Career development for doctoral and postdoctoral trainees in Canada

Job prospects – Rethinking academic aspirations

Traditionally, doctoral training programmes have aimed to prepare individuals for a career in academia, that is for a tenured faculty position (e.g., professor) at a research-focused university or college. In Canada, only 18.6% of PhDs hold a position of full-time university professor, according to a 2011 National Household Survey report from Statistics Canada (Munro, 2015). In the fifteen-year period between the 1986 and 2001 Canadian census, the number of PhDs soared by 93%, while the number of university professors had only risen by 22% (McKenzie, 2006). The picture in the USA is similar, with less than 20% of science PhDs moving on to a tenure-track position within five to six years of graduation (Fuhrmann et al., 2011). This oversupply of PhDs translates into very few opportunities to obtain stable employment as an academic researcher or professor. As such, the competition for jobs in the academic research sector is fierce. The effects of this are felt throughout the PhD training process, where trainees feel pressured to outperform their colleagues in order to enhance their chances of securing academic employment in the future. High levels of stress and other mental health concerns are increasingly becoming recognized as important issues and are factors that can affect the success of a trainee aspiring to a career in academia (Pain, 2017). Career counsellors need to be prepared to address the psychological difficulties that graduate students might face as they work towards their career goals.

Successful completion of a PhD, which can take on average at least five years (Tamburri, 2013), is only the first step in the road to an academic career. Securing a tenure-track position typically involves first holding one or a series of postdoctoral positions over an average of three to five years following graduation (Mitchell et al., 2013). The postdoctoral position is considered an additional form of training and not typical employment, with postdocs falling into a grey area between student and employee, sometimes having access neither to student services nor worker’s benefits. The majority of postdocs (63%) earn annual salaries that fall below $45,000 (Canadian currency; Mitchell et al., 2013), leaving many postdocs financially stressed and feeling undervalued as their earnings are not commensurate with the level of education and training in which they have invested. Furthermore, there is a significant financial sacrifice to attain a PhD in terms of years of lost potential earnings while pursuing graduate studies.

For many, the lack of financial incentive and the dismal job prospects weigh heavily on them as they decide whether or not to continue along on their desired career path in academia. Doctoral students nearing completion of their degree commonly arrive at a fork in the road where they must decide whether to pursue a postdoc or leave academia. ‘To postdoc or not to postdoc’ is a crucial question with which trainees grapple and may seek career counselling to resolve. The decision not to do a postdoc can mean closing the door to an academic career, as it is very challenging to return to academia once one leaves in pursuit of alternative employment (Gibbs & Griffin, 2013). Many fall into a postdoc position to delay this decision, as they are forced to confront their career decision again when their postdoc contract terminates and they feel the instability of a seemingly endless series of postdoctoral positions coming into conflict with their life roles and family considerations. The average Canadian postdoc is 34 years old; most are married or in common-law partnerships (69%), and 35% have dependent children (Mitchell et al., 2013). Family and other life roles come into the picture more vividly at this stage and are integral factors in career decision-making for those wrestling with whether or not to stay on an academic track.

Life stage – Juggling different life roles and plans

Given the length of time it takes to complete a PhD, most arrive at the end of their studies and embark on employment in their early thirties. This is a time when different life roles emerge that have an increasingly important influence on one’s career decisions. At this stage, both men and women might prioritize starting a family and raising children, a decision that is more likely to affect a woman’s career advancement than a man’s (Coogan & Chen, 2007). Alternatively, family planning might be delayed due to the intensive time and financial commitment of pursuing an academic path. The academic path often necessitates relocation, sometimes internationally and multiple times to obtain specialized postdoctoral or faculty positions in the desired research area, which can be destabilizing for PhDs and their families (Sekuler, Crow, & Annan, 2013). The needs of significant others, dependent children, and other family considerations must be taken into account while working towards a career in academia, and this can create tension in juggling multiple demands and making important career decisions. For women in science, this is especially evident, and might explain why women are under-represented among academic faculty in the sciences (Evers & Sieverding, 2015).

