![\"\"](\"https:\/\/world.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/employmentselection.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Lately, more and more students want a non-academic job when they finish their PhD. Anecdotally, some graduates seem to be experiencing the PhD as a barrier to employment, not an enabler. In fact, I\u2019ve heard so much negative talk about how employers react to PhD holders over the years that it seemed important to start looking at this phenomenon more closely. We\u2019ve just started doing some work, interviewing recruiters and hiring managers, and I thought I would share some (very preliminary) research findings with you.<\/p>\n
In case you don\u2019t know, I\u2019m actually an academic and for 10% of my time each week I study, well \u2013 research. Since\u00a02014 I\u2019ve been researching post PhD employability exclusively because I think it\u2019s an important, but under-researched, problem.\u00a0In 2014 I started working with my friend Dr Rachael Pitt (@thefellowette on Twitter) on academic employment. Rachael noticed that academic job ads asked for a ridiculous number of skills. We simply collected a bunch of academic job ads and coded them to find out what academic employers seemed to be looking for when hiring a PhD graduate. This research resulted in a paper called\u00a0\u201cAcademic superheroes: a critical analysis of academic job descriptions\u201d<\/a>, part of which I shared on the blog\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n (Please do not confuse this paper with the recent book called \u2018How to be an academic superhero\u2019, which I won\u2019t link to because I think it\u2019s bad. This author read and quoted our research, but clearly didn\u2019t really understand it, so his book mostly reinforces old fashioned, unhelpful ideas like \u2018publish or perish\u2019. If you want a good book on the topic of finding and securing an academic job, I recommend\u00a0The Professor is In<\/a>).<\/p>\n The obvious next step was to do a similar analysis of non-academic jobs, but we had to find them first. If you type in \u2018PhD\u2019 to a database like Seek.com, you\u2019ll see pages and pages of academic jobs and precious little else. To solve this problem, I worked with my ANU colleagues Dr Will Grant and Associate Professor Hanna Suominen. We used machine learning (specifically natural language processing) to design an algorithm that was capable of \u2018reading\u2019 millions of job ads to find ads that were suggestive of PhD level research skills, but did not explicitly ask for a PhD. If you\u2019re interested in reading more about this work, it\u2019s documented in our paper\u00a0\u201cA machine learning analysis of the demand for non academic \u00a0job opportunities for PhD graduates in Australia\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n As it turns out, our analysis showed that 80% of Australian employers looking to hire someone with high-level research skills do not ask for a PhD.<\/strong>\u00a0This fact is, in itself, is an important finding. If most employers don\u2019t think that putting \u2018PhD\u2019 in a job ad is a good way to attract the best candidates to apply for research jobs, what do they think is important? We set about asking recruiters and hiring managers this question.<\/p>\n Recruiters and HR professional are important gatekeepers in the employment process; either doing the shortlisting or producing the \u2018long list\u2019 from which the shortlist is formed. As it turned out, getting these interviews was hard: harder than doing machine learning in some ways. Recruiters are busy people; difficult to reach and seemingly reluctant to give their precious time to researchers asking about their practice. We tried to place some 80 calls, but only eight so far have agreed to a phone interview, but what I found out during these conversations was fascinating.<\/p>\n Recruiters are looking for evidence you can do the job advertised. My participants told me repeatedly that experience was highly valued, over and above qualifications. Qualifications were regarded with suspicion, and the PhD was no exception. Just because you can demonstrate you have learned something, doesn\u2019t mean you can do it well in practice.\u00a0Recruiters told me that lack of experience was the primary reason why PhD graduates are often passed over in the shortlisting process, despite having plenty of evidence they can run a research project from start to finish.\u00a0Since I see the PhD as a clear demonstration of work experience in doing research, I found this attitude mystifying, until I started to realise that what counts as experience depends on the way \u2018work\u2019 is understood.<\/p>\n I started to tune in on the words and phrases recruiters use to describe their understanding of the PhD and academia. A discourse analysis revealed that these recruiters saw academia not as a workplace, but as another \u2018world\u2019, almost completely separate from the commercial workforce\u00a0(one even said academia is \u2018another planet\u2019 and academics as \u2018aliens\u2019). If these important gatekeepers don\u2019t see the university as a workplace, they will not tend to see PhD as work. Alternatively, they will position the PhD as work that happened under such different conditions that it just doesn\u2019t count as \u2018actual experience\u2019.