What really contributes to employability of PhD graduates in uncertain labour markets?

ABSTRACT

The increasing number of PhD holders has led to increased attention to the employability outcomes of this cohort. This study addressed the current gap in knowledge concerning what contributes to PhD holders’ employability via a qualitative approach using in-depth interviews with 23 PhD graduates in Australia. The findings revealed that the extent to which the graduates could use human capital for their post-study career depends on the expertise acquired from their previous degrees, the amount of time that has elapsed since graduation, and the positions they held at their workplaces. Social capital was also found to be a significant factor contributing to graduates’ career success. Finally, employability agency was reported as an important contributor. The findings advance what has been found about agency by providing support for how agency was facilitated and constrained by both structural and personal resources. The implications of these findings are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Employability
• higher education
• doctoral education
• social capital
• agency

Introduction

The national and global policy discourse has been dominated with the knowledge-based economy (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 1996). As a result, building a highly qualified workforce has been identified as a need to meet the demands and challenges of modern and advanced economies (e.g., Harman 2002; Neumann and Tan 2011). Many countries have, therefore, focused on strengthening their doctoral education by increasing the number and quality. There is a common perception that doctoral education is one of the key drivers in knowledge creation, innovation and national competitiveness (Jackson and Michelson 2015). The significant increase in the number of doctoral graduates has made different stakeholders become interested in the occupational outcomes of doctoral graduates (Jones 2013). In Australia, while large-scale surveys conducted by governments and professional organisations such as the Australian Graduate Survey (AGS), the Graduate Destination Survey (GDS) and Postgraduate Research Experience Questionnaire (PREQ) provide general information about how PhD holders obtain their job after a certain time like 6, 12 or 24 months, we know very little about important aspects of PhD holders’ occupational outcomes. Some of the recurring questions in the debate are, for instance, how are the resources provided in the PhD programme useful for PhD holders’ career in and beyond academia? What do PhD recipients have to further cultivate after their graduation to negotiate employability?

This contribution enriches the graduate employability literature of PhD holders by unpacking how PhD graduates developed and utilised their resources to manage their transitions into the labour market. The paper is structured as follows. It will commence with a discussion of employment issues of PhD graduates in Australia, followed by a discussion of the theorical perspectives that underpinned the research. It will finally present how the present study was conducted and what findings were revealed as well as suggestions and implications for graduates, policy makers, and educators. The focus is specifically on those PhD graduates who have completed research-only doctorates, rather than those degrees including elements of formalised coursework which are more typically referred to as professional doctorates.

Employability outcomes of PhD graduates and associated determinants

Doctoral education has been largely influenced by a human capital approach emphasising the need for PhD students to be trained with intellectual knowledge and specialisations so that they can work in either academia or a specific area that is closely connected to their PhD research. However, the significant increase in PhD enrolment has led to many graduates being forced to look for occupational destinations beyond academia. More than 50% of doctoral graduates in the advanced economies find jobs outside academia in industry, government, and the non-profit sector (Borrell-Damian et al. 2010). In Australia, only 25% of all doctoral graduates were employed in academic positions upon completion of their PhDs (Neumann and Tan 2011).

The diversity in occupational pathways of PhD graduates and the increasing competition in the labour markets have attracted the attention of researchers interested in the employability trajectories of PhD holders and what influences them. A range of signifiers has been documented. Many researchers have agreed that a PhD qualification alone does not ensure employment outcomes (Jackson and Michelson 2015). Instead, these outcomes are determined by other factors. For example, supervisors were found to be pivotal in various aspects of PhD graduates’ employment and career motivation (Platow 2012; Jackson and Michelson 2015). The supervisors’ influence was not necessarily found to stem from the quality of supervision but rather from the personal and professional networks they introduced to their PhD students and the career advice they provided. In fact, PhD students often closely follow in the footsteps of their supervisors and mentors (Jones and Warnock 2015). Discipline area and institution type were also important determinants of PhD graduates’ employment outcomes. Jackson and Michelson (2015) found that those graduating from a Group of Eight (GO8) university are almost 30% more likely to attain a full-time job than those graduating from non-GO8 universities, and those graduating with a non-medical and health science-based PhD degree will almost halve their odds of securing full-time employment.