While just over half of all life sciences PhD degrees are granted to women in the USA, the proportion of tenured or tenure-track faculty positions occupied by women is significantly lower, hovering around 33% (Gibbs & Griffin, 2013). Highly qualified women appear to opt out of academic careers, and although a number of factors are likely to play a role, the precise reasons for the ‘academic gender gap’ are not clear (Evers & Sieverding, 2015). Some of the factors thought to be involved include: international relocation requirements, which are perceived as higher barriers for women than men; scarcity of female role models in tenured positions; and work–life balance or family circumstances, where women experience greater difficulty in balancing work and family given the tendency to absorb more of the childcare responsibilities (Evers & Sieverding, 2015).

When considering the issue of life stage, it is also important for counsellors to be sensitive to the fact that some PhDs opting out of academic careers might find the idea of pursuing a new career path in their thirties daunting, especially after having invested so much and having the sense that their graduate training was ‘lost time’ (Tamburri, 2013). It is important to emphasize the transferable skills gained during their graduate training when preparing for a work transition (Pain, 2014).

School-to-work transition – Job preparedness

Despite the bleak job prospects in academia for PhDs, there is a much brighter side. There is increasing demand across an assortment of jobs for individuals possessing PhD degrees in the sciences. The vast majority – more than 60% – of Canadian PhDs are employed in so-called ‘alternative careers’ outside academia, namely in industry, government, or non-governmental organizations (Munro, 2015), and this employment segment is quickly becoming the ‘new normal’ for PhDs (St. Clair et al., 2017). The rapid change in the labour market for PhDs, however, has not been met with an equally responsive shift in their training and career preparation (Desjardins, 2012; Fuhrmann et al., 2011; Pain, 2014; Pask-Aubé, 2016; Savage, 2015; Stephan, 2012). This is particularly true in the biomedical sciences, where research professors continue to recruit graduate students and postdocs to work in their labs and train for careers in academic research despite the knowledge that there is a dearth of academic jobs awaiting these trainees upon graduation (Stephan, 2012).

There is a deeply held notion among professors in the sciences that ‘an academic job is the gold standard of scientific employment’ (Savage, 2015, p. 645). Many students share this view upon entering their PhD programmes, but interest in pursuing a traditional academic career at a research-focused university declines over the course of their PhD training (Fuhrmann et al., 2011; Gibbs & Griffin, 2013). Some factors that can be linked to this change in career ambition include negative perceptions around work–life balance, funding challenges, highly competitive nature of the academic environment, and low availability of academic jobs (Fuhrmann et al., 2011; Rybarczyk, Lerea, Whittington, & Dykstra, 2016). In spite of this, most doctoral students are not aware of the many non-academic job possibilities that are out there. Professors also tend to lack awareness and information about career options that lie outside their academic realm. Moreover, it reflects favourably on a thesis supervisor to have trained a doctoral student who goes on to achieve a successful academic career (Savage, 2015). As such, thesis supervisors are unlikely to be in a position to offer guidance to doctoral students about alternative careers, and students are unlikely to gain exposure to information, training, and role models within their graduate programmes to help prepare them for alternative careers (Golovushkina & Milligan, 2013). As a result, doctoral students are left feeling anxious and unprepared for the job market as they approach graduation (Sekuler et al., 2013). Career counsellors therefore have a vital role to play in helping doctoral students navigate this in order to best prepare for a successful and fulfilling career, within or outside of academia (Pain, 2014).

Insights from social cognitive career theory

There appears to be a shift in career interest that happens as doctoral students progress through their training, which can be distressing for many students as they experience a sense of uncertainty about their future career prospects. Using the framework of social cognitive career theory (SCCT) to study the factors that might influence this shift can be helpful in determining how to best guide doctoral students through this process. Lent, Brown, and Hackett (1994) proposed SCCT as a theoretical model to ‘understand the processes through which people form interests, make choices, and achieve varying levels of success in educational and occupational pursuits’ (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 2000, p. 36). The theory draws heavily on Bandura’s (1986) general social cognitive theory, using the concept of ‘triadic reciprocality’ as a model to explain the bidirectional influences among: (a) an individual’s personal and physical attributes (e.g., beliefs, preferences, gender, race); (b) external environment (e.g., contextual supports and barriers); and (c) behaviour (e.g., learning experiences).

