Product or Process? A pilot study into the perceptions of research training by PhD students in GEES subjects at three universities

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a small pedagogic research project funded by the GEES Subject Centre Small-Scale Projects, conducted with GEES PhD students across 3 HEIs. The research investigated student rationales for undertaking their research degrees, and their associated perceptions of the value of their institution’s research training programmes. Results are presented from students in response to three key questions asked on these themes during Nominal Group Technique (NGT) focus groups. The paper provides background information on current debates with respect to the UK doctorate and researcher development more generally. It concludes with some recommendations for university doctoral training providers and finally presents some much larger questions which could spark a national and interesting debate about whether a doctorate in the GEES disciplines is in fact fit-for-purpose.

Introduction

“PhD students want to, and must, be recognised as a specific, different type of student, who is a professional being trained. The core component of doctoral training is the advancement of knowledge through original research… but we urge universities to ensure that their doctoral programmes promote interdisciplinary skills training and development.” (UKGRAD, 2006).

“In tomorrow’s global economy, business investment and job opportunities will be driven by costs and talent. We must raise our game with skills and training.” (Richard Lambert, CBI Director-General, 2008)

“A generation ago, a British Prime Minister had to worry about the global arms race. Today a British Prime Minister has to worry about the global skills race…” (Gordon Brown PM, 2008)

These three quotes above reveal a government and business agenda articulating a skills revolution which is increasingly dominating many political debates and associated policies and funding models. According to those at the helm, the UK has a major skills shortage in many employment sectors. For example, a recent report by The Royal Society (Jan, 2008) concludes that the UK’s position as a leader in higher education could be jeopardised by a failure to meet the needs of both the local and the global economy, where skills and innovation are increasingly essential to remain competitive.

The skills debate is nowhere more pertinent than in the current doctoral training process in the UK where a major transition is underway in the development of ‘generic’ skills amongst postgraduate research students (PGRs) and early-career researchers (often referred to as post-docs and/or contract research staff — CRS). Section 1 of the revised (2007) QAA Code of Practice, the Joint Skills Statement articulated by Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the recommendations arising from the ‘Roberts Review (2002) SET for Success’ report have embedded an already growing emphasis on skills and training, submission and qualification rates, quality of supervision and possible changes in the examination of doctoral research.

The Research Councils (RCUK) are committed to enhancing the quality and output of the UK research base through training the next generation of world-class researchers. They are the largest funder of research training, supporting over 30,000 researchers at any one time (including 15,500 doctoral students, 10,000 research staff in universities, 4,000 research staff in research institutes and 2,000 research fellows) (RCUK, 2008). The importance of research training, as much as the high demands for world-class research outputs, is now seen as an integral part of all (high-profile governmental) RCUK research grants, contracts and studentship / staff awards and associated policies. As Park (2007, p.8) notes “for the nation, the obvious benefits of an active community of scholars engaged in doctoral level research include enhanced creativity and innovation, and the development of a skilled workforce and of intellectual capital and knowledge transfer, which drive the knowledge economy and are engines of the growth of cultural capital.”

The research councils and other major funders of research in the UK are now just as much interested in the “process” of doing research (i.e. the professional and transferable skills acquired and required to become a future independent successful researcher), as they are in the “products” of the research process (the thesis, the papers and associated knowledge transfer and application).

In recognition of the need to provide leadership and management of this ambitious and internationally-leading researcher development agenda, RCUK’s first Research Careers and Diversity Strategy was launched in January 2007, and currently has 3 key aims: (1) to ensure that the best potential researchers are attracted into research careers in universities and research institutes, (2) to help universities to improve the quality of their research training and improve the employability of early stage researchers, both Post Graduate Research (PGRs) and research staff, and (3) to improve retention of the best researchers by promoting better professional development and management of early-career research staff in all research organisations (RCUK, 2008).

CRAC, the UK Career Development Organisation, in partnership with UKGRAD and UKHERD (the Higher Education Researcher Development group) are the overarching national bodies (funded by RCUK) for PGR and contract research staff (CRS) training respectively. A new programme — launched in January 2008 and yet to be named — will continue to build on the momentum gained during the highly successful UKGRAD contract in supporting postgraduate researchers, while widening the scope of their remit to include research staff. In other words, the UK, through RCUK, is seeing an unprecedented investment in the future of our researchers, both of our research students and research staff.

In short, January 2008 marked a major turning point in researcher development and associated skills training in the UK, with the research councils widening their researcher development brief, as detailed above, but also committing to maintain their funding for skills training throughout the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review (2007) for the period 2008/9 to 2010/11 at a rate of £20 million per annum. Enhancing the national, regional and local research infrastructure through investing in researcher development is clearly of national and international significance, and wider economic benefit.