Some studies reported other internal factors as determinants of PhD graduates’ employability, although the research findings sometimes offer contradictory findings. For instance, attendance status was thought to be important to PhD holders’ employment outcomes; however, contesting evidence has been found. Similarly, Platow (2012) reported that part-time PhDs had greater delays in job attainment following thesis submission whereas Jackson and Michelson (2015) found that part-time students found employment early. These authors explained that the success of both part-time and off-campus graduates may be attributed to more opportunities to reflect on and enact initial employment rather than being constrained by what is available, perhaps casual positions in the immediate environment of their awarding institution. The implication that these types of graduates are more effective in seeking employment, more employable, or have more time to dedicate or increased exposure to professional networking is weakened by the high proportion securing employment during their final year of study. Further, residential status has been deemed important with those classed as non-overseas residents at the time of PhD enrolment significantly increasing their chances of full-time employment by almost 50% in comparison with overseas residents (Jackson and Michelson 2015).

Finally, today’s competitive labour markets are putting great pressure on individuals to manage their own careers (Tomlinson and Jackson 2021). Increasing evidence has accumulated supporting the need for graduates to develop and utilise their agency in strategizing their resources (Pham 2021a). For example, Purcell et al. (2013) examined the importance of the strategies that PhD holders used to search for jobs and highlighted the fact that different occupations and sectors required different techniques for job searching; thus, it was important for PhD graduates to determine and utilise appropriate strategies. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that graduates possessing strong beliefs and confidence about their capacities and career prospects were more likely to succeed in securing and sustaining their careers (Pham 2021b).

In sum, the extant literature has provided insights into the short-term employment outcomes of PhD holders and a number of factors that determine these outcomes. Measuring short-term employment outcomes has dominated the employability agenda in higher education for the last few decades mainly because the government uses short-term employment rate as an indicator of teaching quality (Bridgstock 2009). Researchers have however increasingly argued for the need to define employability as sustainable career because the graduate’s career trajectories often change significantly as they progress their career (e.g., Billett 2022; Jackson and Bridgstock 2021; Pham 2020; Pham and Soltani 2021). If only short-term employment outcomes are measured, universities would have insufficient information to support curriculum design. Besides, there would be limited insights about how to support graduates to develop sustainable career which has recently become a serious problem facing many industries of which teaching profession is a clear example (Department of Education 2022). Researchers have, therefore, argued for a broader concept of employability by advocating that employability involves sustainability (Jackson and Bridgstock 2021; Pham 2020). Given little attention has been paid to the medium- and long-term occupational outcomes of PhD graduates (Passaretta, Trivellato, and Triventi 2019), there is a need to explore how PhD holders negotiate medium- and long-term employability, and to examine how PhD holders build and use the resources needed for this journey. This study aims to address these gaps, being guided by the overarching research question of ‘What contributes to the medium-and long-term employability outcomes of PhD graduates in Australia?’

Conceptual frameworks

This study deployed classic and emerging sociological theoretical accounts as the underpinning theoretical frameworks. These accounts stress that employability outcomes result from the development and utilisation of a range of resources. Bourdieu’s cultural theory foregrounds this line of research by claiming that individuals’ positions and careers are determined by four forms of capital: economic, cultural, social, and symbolic (Maclean and Harvey 2008). Economic capital includes tangible materials such as financial assets; cultural capital refers to material objects (excluding economic resources) that offer cultural values; symbolic capital includes recognisable intangible values such as reputation; and social capital refers to social connections that come from one’s social position and status (Bourdieu 1986). Subsequent research extended Bourdieu’s initial work by highlighting the significance of various forms of capital in graduate employability. These include human (e.g., qualifications, professional skills), cultural (e.g., understanding of local labour markets), social (e.g., connections with family members and industry players), identity (e.g., career direction), and psychological (e.g., resilience, capacity to deal with stress) capital for successful employability negotiation (Pham, Tomlinson, and Thompson 2019; Tomlinson 2017).

Most recently, Pham and Jackson (2020) and Pham (2021a) found that merely articulating these forms of capital is insufficient. To obtain optimal outcomes in the employability negotiation process, graduates must develop employability agency. These researchers claimed that employability agency is facilitated and constrained by a range of factors, including important agentic dispositions (e.g., beliefs, confidence) and agentic actions (e.g., active engagement, active selection), ethnic resources, and living experiences. This was because when graduates possessed these resources, they tended to be more successful in their employability negotiations. The combination of these theoretical accounts provides a new perspective on the complexity of interactions between PhD graduates’ employability outcomes and their determinants.

