Stories of moving on HASS PhD graduates’ motivations and career trajectories inside and beyond academia

Background

It is widely accepted that the academic job market in developed countries has been very limited for some years now and is unlikely to expand significantly any time soon (Auriol et al., 2013; Cyranoski et al., 2011; Golde and Dore, 2001). Speculation about the future and viability of universities in the face of soaring costs, digital disruption (such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) available, at least in theory, to anyone with an internet connection) and the Maker Movement ¹ (Halverson and Sheridan, 2014) is rife; these discussions occur both within academia (Izak et al., 2017) and in the wider media and public discussions of Higher Education (Hall, 2018; Ward, 2014). Within this context, we know that very few PhD graduates go on to become full professors and only a low percentage get full-time academic jobs (Acker and Haque, 2017; Barsky et al., 2013 Loxley and Kearns,2018). Yet we keep on producing more and more PhDs – in Australia, for example, we graduate enough PhDs to replace the academic workforce every three years (McGagh et al., 2016). Why are people continuing to do PhDs, and what happens to those who don’t go onto academic jobs? Pedersen (2014) explores the question of employment destinations in relation to STEM doctoral holders; in parallel, I ask: ‘Where are Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) doctoral graduates employed?’

Clearly, a major decision such as starting a PhD will be associated with multiple motivations and aspirations, given the significant time and financial commitments entailed. Research into the motivations driving PhD candidates in general to embark on research degrees reveals a range of reasons behind the decision. Guerin et al. (2014), surveying PhD candidates from all disciplines across a research-intensive university, demonstrated the key factors influencing this decision are: family and friends; intrinsic motivation (i.e. genuine interest in the research topic, personal identity); lecturer influence; previous research experience; and career progression. This last factor, though not exclusively directed towards university positions, includes those who do hope to obtain a permanent academic appointment. The limited published research specifically focused on motivations for undertaking doctorates in HASS disciplines includes Brailsford’s (2010) research on history doctorates. Brailsford (2010) lists motivations that echo those found by Guerin et al. (2014): personal development and intrinsic interest in the discipline; encouragement from third parties (friends, colleagues, family, and academics); and improving career prospects. Much of the other relevant research into doctoral motivations relates to professional doctorates in Education and/or Business (see, e.g. Clark, 2007; Jablonski, 2001; Leonard et al., 2005; Wellington and Sikes, 2006). Not surprisingly, given that professional doctorates are usually closely linked to the candidate’s profession and workplace, these studies also identify career progression amongst the motivations to embark on doctoral studies. For those studying in HASS disciplines, an academic life still appears to be one of the main career expectations (Gemme and Gingras, 2012; Mason et al., 2009; Morrison et al., 2011), though I readily acknowledge that not all candidates want to work in a university. Further, the broad age range of those doing a PhD in HASS includes some who see this as their ‘retirement plan,’ having waited for many years to be in a position to follow their intellectual pursuits at doctoral level. Until now, however, the usual expectation is that a PhD is the required preparation and entry-level qualification for a HASS university lectureship: the culture inside universities implicitly communicates that a PhD provides the normal pathway into an academic career.

Within universities there has been little guidance, at least until recently, for PhD candidates in HASS about how the knowledge and capacities gained during doctoral studies might be used outside academia. The growing interest in generic or transferable skills at doctoral level (Gilbert et al., 2004) is evidence of the changing attitudes to likely employment futures beyond academia for the majority of PhD graduates (Neumann and Tan, 2011). Increasingly, universities in Australia and the UK that had previously required only research in doctoral degrees are including coursework designed to expand the skillset acquired during candidature (Denicolo, 2016). Substantial resources have been put into developing the Vitae Framework for researcher development and informative career profiles for researchers made available online (see vitae.ac.uk). The Australian higher education system has yet to provide comparable resources for PhD graduates, though the need for such detailed material is clearly evident.

One strand of the research into doctoral education focuses on the identity formation during doctoral studies, and how these identities interact with career trajectories (see, e.g. Hancock and Walsh, 2016; McAlpine and Turner, 2012; McAlpine and Amundsen, 2016). As individuals transition through thinking of themselves as students into regarding themselves as researchers, many begin to consider who they will become as professionals in their field. McAlpine and Amundsen (2016) remind us of the importance of individual agency in understanding the career choices of doctoral graduates, whilst acknowledging the constraints of external forces that inevitably influence the available choices. Identity trajectories are intertwined with career trajectories, so that ‘understanding imagined futures involves understanding past intentions’ (McAlpine and Turner, 2012: 539); relinquishing the imagined future of an academic life includes setting aside some of the original motivations for undertaking a PhD. For some this is deeply unsettling, experienced as disappointing failure.

