time you work, whether you eat\u2026 So it\u2019s down to you. If you don\u2019t have plenty of organisation, drive, self-discipline and time management, you\u2019re going nowhere. If you\u2019ve managed to do a PhD it\u2019s proof that you more than tick the self-starter box.<\/p>\n Expert Communication<\/strong><\/p>\n As PhD students, we spend a lot of our time writing or presenting to different audiences in different formats. Whether it\u2019s a departmental discussion group, a poster competition, a conference paper, or even just putting forward an idea in a seminar \u2013 we\u2019re always thinking about how to get our message across to people who might not share our expertise (or our opinions). And this isn\u2019t just about throwing words out there. We also network \u2013 a lot. We need to get our work noticed, so we spend a lot of time persuading people that what we do is really interesting and important. It might feel like an uphill struggle sometimes, but it\u2019s a skill that a lot of other people don\u2019t have.<\/p>\n Management of others<\/strong><\/p>\n We don\u2019t just manage ourselves \u2013 we manage others too. It\u2019s helpful to think in jargon-y terms here. So we sometimes manage downwards (i.e. the traditional kind), perhaps if we\u2019re leading on a conference or heading up a committee or society (it might be something as simple as being student representative). But we also manage \u2018horizontally\u2019, when we\u2019re involved in collaborations (maybe organising a workshop or a seminar). Remember that time you convinced your co-convenor to go with your idea? That\u2019s management. Even more importantly, we manage upwards. We manage our supervisors, our directors of graduate studies, our departmental administrators \u2013 the list goes on. Think about the last time you negotiated with your supervisor about what your next chapter will look like, or discussed their expectations for when you\u2019ll have it ready.<\/p>\n Managing Money<\/strong><\/p>\n We don\u2019t have very much of it, and we\u2019re always asking for more. As a PhD student, most of us probably aren\u2019t putting our names to major research grants. But we are applying for fieldwork funding, travel or conference grants, book grants, support funds, scholarships, etc. We spend quite a bit of our time making the case for why people should give us money (including putting together budgets and plans) \u2013 and then accounting for how we\u2019ve spent it.<\/p>\n Project management<\/strong><\/p>\n Self-management is one thing, but it won\u2019t get you anywhere unless you have a workable plan for a thesis project \u2013 and then actually carry it out. A three year project is a major undertaking. It requires a lot of forward planning to get right. Plus, things go wrong \u2013 holes appear in arguments, fieldwork arrangements go awry, new books get published while you\u2019re writing \u2013 and your plan has to adapt to them.<\/p>\n