Methodology

Participants

Using snowball sampling, 23 PhD graduates from Australia were selected to participate in this study. The individuals selected as participants met the following criteria: (i) had completed a PhD within five years in Australia; (ii) were living in Australia when the research was conducted; and (iii) had either full-time, part-time, or casual work experience. The participants included 18 domestic graduates and 5 international graduates residing in Australia when the research was conducted. Three of the five international graduates had already obtained citizenship or permanent residency, and the rest were still holding the Temporary Graduate Visa. Before the interviews were conducted, ethics approval was granted by the ethics committee of the author’s university. The participants were recruited and made aware of the nature of the study, consented to participate, and were ensured that any names used in the research publications would be pseudonyms. The sample was diverse in terms of gender, nationality, and discipline. Participants’ demographic details are provided in Table 1.

Table 1. Participants’ demographic details.

Variable	Sub-groups	n
Gender	Male	10
	Female	13
Nationality	Australian	18
	Chinese	1
	Vietnamese	1
	Indonesian	1
	Indian	2
Age groups	30–40 years	15
	41–55 years	8
Field of study	Business (e.g., marketing, finance, accounting, management, sales)	6
	STEM (e.g., IT, engineering, construction, medicine)	8
	Education	3
	Linguistics	3
	Journalism	2
	Art	1
Professions	Academics (full-time and part-time)	7
	Industry staff (full-time and part-time)	11
	Programme coordinators (full-time and part-time)	2
	Unstable jobs (e.g., part-time work in shops and supermarkets)	3

Method

The current literature is dominated by research using surveys that provide snapshots of graduates’ work experience at particular times and tends to only explore the narrow meaning of employability by equating employability with short-term employment outcomes. Therefore, to explore the complexity of graduates’ employability experiences, this study deployed a qualitative research method. This method is particularly useful for capturing the complex relations between associated factors and graduates’ employability (Lipura and Collins 2020; Pham 2021a). Specifically, this research used the biographical interpretive method to conduct in-depth interviews with participants. At the beginning of the interview, the participants were invited to answer an overarching question, which Ross and Moore (2016) called the ‘Single question for inducing narrative’ (SQIN), as a narrative prompt. The SQIN was ‘Can you please tell me the story of your employability journey since you graduated in Australia?’. While the participants were responding, the researcher actively listened to and transcribed key phrases, which were then elaborated upon in more traditional semi-structured interviews using prompts. As informed by the research questions, the semi-structured interviews focused on discovering factors that contributed to their employability. Example interview questions included: ‘What helped you succeed in the first job interview?’, ‘How do you use your research expertise in the work you are doing?’, and ‘How did you manage to overcome the difficulties you experienced when starting your position?’ Since the graduates had different experiences, the interview questions were revised depending on each case. Each individual interview lasted for approximately 30–40 min.

The scroll-back method was also used. The graduates were invited to connect with the researcher on social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) in order to collect a broad range of information about their social and political contexts, such has their resources, interests, and circumstances. The graduates were then directed to speak about the connection between these contexts and their career trajectories as co-analysts in in-depth interviews to provide the context and deeper meanings (Lincoln and Robards 2016). While co-analysing, the researcher used probing questions and directed the graduates to certain parts of their timelines, such as their study and career milestones. Since the graduates used social media as the main tool to connect with their home country, their narratives were surprisingly informative. As advocated by Lincoln and Robards (2016), the scroll-back method allows researchers to obtain longitudinal data without spending a long period of time in real longitudinal research. This dimension enabled the researcher to collect data on international graduates’ long-term employability within a short timeframe.