<\/p>\n My social science training cautioned me to take a deep breath and not get outraged. I\u2019ve been taught to take my research participants at their word, not assume they are labouring under a \u2018false consciousness\u2019 about their actions. I must assume my participants are telling me the truth, from their perspective, which enables me to ask a more important question: why might some recruiters form the opinion that academia is not a \u2018real workplace\u2019?<\/p>\n My friend @nontweetingnigel once told me that his PhD was \u2018a job no one else would pay me to do\u201d and I think he\u2019s right. Work conditions in academia value inquiry and creation of new knowledge, so we take on the most difficult questions and problems. The aim of academic research is to answer questions, but we also value your ability to find more questions. We tend to be pretty relaxed about how long that process takes. By contrast, most non-academic employers value utility\u00a0over novelty and depth. In my discussions with employers, employer groups and my latest discussions with recruiters most have told me they want the answers to questions \u2013 and relatively quickly. Projects are likely to be carried out under significant time constraints, closing out further questions as much as possible. Unlike academia, commercial reports are designed to be read by people in a hurry and tend to be short (never 100,000 words long!). Thus, viewed from the commercial side of the fence, academic research, with its long project timelines and documents, must appear more leisurely and less task focussed than research carried out for profit. We don\u2019t experience it that way, but what is at stake here is not our perception of reality \u2013 it\u2019s theirs.<\/p>\n This is a satisfying analysis, but I don\u2019t think this is the whole explanation for anti-PhD sentiment. I got several comments along the lines that PhD graduates were \u201d a bit peculiar\u201d and tried to probe this attitude more closely. One recruiter told me he used to routinely put CVs with PhDs into a shortlists at the start of his career but now is more circumspect. He noticed that some hiring managers would immediately throw resumes with a PhD on them out, or force him into into into arguing the case to hire the PhD candidate (from his point of view, a waste of time). He has now developed a \u201csense for when the hiring manager is open-minded\u201d and will choose whether or not to present a PhD graduate not on fitness for purpose, but on the attitude of the hiring manager. I asked why he thought that hiring managers might become \u2018anti-PhD\u2019 on principle, and he used words to the effect that \u201chiring managers only have to experience one difficult PhD graduate and they never want another one\u201d.<\/p>\n On the face to it, automatically assuming someone is going to be \u2018difficult\u2019 because they have a PhD seems fundamentally unfair. PhD graduates are people, and people should be treated as people \u2013 right? Sadly, in the employment process, people are often\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0treated as people but as representatives of a \u2018type\u2019. So what sort of \u2018type\u2019 is the PhD graduate? I\u2019d suggest, in the popular imagination, The PhD graduate is someone like Sheldon Cooper on the Big Bang Theory: intelligent, but odd with difficulties fitting in socially. Of course, most of us are not at all like Sheldon Cooper, but many people do not encounter PhD graduates in their everyday life \u2013 at least not enough to counter the effects of this stereotype. It\u2019s easy to forget when you are surrounded by Doctors all day that comparatively few people graduate from the degree each year and make up a vanishingly small proportion of the population. PhD graduates are therefore representatives of a minority group and are facing the ordinary problems minorities face when trying to enter areas of\u00a0the workforce where they are under-represented.<\/p>\n I suspect what is going on here is similar to how racism, ageism and ableism distort the hiring process: discrimination.\u00a0There\u2019s plenty of evidence to suggest your name and gender will affect whether your CV finds its way to the top of the pile<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 it seems the PhD, in some circumstances, has a similar effect. The PhD marks you out as special and different, but sometimes being special and different is not to your advantage.<\/p>\n How can we counter this discrimination? I\u2019m not sure. I am planning another post on how people \u2018hide\u2019 their PhD in the application paperwork, but for now, I\u2019m interested in your thoughts and experiences. Have you experienced ani-PhD sentiment when attempting to find a job, or just in everyday life? If you want a non-academic job, what do you think you can do to counter this stereotyping in the way you present yourself in your CV and resume?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"