Cognitive-person variables (e.g., self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and goals) are central to SCCT, and represent factors that enable individuals to exercise control over their own career development (Lent et al., 1994). Self-efficacy refers to beliefs that individuals have in their ability to undertake the action(s) required to achieve a goal, while outcome expectations refers to beliefs about how likely it is for a given outcome to occur as a consequence of some action (Lent et al., 1994). Self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and goals interact with other environmental, behavioural, and person variables (as per the triadic reciprocality model) to influence career-related interests and choice behaviour (Lent et al., 2000).

With the SCCT framework in mind, Gibbs and Griffin (2013) surveyed a group of 38 biomedical science PhD graduates to identify the factors that played a role in the development of their interest in and decision to pursue either a faculty career or a non-academic career. The study found that personal values and systemic factors related to the lack of attractiveness of the academic career (e.g., low availability of jobs, funding challenges, low pay scale) were significant drivers of low interest in pursuing an academic career. The study also noted that outcome expectations were shaped by vicarious learning (i.e., learning by observing role models) almost exclusively through faculty mentors. This suggests that career counsellors should make efforts to connect PhD trainees with PhD graduates working in a diverse range of careers outside academia to serve as role models and help guide outcome expectations in the context of alternative careers. Interestingly, neither self-efficacy nor objectively measured performance differed between the PhD graduates with high versus low interest in an academic career, which is not entirely surprising, given that both high performance and positive beliefs around self-efficacy are likely to have been instrumental in getting individuals to this level of scientific education in the first place.

Self-efficacy (along with outcome expectations) might play a more important role in influencing science career interest and academic career goals earlier on in the education process (i.e., undergraduate level; Lent, Brown, & Larkin, 1986), and this might be particularly important for women and visible minorities. At the undergraduate level, self-efficacy has been shown to be correlated with choice of and persistence with a science or engineering major among historically underrepresented groups (Byars-Winston, Estrada, Howard, Davis, & Zalapa, 2010; Lent et al., 2005; Lent, Lopez, Sheu, & Lopez, 2011). Self-efficacy might continue to be an important correlate of persistence in science for women at higher education levels as well. Evers and Sieverding (2015) found that female postdocs in Germany showed a lower intention to strive for an academic career than male postdocs, and that this was explained in part by lower self-efficacy scores among the female versus male postdocs. A USA study did not find differences in self-efficacy among male and female PhD graduates with respect to their interest in pursuing an academic career (Gibbs & Griffin, 2013), which might be related to limitations of a smaller sample size or reflect cultural differences.

An adapted version of SCCT (Lent & Brown, 2013) that focuses on self-efficacy related to career search has also been used as a framework to explore the strategies and resources that doctoral trainees use to prepare for non-academic careers once they have made the decision to opt out of the academic career path. A study of nearly 900 doctoral and postdoctoral trainees in the biomedical sciences at two USA universities found that those who were pursuing non-academic careers and/or had low perceived programme support, had lower self-efficacy related to their career development and job search process, and that this had an impact on trainee adaptation more so than their career interests (St. Clair et al., 2017). This highlights the importance of offering resources to doctoral students that can enhance their job search efficacy, particularly for students considering alternative careers.

