How postdocs get on

A new paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the postdoc period, the period of flexible, temporary and often insecure work after a PhD but before a permanent role, is “no less critical than the Ph.D. in determining future academic careers.”

The paper by Duan et al shows that in America the PhD studying period is not in and of itself the only determinant of whether a student will secure an academic role. They demonstrate that

Those whose productivity went down during the postdoc, and those without a hit paper during this period are significantly more likely to drop out of academia than others

The paper also argues that the research active and geographically mobile do better in securing a faculty job. The authors argue this is because their “diverse academic experience gives an advantage.”

Waiting around

The paper suggests that waiting for a faculty job is usually the wrong path. This is to say that doing a PhD, working as a postdoc, and then securing a coveted faculty role, sounds more straightforward on paper than it is in reality.

This is interesting in itself but it’s also a question of how a market for talent functions. And this is important because the whole economy relies on universities selecting academics that are the best in the field, not just those more likely to get picked by dint of good fortune or demographics.

The most obvious way to look at how this market works is to look at how universities themselves describe it. Let’s move away from the US examples and look to the UK.

There is lots of advice for PhDs seeking to break into the academic job market. This slideshow from LSE presents the kind of information that is typically shared with aspiring academics. The slides suggest the UK academic job-market is more multivariate than the US with greater flexibility in choosing between teaching and research routes without the possibility of tenure in either. The slides, albeit now a bit dated, show that promotion depends on a mixture of teaching, research, service, and public engagement. So far so REF.

The University of Salford’s advice from 2023 includes a good chunk of information on the administrative responsibilities of academics and its broader emphasis for the aspirant academic is a practical one. Their guidance looks at the kinds of skills an academic needs including: passion, communication skills, team-working, and networking skills. And advice on getting that first academic job foremost of which is publishing research.

The University of Oxford has an extensive and nuanced set of guidance which brings the dynamics of the labour market into sharper relief. This particular section captures the sentiment that undercuts much of the academic career guidance “Only a tiny percentage of PhD graduates become professors; the vast majority take their research and teaching training to make significant contributions in other fields.”

These are only three examples amongst dozens of guides on getting an academic career split across hundreds and hundreds of pages. The underlying themes are that getting a first academic role is hard, it is largely based on research record (and luck) and the extent to which a PhD student has been published, and building a broad skills base with flexibility over job role and location is helpful.

Jobs

Of course as well as being educators, institutions are also employers. An analysis of academic job postings in Europe demonstrates that research is the primary job criteria for early career academics with emphasis on teaching and other skills becoming more important as academics progress up the career ladder. Albeit, as pointed out on Wonkhe, within the UK there is a significant growth in teaching only academic contracts. Even more specifically within the UK there is a literature over many decades which emphasises the importance of teaching, writing, and networking, the porosity between programmes and other institutions in careers, and the global precarity of junior academics

The challenge that emerges for the PhD and early post-doc breaking into and through the job market are therefore twofold. The first is that the skills and experience required to secure a first permanent academic role are effectively the same as someone already carrying out a full-time academic role. This is a big hurdle to clear. The second is that the conditions of postdocs, particularly the lack of stability, makes acquiring those skills difficult.

In line with the study emerging from the US, if a UK post-doc wants to get on academic literature suggests they are best-placed to do so by being fortunate enough to have high-quality instruction and they may benefit from structured support through programmes like Prosper.

There is potentially an endless list of the ways in which PhD and postdoc study shape future academic careers. The analysis here does not even touch on the various ways in which social and economic inequalities shut down or otherwise open up career paths.

Nevertheless, the UK’s industrial strategy relies on a pipeline of academics progressing in both established fields and emergent ones. The lack of institutionalised knowledge on not just who gets on but the conditions through which students get on presents not only an institutional risk in losing talent in the academic pipeline but an economic one in allowing future academics to slip out of the system.