Data analysis

All interviewees’ utterances were recorded via an audio device and written notes. Both the first researcher and the research assistant participated in coding data and continuously cross-checked codes until the inter-rater agreement was 100%. A deductive approach was applied to analyse the data. The analytical process commenced at a general level starting with the forms of capital such as human, social, and cultural, as framed by the theoretical framework and then focused on more specific issues associated with each kind of capital. Specific sub-dimensions of each capital form (e.g., knowledge, social relations, resilience, cultural fit) that emerged through the respondents’ personal accounts of their early career experiences and outcomes were developed as sub-themes. Accordingly, the data were disentangled into segments (i.e., a word, single sentence, or paragraph) so that annotations and codes could be attached. Any code referring to these capitals was grouped into one or more categories. Then, for each category, any codes that referred to the same phenomenon as a theme were grouped together. Codes that did not fall into these five categories were grouped into new categories to allow for further inductive analysis.

Results

The data analysis revealed a number of signifiers of the graduates’ employability outcomes. The following sections discuss three key themes within the scope of this study. The first was the PhD qualifications and professional skills that most of the participants were interested in discussing. The second was social connections that the majority agreed to be significant. The findings of this research expanded on what has been reported in previous studies by discovering how the graduates built and used significant social connections for their careers. The last was employability agency, which emerged as an important theme from the data analysis but has received insufficient attention in the extant literature.

A PhD qualification and professional skills

The participants agreed that their PhD programme focused on two aspects: research expertise and key professional skills. In their opinion, the demands of the labour markets certainly influenced the extent to which their PhD qualifications could help them secure a job. However, the data analysis revealed a couple of aspects associated with the usefulness of PhD qualifications that have not received enough attention to date in the literature.

First, the responses showed the extent to which the participants could use their research expertise, and this varied depending on the connections between their PhD research and the disciplines of their previous degrees. Those who completed their PhD in the same field as their undergraduate and master’s degrees appeared much more confident with the level of research expertise they had obtained from their PhD programme. For example, an engineer who had completed his master’s degree in Russia and then completed his PhD in the same field in Australia obtained two job offers directly upon the completion of his PhD degree. He then became a team leader at a private engineering company after a couple of years, mainly due to his success in securing large projects that he used his strong expertise to develop. In contrast, those who completed a PhD in an area that was not connected to their previous degrees were not very confident with their specialisation. They all thought that three years of doing the PhD were just enough to build a foundation including research and writing skills and some expertise in the field. A graduate working as a research programme coordinator and a project manager shared that the expertise they had obtained in their PhD programme did not significantly help their careers due to the lack of deep and relevant knowledge. However, they benefited immensely from the professional skills they had acquired during their PhD programmes. The key skills were time management, critical thinking, multitasking skills, and stress management.

Notably, most of the participants expressed the view that the professional skills that they gained and improved during the PhD programme did not necessarily come from their PhD programme but mainly from the ‘special’ period during which they completed the PhD programme. This was the case because most of them pursued a PhD degree in their 30s and 40s when they had significant other commitments such as getting married, having children, buying houses, and finding and handling jobs. Fulfilling these personal commitments while concurrently conducting PhD research forced them to develop a range of professional skills in order to become more self-sufficient, multifunctional, and especially good at time management. Most international graduate respondents agreed that they became considerably more resilient, independent, responsible, persistent, and self-sufficient.

Second, the responses revealed the multifaceted connections between their part-time work, PhD degree, and post-study career. Half of the participants had engaged in some form of work while completing their PhDs. Some worked at several places as part-time workers whereas others worked in casual employment both in and beyond their fields of research. Those who had engaged in work related to their field of research reported that they were able to acquire practical skills in their research and felt more engaged with their research. This happened because some could use the experiences and insights obtained from part-time work to adjust and enhance the PhD project. As a result, their projects became more practical and useful for their post-study careers. In contrast, those participants who had not engaged in any work in their field of research expressed doubt about the relevance and application of their PhD research. A couple of participants shared that they could only apply their PhD expertise after several years of working in the field. This was the case because when they entered the field as junior staff, they had little power and skills to create changes using the expertise obtained from their PhD research. Consequently, most had to follow the traditional ways of doing things set up by their supervisors. However, when they acquired seniority and confidence in the workplace, they knew how to negotiate and find space for initiatives, many of which were supported by what they had learned from their PhD programmes.

