Hanging tough: post-PhD researchers dealing with career uncertainty

ABSTRACT

This study examines the impact of career uncertainty on post-PhD researchers’ experiences. Drawing on an identity-trajectory approach and a qualitative design, we analysed experiences of post-PhDs from the UK and Switzerland. Our findings show that in the course of their work experiences, career uncertainty takes two different forms: intellectual uncertainty and occupational uncertainty. On a daily basis, both forms strongly impact the participants’ work and personal lives and can limit their ability to plan for the future, restrict their developing research expertise and networks and induce tension in trying to reconcile work and personal lives. While often struggling with a blurred institutional status, participants ‘hang tough’ despite their uncertain situation, notably by clinging to the academic researcher identity. Contributing to the previous work on the increasing casualisation of post-PhD positions and the resulting challenges, our study offers new insights into how different aspects of career uncertainty influence post-PhDs’ work and identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-PhD researchers
• career uncertainty
• identity
• career development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Isabelle Skakni http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7704-7737

María del Carmen Calatrava Moreno http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6493-2251

Mariona Corcelles Seuba http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6771-1251

Lynn McAlpine http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5361-1361

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture: [grant number 2016-B3-193871]; Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the project ‘Researchers’ Identity Education in Social Sciences’: [grant number CSO2013-41108].