Some PhD graduates struggle to surrender an imagined future and identity as a full-time, tenured academic. An emerging strand of research into academic work and identities mobilises the concept of ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2006) in an attempt to understand this phenomenon (Burford, 2018; Thouaille, 2018). Berlant (2006: 21) defines ‘cruel optimism’ as ‘a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility.’ This damaging attachment to a problematic object of desire can be observed in PhD graduates who cling to the belief that they can be one of the few to succeed in academia despite the repeated setbacks experienced in their own work lives. It is possible to see how such a fantasy of ‘the good life’ can operate as an obstacle to an individual’s success and flourishing (Berlant, 2011). That fantasised ‘script of the ideal faculty life’ (Bieber and Worley, 2006: 1022) can be extraordinarily difficult to dislodge. Using a different framework, Acker and Haque (2017) invoke Bourdieu’s concept of ‘hysteresis’ to explain the dissonance PhD graduates experience when they turn out to be excluded from the fortunate few to obtain full-time, tenured academic positions. By understanding something of these psychological conditions and the stories behind them, universities and those involved in doctoral education can help graduates manage their responses to their future work choices.

Not all graduates are caught in this unhappy limbo, of course, and there is an increasingly robust discourse lauding the value of a PhD in ‘alternate academic’ (‘alt-ac’) careers and also beyond the academy entirely (sometimes referred to as ‘post-ac’ careers). Recognising the limited opportunities offered by academia at present, many PhD graduates actively choose to work in higher education administration, government, non-government organisations (NGOs), not-for-profit organisations and private industry. Much of the research into employment outside the academy concerns PhD graduates in STEM areas (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) (Hancock and Walsh, 2016; Pedersen, 2014; Thiry et al., 2015), but there is also some investigation into post-PhD careers for HASS doctorates (Higgins and Daniels, 2015; McAlpine et al., 2013; Wood and Townsend, 2013) that focuses on the skills and capacities developed during HASS doctorates.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we see much of the discussion about non-academic careers occurring outside the academy, on social media and online news services. For example, the UK-based Times Higher Education published a blog entitled, ‘What happens when academics quit? Good things, it turns out’ (Perel, 2018); the US-based Chronicle of Higher Education forum has a discussion board dedicated to ‘Leaving Academe’ (accessed at https://www.chronicle.com/forums/index.php/board,28.0.html); and a Nature Editorial (2016) outlined the findings of the Vitae report What do research staff do next?. The latter explained that PhD graduates choose to leave the academy because ‘they wanted better long-term prospects, they wanted more job security and they were no longer prepared to be employed on short-term and fixed contracts’ (Nature, 2016: 585). The tenor of these discussions is much more positive than the preceding reports that universities are turning out far too many PhDs (see, e.g. Cyranoski et al., 2011; Croucher, 2016; Kolata, 2016). Instead, we now see radio broadcasts such as the Canadian CBC Sunday Edition documenting successful transitions out of academia (CBC/Radio-Canada 2018). Blogs such as ‘Jobs on Toast’ (http://jobsontoast.com/) and ‘The Versatile PhD’ (https://versatilephd.com/) offer advice on making these transitions, and online communities such as ‘Beyond the Professoriate’ (https://community.beyondprof.com/) have emerged to provide professional development and career coaching for those working through their employment options post-PhD.

I wanted to find out more about the lived experiences of HASS PhD graduates working in non-academic jobs in order to provide positive models for current postgraduate students. The project also investigated the impact of doctorates on career trajectories and the skills/capacities graduates gained from doing the PhD. While the stories here are situated in the Australian context, they resonate with the international context described above. The voices of those with first-hand experience of negotiating academia and transitioning out bring to life the bland statistics and government reports on graduate outcomes and career paths.

