The PhD - Well worth the effort!
According to research presented at the Vitae researcher development conference last week the effort invested in getting a PhD is well worth it when it comes to career prospects. Research carried out by RCUK found that PhD graduates were highly employable, as indicated by the fact that less than 2 percent of those with a PhD were unemployed 3 years after graduation.
More than half of these PhD graduates have left academia by this time, backing up the findings published last year which I have blogged about here before. However, 94 per cent of those question say they do use their research skills in their work and about 40 per cent say they carry out research “most of the time”. 92 per cent stated that their research skills helped them to be “innovative” in the workplace.
These finding indicates that although PhD graduates enter the commercial or public sectors, they still enter into research based roles and use key skills developed during their PhD to advance their careers. This research further supports the findings of the CIHE Talent Fishing report where the companies that employ PhD graduates said that the subject specific knowledge of the graduates was one of their key attributes. Other key attributes included critical and independent thinking and problem solving abilities.
This recent research highlighted the healthcare, engineering and finance sectors as areas that PhD graduates are finding careers in.
This evidence is encouraging and continues to fuel the argument that in todays knowledge economy, with the proportion of this with a Bachelors degree rising, it is postgraduate level qualifications that employers are turning to to differentiate between candidates.
**The analysis was conducted by the Institute for Employment Studies for RCUK and supported by Vitae. It used data from the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education and the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education Longitudinal Survey, both produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency.The study concludes that the supply of highly skilled workers is critical to the UK’s economic growth and social well-being.