Social connections

The data analysis revealed that most participants perceived the connections they had developed with their supervisors as the primary social network during the PhD period. Supervisors supported their career prospects in various ways. Some connected the graduates with potential employers, acted as referees, and shared significant knowledge concerning job openings and how to negotiate with potential employers. Positive relationships with supervisors also enabled them to complete their PhD research tasks successfully and smoothly, resulting in lower levels of stress and anxiety. Supervisor support was more significant for those working in academia. These graduates clearly highlighted that almost all part-time and casual employment opportunities they secured came directly or indirectly from their supervisors’ introductions. This finding resonates with Jackson and Michelson (2015) and Pham, Tomlinson, and Thompson (2019), who acknowledged the importance of social networks, especially networks with professionals, for career opportunities. For graduates based in a particular industry, their employment success was also marked by assistance from key contacts. Some local graduates used their family members, relatives, friends, peers, and colleagues to secure part-time and casual work before landing a full-time job. A few participants acknowledged that they had been offered various professional development opportunities by people they had become acquainted with at events and conferences.

Another theme emerging from the analysis was that the connections that the participants developed and used for their careers did not occur by chance. Instead, all positive relationships were initiated based on several factors. Some respondents stated that they had clear career intentions, so they tried to seize all opportunities to work with supervisors to enrich their experiences and acquire expertise relevant to their research and targeted careers. They were dedicated and willing to listen to and learn from the supervisor by completing assigned tasks, initiating ideas, and being proactive about requesting advice and feedback. These efforts helped them develop and strengthen their professional and personal relationships with their mentors. Moreover, most of the graduates shared that they needed to develop and use a range of professional and personal qualities to develop and nurture meaningful relationships with different stakeholders. For example, one graduate demonstrated his rich teamwork skills by enthusiastically offering to collaborate with different colleagues, so he was continuously offered casual work that enriched his profile. He eventually succeeded in securing a research fellowship due to his rich research experience and strong recommendations from his supervisors.

Although the graduates shared different experiences in building and nurturing meaningful social networks, the common qualities that emerged in almost all responses were trustworthiness, dedication, a sense of responsibility, and approachability. Some also mentioned the significance of mutual interests that enabled them to develop long-term relationships with professional peers. However, such a relationship took a great deal of time and investment and required an exchange of services, meaning that both parties needed to support each other. For instance, a graduate living and working in Australia for almost 20 years shared the following:

I knew them [their life mentors] when I was an MA student, and then they became my PhD supervisors. We then worked on several projects, of which two were managed by them as the main investigators and one by me. We supported each other by covering most of the work of the other if we were the primary investigators. (James)

Employability agency

The final theme that emerged as a significant contributor to graduates’ employability was the role of employability agency. More than half of the graduates showed evidence of agentic features (e.g., strong beliefs, self-determination, persistence, intentional actions, capacities) (Bandura 2001). These characteristics enabled them to pursue and eventually achieve the desired employability outcomes. Among the participants, three academics emerged as the best examples representing this group. They had strong beliefs in their research and intellectual capacities and demonstrated strong persistence in pursuing their careers in academia. Therefore, they strategically built teaching and research records very early on and persistently refused part-time work that did not support their profiles as academics (e.g., working at a supermarket or cooking at a restaurant). Here, their agency is demonstrated in their confidence in their capacity to eventually achieve their objectives (Bandura 2001).

Furthermore, several stated that they engaged with agentic actions (e.g., active engagement, selection, initiative, and reflection), which helped them strategize their resources. The capacity to be selective arose from recognising their desire to be engaged in the work, which in turn impacted their decisions regarding how much they should engage with constraints and affordances associated with their employability. Some had great passion, and thus desperately looked for solutions to overcome barriers and make improvements. They perceived that their personal and professional enhancements were not only for the sake of obtaining employment but also for their holistic personal development, as shared by one of them below.

When you complete a PhD, you will have a voice in the field. I have therefore done many things related to my research, such as volunteering in industries and writing publications. Many things I did went beyond the expectations of my supervisors and managers. If you want to become an expert, you need to see your supervisor or manager as your colleagues but not as someone who tells you to do things. (Son)

In contrast, others only fulfilled their commitments at a minimal level. Therefore, they actively decided what is ‘judged worth of participation’ (Billett 2004, 320).