Methods

Originally pictured as straight forward semi-structured interviews, the project became a version of narrative enquiry (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990; Clandinin, 2007), revealing the sometimes intense emotional challenges in the stories of moving out of the academy. Participants needed very little prompting to tell their stories beyond the general questions: What were your original motivations for doing a PhD? Did your career intentions change during or after your doctoral studies? How did your career path develop? Do you have any regrets about leaving the academy? The stories spilled out readily, perhaps influenced by two main factors. Firstly, I was inviting them to tell stories of their own success and victory – after all, they had all succeeded in obtaining their doctoral qualification and were now employed. But there were also painful and unhappy memories attached to this story for several of the participants, which soon became apparent when describing their decisions to look for work outside the academy. This leads to the second factor: I often noticed a strong sense that participants ‘needed’ to tell the story, to explain themselves, perhaps to say out loud the reasoning that they had rehearsed in their own heads so often in the past. At times there was a sense that telling the story was almost cathartic, or allowed for some healing process to occur. Narrative enquiry opens the possibilities for participants to make sense of their emotions and experience through recounting a comprehensible, coherent story (McAlpine and Amundsen, 2018); these interviews opened a space for such stories to be told. The transcripts expose strong emotions in their long, tumbling sentences, halting starts and stops and uncertain repetitions.

Participants were recruited via a ‘passive snowball’ technique (the ethics committee required that I advertise the project and ask others to tell suitable recruits about it, and thus for the participants to approach me themselves). Interviews were on average approximately one hour long; audio recordings were transcribed and returned to participants for checking. Themes were developed through manual coding following repeated reading of the transcripts (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Pseudonyms have been used to ensure anonymity in reporting the results, as well as removal of any other identifying factors. Twelve PhD graduates (five women, seven men) who had studied and worked across three Australian universities were interviewed. Their PhDs were in a range of HASS disciplines: Politics (4), History (1), Creative writing (3), English literature (1), Gender studies (2) and Labour studies (1). All 12 had completed their degrees between 2000 and 2017. It is important to note that all participants were domestic students; unlike many of their international student counterparts, they did not have the option (or obligation) of returning to existing lecturing positions in their home universities overseas. Participants were of different ages and had a range of work experience – some had come straight through from undergraduate and Honours degrees into doctoral studies, while others had been in the workforce for several years prior to embarking on their PhD. As a qualitative study, this project cannot make claims to being comprehensive, nor generalisable; rather, it seeks to uncover a range of experiences and to present various possibilities.

Where did they imagine their PhD leading?

When asked about their original motivations for doing the PhD and what they hoped to do after it, most participants responded that they had planned to be an academic; those enrolled in creative writing doctorates hoped to continue as creative writers; but several admitted they had not really thought beyond the thesis. Their stories reveal a range of pathways into and out of academia.

A recurring theme that emerged from the stories was a dawning recognition that participants’ imagined vision of an academic life was very idealistic, somewhat removed from contemporary realities. Their original perception of academic work was focused on scholarship and teaching:

I just had this moment [as a third-year undergraduate student] of – I’m reading things that people wrote about this! This must be like a job that people can do! And I just had this moment of – I could do this for a living – I could – research and teach about the kind of literature that I love. (Alison)

However, during the process of undertaking the degree and spending more time at close quarters with academics, students do often move ‘from a rather naïve understanding of academic work (with their imagined futures representing a sort of wish fulfillment) to a grounded embodied experience of academic work’ (McAlpine and Turner, 2012: 545). Participants reflected:

I certainly didn’t have a realistic conception of what academia is or had become. And I don’t think I – in some ways it’s hard to understand something before you’re in it, but I didn’t understand it, I think, as a system. (Michael)

Some participants realised early on that they weren’t suited to an academic career, despite enjoying researching and teaching. One participant recalled:

It was probably about two years in to my PhD, when I started thinking about ‘Is this what I actually want to do?’, because I enjoyed the teaching, I enjoyed the research. But for the research side, I enjoyed research [for] myself. I enjoyed reading and writing about things and thinking about things, but I didn’t really enjoy too much the – sharing it with other people side of things. I didn’t really get into publishing – I presented at a few local conferences, but I didn’t really – I didn’t really like talking about my research with other people, all that much, or debating it, or trying to argue my point. (Alison)

Two participants did obtain full-time contracts as researchers and lecturers, but decided to leave the university system. One explained: ‘I wanted more than just a full-time, busy job. I wanted to explore the world a little bit, so I took leave without pay and went travelling for a year, which turned into two years, which turned into seven’ (Anna). The other felt limited by the research jobs she was employed to undertake:

there was just something at the back of my mind where I was just then questioning, well, I’ve now acquired all of this knowledge, but it was more about the skills that I’d acquired […] I realised that I actually had all these skills, I shouldn’t be pigeon-holing myself in academia. There’s other opportunities out there. (Julie)

Over time, then, these PhD candidates developed a more realistic understanding of academic lives in today’s universities. For those who had originally been motivated by a desire to pursue an academic career, this close-up observation started to shift their career plans.