Understanding career decision-making through a narrative approach

There are a number of decision points in the process of academic career development. In the biomedical sciences, for example, the first decision point is to undertake a graduate (doctoral) level degree. The second decision point is to proceed to a postdoctoral research position, and the third is to pursue a faculty position (Fuhrmann et al., 2011). At each point along the way, individuals ‘leak out’ of the pipeline, as their career interests and intentions change. This metaphor is helpful to understand the career decision-making process of doctoral and postdoctoral trainees, but it implies a linear progression towards the single goal of obtaining a faculty position; when, in fact, it has been shown that for the majority of trainees, the decision to undertake doctoral or postdoctoral training is not based on a clear, well-informed goal to pursue a faculty position (Gibbs & Griffin, 2013). Only 26.3% of biomedical science PhDs reported having pursued a doctorate with the aim of securing a faculty position, while 55.2% had undefined interests, and many ended up moving to a postdoc simply by default (Gibbs & Griffin, 2013). At least 40% of science doctoral students in a USA study reported having never been interested in an academic career, while others reported a decline in their interest after gaining insight into the role and requirements of a faculty member over the course of their studies (Roach & Sauermann, 2017).

Narrative reflections from recent science PhD graduates on their reasons for entering a doctoral programme generally spoke to their love of science as being the main driver, as well as the recognition that a PhD was required for career mobility (Gibbs & Griffin, 2013). Narratives offer important perspectives that fail to be captured by the statistics in studies attempting to quantify the interactions of variables leading to career choice actions. Furthermore, a narrative perspective allows room for a nearly limitless variety of career goals and helps reshape the view that not aspiring to a faculty position amounts to failure. This notion is essential to convey in order to help doctoral students clarify their career interests and goals and alleviate the pressure that arises from expectations to follow a given narrow path. In this way, there is a strong rationale for approaching the career development issues of doctoral and postdoctoral trainees from a postmodern constructivist point of view that sees the individual as constructing and perceiving their own truth (Sharf, 2013).

Narrative career counselling is one such constructivist approach that is gaining popularity in our postmodern age where careers are no longer seen as ‘lifetime employment but as ways of providing meaning to individuals’ (Sharf, 2013, p. 296). In narrative counselling, the career is seen as a story, where clients describe their past and present career experiences, and with the help of a career counsellor, construct their career future (Brott, 2001; Cochran, 1997). Meaning can be extracted from the stories, and problems that arrive in the narrative can reflect barriers to achieving career goals (e.g., lack of academic jobs), or difficulties in making decisions (e.g., lack of information about alternative careers). In the storyline, these problems can be seen positively as signals that a change in the plot or setting of the story might be necessary, and the counsellor works with the client to identify solutions that can help clarify the future direction of the story (Sharf, 2013). Cochran (1997) described specific narrative career counselling interventions that can be applied in practice, and some of these are outlined further below.

Start with mental health and wellness

The narrative approach to career counselling is especially well-suited where mental health intersects with career development (Stoltz & Haas, 2016). Whether it is the depression experienced when individuals feel they must give up on their dreams of an academic career, the stress of juggling family responsibilities while working towards a PhD in an intensely competitive career landscape, or the anxiety that comes with feeling one is floundering in uncertainty about career goals and interests outside of academia, mental health concerns are very real and important for career counsellors to consider. The career counsellor has a role to play in creating a safe, empathic, and trusting space where clients can explore their career development issues and develop a sense of agency and growth (Stoltz & Haas, 2016).

Keep in mind insights from SCCT research

Most of the findings from studies based on the SCCT framework point to systemic interventions that are meant to be enacted at a policy level (e.g., graduate training programme resources, funding, pay scale), and these are important for career counsellors to bear in mind in order to understand the client’s broader landscape. Although approaches aimed at increasing self-efficacy are generally helpful for strengthening career interests and achieving career goals, the evidence supporting this as a target for intervention for doctoral trainees appears to be lacking, and it might be more important to consider the influence of contextual supports and barriers and outcome expectations (Gibbs & Griffin, 2013). To this point, occupational information is essential in developing realistic outcome expectations (Sharf, 2013), and career counsellors play a vital role in connecting clients with role models as well as new and up-to-date information about both traditional academic careers and a range of alternative careers. Career counsellors affiliated with university graduate programmes can work with faculty to develop courses and training programmes that can be integrated into the curriculum, and which cover job preparation skills specific to non-academic jobs (e.g., job search, resume preparation, interviewing, and marketing transferable skills), as this is where doctoral students report the greatest need (Pask-Aubé, 2016).