PhD holders' transitions towards unconventional professional contexts - Symposium "Pursuing careers beyond academia: motivations, challenges and trajectories"

In an “age of supercomplexity” (Barnett, 2000), educational systems continually face new questions and new ideas about the relationship with knowledge. In particular, knowledge actors, roles, and networks are constantly changing. Junior academics (e.g., postdoctoral researchers, junior lecturers, PhDs) are at the crossroad of this scenario, facing new constraints and new possibilities. Younger entry-level academics are, in fact, dealing with a lack of opportunities regarding long-term careers: it is reasonable to agree that the chances of a PhD graduate for eventually obtaining a stable position in public research are hardly higher than a few percent and slimmer when geographical constraints are set (Van der Weijden et al., 2016). This uncertainty inside academia (Fumasoli et al., 2015) is exacerbated by a general difficulty to find satisfying employment in the private sector (Vitae, 2010). Academic experiences can be very difficult for a potential employer to interpret, as much as it is difficult for a researcher to determine which of his/her experiences might be of interest outside his/her former context. For my contribution, I present a qualitative research based on narrative interviews that were addressed to PhD graduates who had experienced a professional transition and faced the challenge of “transferring” competences developed during the academic training into new contexts.