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Labour market transitions (Spring 09)

Labour Market Transitions of Arts and Humanities PhDs

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Summary

In this article, Jessica March and Julia Horn from the University of Reading and Catherine Reynolds from the University of Sussex present a career resource for Arts and Humanities PhD researchers called ‘Beyond the PhD’. The site aims to assist PhD students in thinking about future career options and possible career paths. You can listen to audio interviews with people talking frankly about their transition into a variety of careers, both inside and outside academia. You can also read opinion pieces and watch video discussions that engage with a range of issues specific to arts and humanities PhDs and their career development. Beyond the PhD was conceived and developed by people with arts and humanities PhDs in collaboration with careers professionals. It brings together a desire to make visible what happens to postgraduate researchers after they graduate and an ambition to avoid easy prescriptions of 'getting your perfect job'. What ‘Beyond the PhD’ offers is a candid insider’s view of the routes PhD researchers take. The resource was created at the Centre for Career Management Skills, a CETL at the University of Reading.

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Introduction

How many employers of arts and humanities postgraduate researchers can you name? ‘What do PhDs Do?’ will give you some indication of the sectors that they go to work in – but how much do we know about individual employers of arts and humanities PhD graduates? A new freely accessible web resource, ‘Beyond the PhD,’ can help us find out more.

The searchable audio interviews with 28 former postgraduates chart individual career journeys through the PhD and into a range of work roles beyond it. The audio approach gives the narrative an intimate quality while also allowing anonymity; the result is that you can hear a real person talking frankly about their transitions and about the various roles and environments they have worked in.

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Who are the employers represented on the site?

Nearly half of the participants interviewed for ‘Beyond the PhD’ are currently working in Higher Education as researchers, lecturers and other professionals. The other half work in a variety of public, voluntary and private organisations. Employers represented on the site include the Rail Standards Safety Board, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a small international property company, the National Audit Office, the Royal Society, an academic publishing house, the Church of England, a precious metals company, an African NGO, a boarding school, a primary school and the civil service. Freelance work and self-employment are also represented.

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What do we learn about the PhD transitions?

By listening to people’s descriptions of their places of work and their current role, we learn about the variety of ways people find themselves in unexpected occupations and how they develop and settle into their new identities. By telling their own stories we have the benefit of hearing how they narrate and make sense of their past in relation to their current position.

Chris, for example, talks about how (to the surprise of his friends) he came to find a rewarding career at the National Audit office.

Like lots of humanities researchers, I was very interested in politics and followed the news very closely when I should have been looking more closely at my own research, probably, at times. And in one sense National Audit Office ‘value for money’ work is all about the news; it's about following current trends and looking at policies. So I knew that all things being equal I would find the transition quite easy, and I did, but I can't say that that was entirely because of everything that my PhD had set me up for, some of it was about other aspects of my personality

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What else do we learn from this site?

We learn about the variety of roles within Higher Education and the feelings some postgraduate researchers have when they move away from their academic discipline to work, for example, in professional services within HE. John, a learning technologist, says:

I do miss the subject matter sometimes, it is nice to work on your own little patch of ground, but I've noticed that my pet projects around the university converge with what I used to study. It hasn't been as large a shift as I thought it might be

The realities of pursuing an academic career are also voiced. Russell describes how it took him almost ten years to secure a permanent lecturing contract and how, at times, he was only just able to make ends meet:

I had three different institutions where I'd go on different days and do different courses. One of those institutions, the one I'm at now, also had a continuing education department and I did a bit of night-time teaching there as well […] So I was literally doing these potted bits all over the country, so at one point I was traveling, you know, to different parts of the country to do teaching and it was eating into how much money I earned, but I thought ‘it's got to be worth it just to build up the experience, to meet people’ so I just hung in there

What ‘Beyond the PhD’ offers is a candid insider’s view of the routes PhD researchers take. As one careers adviser recently commented “‘Beyond the PhD’ opens a window into the world beyond the PhD, offering realism and optimism in equal measure”.

To explore the interviews for yourself, go to www.beyondthephd.co.uk . The resource was created by Centre for Career Management Skills, a CETL at the University of Reading.

For more information please contact Catherine Reynolds, Senior Careers Adviser, University of Sussex at C.M.Reynolds@sussex.ac.uk