I do not define a person with a successful career as someone who is successful in life. Successful individuals have different choices at different stages of their lives. At some stage, you prioritize career but at others, you need to prioritize your children and other commitments. Success means that you feel happy and enjoy what you do. (Mary)

Another important theme emerging from the analysis was the significant role of real-life experiences and self-reflection in enabling the participants to capitalise on their resources. Real-life experiences allowed the graduates to reflect on how what they had learned in universities differed from reality and how they had to adjust. Those who worked during their PhD experienced fewer struggles when transitioning to the workforce. Based on this work experience, they knew how to be selective when applying their expertise and use professional skills to deal with the expectations of industries and employers. In contrast, the graduates who could not improve their communication competencies were often those who lacked work experience. Therefore, the latter often faced a sense of being stuck because they found it confusing and difficult to decode cultural values embedded in the labour market. For instance, one graduate expressed their depression when experiencing how ‘professionalism’ was applied very personally in the workplace in a way that was entirely different from that learned at university. In fact, universities and the labour market are two different discourses. Without insider experience, graduates often find it hard to transfer the knowledge and skills obtained in universities to the realities of the market (Pham 2021b).

Among the five international graduates, two obtained employment and progressed their careers based on their ethnic capital. Specifically, one was rejected several times when applying for jobs at universities and colleges. She then decided to become an English teacher at an English centre where she could assist a large number of new Chinese students because she was familiar with both English and Chinese. Another graduate succeeded in landing a job at a multinational enterprise that collaborated with clients in his/her home country. In these cases, ethnic capital is international graduates’ unique or unofficial power (Collin et al. 2011), which these graduates were able to tap into.

Discussion

This research revealed three main issues that require attention in comparison with the extant literature. First, as discussed in the first part of this article, the role of human capital has been questioned by many researchers (e.g., Jackson and Bridgstock 2021; Pham 2021b). However, this study revealed that the value and significance of human capital in PhD graduates’ employability trajectories were largely influenced by the connections between their PhD research and previous degrees. The responses revealed that the length of the PhD programme was insufficient for graduates to build rich knowledge and expertise in the field. Sharing a similar view on the connection between the length of a PhD programme and PhD holders’ employment outcomes, Jackson and Michelson (2015) found that part-time PhDs had higher employment outcomes than their full-time counterparts because they had more time to seek and engage in professional networking and reflect on the lessons learned from earlier employment. In addition, this study reported that participants’ position, authority, and understanding of workplace culture also determined the extent to which the participants could apply their research expertise. This finding aligns with Bourdieu’s (1986) claim that the application of human capital is determined by other forms of capital, e.g., social, cultural, and symbolic. Individuals often struggle to mobilise their expertise and content knowledge in the absence of other forms of capital.

Second, graduates who succeeded in obtaining employment had not only expanded but also leveraged their social networks. Their narratives resonated with Popadiuk and Arthur (2014) and Pham, Tomlinson, and Thompson (2019), who acknowledged the importance of students developing relationships with supervisors and mentors for career opportunities. While many studies in the current literature have verified the significance of social networks on careers, this research revealed novel findings about the mechanism of social networks. The networking experiences shared by the interviewed graduates revealed that social capital exists at different layers. Most graduates had succeeded in building informal social networks mainly used for social and entertainment purposes, such as having coffee and ‘hanging out’. Both local and international graduates tended to develop these social ties between people from the same or similar ethnic backgrounds. However, a few graduates had developed deeper connections that were used for professional purposes. These connections were deeper than those at the first layer because they entailed a relatively longer time to develop (Pham 2020). Moreover, they were often built on mutual interests and could only be nurtured when their counterparts had a good understanding of their personal circumstances. Many of these relationships were defined as contacts with professional peers who often assisted the graduates in building resources for their target careers or accessing future employment opportunities. Such resources are found in what Bridgstock (2017, 344) calls ‘professional networks’. The analysis illustrated that developing relationships at this layer was much harder for international students because they did not have contextual backgrounds (i.e., family, education, friendships) to support the development of these connections. Finally, only a couple of the graduates succeeded in building very meaningful relationships, which they called ‘life mentors’ These relationships take a long time to build and require mutual trust between partners. The partners were not mentors and mentees but colleagues who supported each other reciprocally.