What experiences pushed them out of academia?

When asked about the events leading up to their decision to move out of the academy, participants usually described experiences of being pushed out by disappointment and inability to remain employed in the sector, rather than being pulled out to better work or lifestyle opportunities. These experiences highlight the cruel optimism at play in academia, but also the tipping points at which individuals break free of damaging attachment to an academic career. The list of factors that pushed participants out of academia will come as no surprise to those who have attended to the debates about the nature and purpose of doctoral education in recent years. Key amongst the push factors are the limited job opportunities for newly graduated PhD holders, the realities of teaching in the contemporary university, and the prevailing academic cultures they encountered.

Where did they go and what did they do?

This group of HASS doctoral graduates were employed both inside and outside the academy, in ‘alt-ac’ and ‘post-ac’ careers in roles and sectors consistent with those recommended by groups such as Vitae and Beyond the Professoriate. Some took up non-academic roles inside universities, working in university administration at various levels, providing student and staff support and development, and developing resources. Others were recruited into government positions via graduate programs or to work on specific projects, employed in state and federal departments. Non-government organisations (NGOs) and not-for-profit organisations also provided satisfying, full-time, paid employment. Some participants worked in private industry, and a few were self-employed as freelancers. That is, they dispersed throughout the workforce.

The employment undertaken by these HASS graduates used various skills and capacities that had been demonstrated through completing their doctoral degrees (see Table 1).

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Table 1.

Skills and occupation titles.

Writing	Magazine associate editor, copy editor, freelance writer, corporate writer, tender writer, report writer, grant application writer, manuscript assessor, creative writer
Researching	Research analyst, research and policy officer, research assistant, research librarian, academic librarian
Teaching	High school teacher, children’s boarding school master, staff training and development facilitator
Managing	Project manager, project officer, manager of communications and strategy, manager of business, manager of organisational development, academic support coordinator, team manager

Some members of this group went into graduate positions in government where they used a whole range of their writing, researching and managing skills in running projects, gathering materials for parliamentary submissions and preparing reports. Interestingly, one mentioned that his experience of university tutoring had taught him how to facilitate small groups effectively, an invaluable capacity when faced with organising government committees:

I think tutorial management and those sorts of things is useful when in any kind of team work, team-based work environment, which all government work is, but getting everyone engaged and involved and talking and those sorts of things, taking the lead in discussions and being – being in a leadership position as you are in a tute, you’re leading the whole process. (Jarrod)

Of those who participated in this project, only a few were developing the portfolio careers that might be expected in today’s gig economy. Among these individuals were those who had embarked on freelancing, sometimes to allow time to undertake other intellectual and creative work, and sometimes because being self-employed entrepreneurs suited their domestic circumstances. As Bridgstock (2012) reminds us, entrepreneurship should not be regarded as ‘a dirty word’ in the Arts – indeed, many creative practitioners need to manage their own careers independently. But most of the participants in this study were full-time employees, undertaking only one job at a time, though they did report a certain amount of change in terms of rotating through government departments or areas of university administration; others were employed on specific, short-term projects or limited contracts, rather than the permanent job-for-life previous generations aspired to. While it is not possible from this data to say that the value of the PhD lies in being more likely to have secure employment, these doctoral holders do appear to be well placed for regular, reliable employment in the knowledge economy.

All the study participants found themselves working in very different roles from what they had originally imagined for themselves when they embarked on their doctoral degrees. While two still held out some limited hope to continue teaching in their discipline areas, they had all moved away from the notion of themselves as full-time, tenured academics. On the whole, they found themselves in positions that offered sufficient outlet for their skills and capacities; as one participant explained: ‘I think I’ve probably found a good balance with this job, whereby I get to do enough research that the research part of me is satisfied ’ (Anna). Surprisingly, though, none of the participants felt it was their content knowledge that was being used by their current jobs.

When asked about any career advice they would pass on to commencing PhD students, participants urged careful consideration of not only what candidates want to get out of the experience, but also what they plan to do afterwards. They also advised that it was a good strategy to undertake some paid work outside academia before embarking on postgraduate study, rather than going straight from school into undergraduate study and then into a doctoral program; this was mostly to ensure that candidates have a better sense of what and why they want to continue studying. Volunteering for community groups and NGOs was also highly recommended:

I remember when I finished, one of my academic mentors said, ‘just keep applying for jobs, but just remember you’re just as likely to get a job from your community work as you are from your academic work’. And she was right [laughs]. (Geoff)

Conclusion

The narratives reported above clearly demonstrate the challenges and disappointments associated with academic work in the contemporary university setting; they also point to how HASS PhD graduates find fulfilling, stimulating work outside the academy that draws on their doctoral education. The stories of post-PhD employment narrated in this study teach us some important lessons for current PhD candidates, their supervisors and doctoral educators.

Current HDRs, and those contemplating embarking on a doctoral degree, need to know about these stories early in the process of their decision-making about their own futures. It is quite possible that better information about likely career trajectories following a HASS PhD will lower attrition rates: if PhD candidates enter their studies with their eyes open, they are less likely to feel disappointed further down the path. As one participant explained, the decision to ‘leave the monastery’ (Michael) is particularly difficult if the alternatives are murky and obscured.

It is also important for supervisors to know where their doctoral students go on graduation, so that they can inform candidates about viable, satisfying employment opportunities for HASS doctoral graduates. Even more important, it is vital that supervisors ensure that alt-ac or post-ac careers are not perceived as a second choice: the damaging concept of a ‘failed academic’ is inconsistent with the realities of 21^st century academia. The ways in which PhD candidates are used as casual teachers urgently needs to change, too. The stories recounted above provide graphic detail into the lived experience of casualised teaching. Supervisors can play a role in implementing less exploitative work practices in their own departments that keep alive the ‘cruel optimism’ that traps PhD candidates in a vicious cycle of hope.

There are advantages to universities when they employ PhD graduates in administrative positions, as demonstrated by participants here who refer to their own negotiations between these worlds (this is emphasised in the way they strategically use their title of ‘Dr,’ as I report in a forthcoming article). In many institutions, there appears to be a degree of antagonism between management and academic staff; PhD holders who have experience of academic work are well placed to understand the sticking points and hence develop mutually beneficial systems and procedures acceptable to both academics and management. As Berman and Pitman (2010) argue, universities could benefit substantially from the graduates they produce by employing research-trained professional staff.

When doctoral graduates take their knowledge and skills out of the ivory tower and into the broader workforce, they are at the forefront of breaking down boundaries between universities and wider society. They can facilitate engagement between universities and industry, establishing collaborative research projects and offering internships for students. Their understanding of both university and industry needs places them in an ideal position to broker these exchanges.

Outside universities, particularly in Australia, employers need to be educated about what a HASS PhD brings to their workplace and organisation. In some countries is it common for PhD graduates to enter business, industry and government, but others (including Australia) still have a long way to go. These workers have a rich skill set that can be mobilised in multiple ways in a knowledge economy. The World Economic Forum predicts:

Overall, social skills – such as persuasion, emotional intelligence and teaching others – will be in higher demand across industries than narrow technical skills, such as programming or equipment operation and control. In essence, technical skills will need to be supplemented with strong social and collaboration skills. (WEF, 2016)

The study has limitations in that participants had all completed their PhDs and were employed at the time of the interview. They were, in effect, invited to tell a story of their own success; no doubt there are other less triumphal narratives circulating amongst doctoral graduates. The stories in this study are located in the Australian context, but do resonate with the experiences reported elsewhere.

The next step in understanding the lived experience of HASS PhD graduates working in non-academic careers is to establish what skills and capacities they learned during their doctoral studies and how they are using them in their current employment. This will be useful in establishing what aspects of doctoral education are most important for post-PhD careers, and hence influence the design of doctoral programs in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. In the meantime, the current study uncovers, through the voices of those who have completed their PhDs and moved into alt-ac and post-ac employment, what it is like to transition out of the academy; this knowledge can be used to break the cycle of cruel optimism that is experienced by too many of our talented and capable HASS PhD graduates.