The final significant contribution of this research was the discovery of how the graduates exercised agency in negotiating employability. As guided by Pham’s (2021a) Employability Agency Framework, the participants’ agency was supported and constrained by a range of factors, including motivation and interests, work experience, living experience, specialisations, the conditions of the labour market, and their beliefs, confidence, and level of engagement. These findings advance the existing notions of agency in the current literature because most researchers often refer to agency as the capacity to develop strategies to use various forms of capital effectively and strategically, depending on one’s ethnic background, areas of expertise, career plans, contexts, and personal qualities (Pham and Jackson 2020). This tendency has been criticised because it overemphasises human agency (Archer 2000). The findings in this research evidenced that although the participants possessed a range of resources, they were, to some extent, constrained by labour market conditions and employers’ expectations. This was clearly shown in the responses of those who were holding unstable jobs. These graduates had a PhD but continuously failed to secure a permanent position due to employers’ high expectations about their research record, work experience, and professional skills. Under these structural constraints, some could exercise employability agency by acquiring or acting on particular forms of strategic knowledge or following the rules of the game. For instance, being aware that small and private companies often used personal connections as an unofficial recruitment strategy, several succeeded in using their hardworking and dedication habitus to develop personal connections with ‘professional peers’ who then introduced them to potential employers.

In addition, the analysis of the graduates’ biographical data revealed that many graduates actively engaged in constructing their own lives and careers. These graduates had employability trajectories with a range of struggles. However, they proactively cultivated their personal development by continuously reflecting on their past experiences, envisioning short and long futures, and working on possibilities for present actions. These enduring journeys resonate with a line of research that emphasises the need to examine agency continuously throughout one’s life course rather than from a limited momentary and cross-sectional viewpoint (Biesta, Priestley, and Robinson 2015; Eteläpelto et al. 2013). Particularly, Biesta and Tedder (2007) claimed that agency cannot be fully understood without considering the historical continuum of an individual’s life course. Similarly, Biesta, Priestley, and Robinson (2015, 626) argued for the need to consider individuals’ active engagement in the ‘interplay’ with ‘influences from the past and orientations towards the future’. Here, the life course notions of agency also allowed for the examination of variations in employability agency wherein the graduates’ employability agency was determined by the interplay between structural conditions and subjectivities, that changed and evolved. The graduates used and showed multifaceted aspects of agency differently through their employability trajectories. Some prioritised employment at some point, and thus had strong agentic features and took various agentic actions to achieve this goal. However, they also neglected their career at some points due to other commitments, thus failing to engage in key activities associated with their career development.

This research has important implications for policies as well as teaching and learning programmes. Doctoral education has been criticised for insufficiently equipping PhD students with professional skills (Manathunga et al. 2009). In Australia, the importance of a range of non-technical skills, such as communication, planning and project management, problem-solving, and analytical skills, in the employment outcomes of PhD graduates has been highlighted in several research studies (Platow 2012; Manathunga et al. 2009). To address this issue, doctoral education programmes have tried to embed skills. However, as evidenced by this study, embedding skills is insufficient to enhance PhD graduates’ employability because the initiative only aims to enrich human capital, which is merely one of the many other elements PhD students need to build and use for employability negotiation. Importantly, this study highlights that PhD students need to guide and build various resources beyond human capital as early as possible.

Moreover, the findings question the validity of graduate employability measurements. Confining markers of successful transitions to graduates attaining employment six months or even 18 months after graduation does not adequately capture their employment success (Clarke 2018). It further risks the continued conflation of employability with employment and overly emphasises short-term outcomes over longer-term career formation processes. It is important for institutions to develop and policymakers to endorse more nuanced and broader ways of capturing graduates’ employment outcomes over time. The process of developing meaningful and sustainable careers is complex and sometimes nonlinear. A number of graduates would potentially be deemed to have not succeeded in the graduate labour market if the dominant 6–18 month measurement approach favoured by many national governments was applied. Clearly, one of the first steps forward is to extend the measurement period to at least three years after graduation and then further extend this to at least five or six years. This will provide a more accurate picture of employment outcomes over time and how commensurate a graduate’s employment position is with their level of qualification.

Sampling is a potential limitation because the study only recruited the graduates graduating from Australia. However, the graduates were from different disciplines and backgrounds, so the findings provided useful insights about employability trajectories of different groups of PhD graduates. Future research should extend this research by exploring employability trajectories of PhD graduates in different countries so that richer insights can be obtained. These insights will then become valuable sources informing universities to develop effective PhD programmes that can support employability of PhD graduates with different career pathways.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).