In response to this agenda, most if not all HEIs (and certainly those involved in the current study) now have more or less formal research training programmes (RTPs) for their PGR students and, to a lesser extent, contract-research staff. These training programmes are often mapped around core development themes articulated in a ‘Joint Skills Statement’ (QAA, 2007, Appendix 4) (and provided in full in Appendix 1 in this paper for information). This statement gives a common view of the skills and experience of a typical research student, thereby providing universities with a clear and consistent message aimed at helping them to ensure that all research training is of the highest standard, across all disciplines. It has been invaluable in putting together research training programmes. The statement is categorised into several key skill areas, all expected of a competent researcher, namely: research skills and techniques, research management, communication, networking, team working and career management.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Researcher Development Investment Nationally

With the funding of the ‘Roberts’ agenda, and associated RCUK policy developments has come an increasing need to be able to evaluate and demonstrate the impact of this increased emphasis and new funding stream on PhD students’ skills and careers, and on research outputs and the UK knowledge base more widely. The importance of evaluating researcher skills is being undertaken at a national level through ‘The Rugby Team’, a sector-led working group who aim to “propose a meaningful and workable way of evaluating the effectiveness of skills development in early career researchers” (UKGRAD, 2008). Amongst other things, the Rugby Team are charged with identifying a set of short term Key Performance Indicators to measure the effectiveness of the Roberts recommendations, and to benchmark current practice with which to measure progress against. Such measures are still in their infancy, as longer-term measures naturally require longer time-periods. Further information on this can be found at: www.grad.ac.uk/rugbyteam.

While it is common practice to have immediate post-course evaluations after each institution researcher development course, few HEIs currently evaluate the effectiveness of their training opportunities in a systematic and student-focused way using established pedagogic research methods. In recognition of this, increasingly, HEIs are looking at ways to gather PGR feedback that is representative, timely and which can inform future strategy and policy of institutional generic skills programmes.

Rationale for this GEES study

Given that most institutional programmes have now witnessed four years of ‘Roberts’ funding, this small-scale pilot study attempted to evaluate GEES student perceptions of their research degrees and associated training. GEES research staff were not the focus of this study.

The 3 research questions asked were:

Question 1: What do you consider to be the main reasons for embarking on your research degree?

Question 2: In what ways, if any, has your research degree experience been helped by personal and professional development opportunities provided by your university?

Question 3: How might future personal and professional development opportunities at your university assist you in completing your research degree and in preparing you for the world of work?

Question 1 was felt important to ask, in order to ascertain how students considered their research degrees with respect to, for example, pure knowledge creation and/or future employability. For example, is skill acquisition as important to our research students, as it is to those who are often funding their research?

Question 2 was concerned with ascertaining how any institutional development programmes had enhanced their research degree experience. For example, are our programmes and development opportunities fit-for-purpose and do they add value to the student research experience as we intend?

Question 3 was added as an aspirational and practical question, in order to help inform future training provision in HEIs. For example, what might we do differently, and how?

The Student Sample

In this study, Nominal Group Technique was applied to PhD students, from 3 separate UK university groups (Table 1).

Each HEI within this study has established training programmes for PhD students which are mapped on the RCUK Joint Skills Statement and all 24 students who participated in this study, had engaged in these respective programmes in one way or another. All students were registered for a full-time PhD and at least 6 months into their programmes. Given the relatively small number of participants, no individual institutional analysis was conducted due to issues around representativeness and exposing those institutions who participated. An agreement about personal and institutional anonymity was established at the outset of the project.

Table 1 Summary Group Data

University	Group Size	No. of responses generated to…
		Q1	Q2	Q3
1	12	19	13	7
2	4	14	8	21
3	8	17	13	11
Totals	24	50	34	39

Pedagogic Research Method

An established social sciences research method was employed in the current study known as Nominal Group Technique (NGT). NGT is a focus group research method which can be used in educational environments to obtain information from a group on a specific topic, or set of questions. Focus groups are useful as they allow information to be yielded from a group within a non-threatening environment and NGT’s main advantage is that it focuses on participant (e.g. student) rather than evaluator (e.g. staff) interests. It is also advantageous in that it captures all participant views, not just those who are the most forthcoming or vociferous. In that respect, NGT is considered to elicit a more representative set of responses to a series of questions posed by the facilitator and it encourages a more abundant yield of themes than could otherwise be achieved using the more usual and open discussions in which tangential debates too often occur. A useful introductory guide to NGT can be found in Gaskin (2003) who includes a short GEES case study. A fuller practical guide can be found in Breen (2006). More detailed uses of NGT in GEES subject-based pedagogic research, with specific reference to fieldwork, can also be found in Gaskin and Hall (2002), Fuller et al. (2003) and Scott et al. (2006).

Rationalisation of student responses to each question took place with each and every response being assigned to specific ‘data-derived’ categories for each question posed, as can be seen in Tables 2 to 4 below.

Table 2 Categories assigned for Question 1 (What do you consider to be the main reasons for embarking on your research degree?) with examples of student responses assigned to those categories

Data-Derived Category	Example student response assigned to this category
1. Professional and Personal (skills focussed)	“to develop specialist skills in research methods”
2. Personal and Professional (knowledge-focussed)	“expand knowledge base in general”
3. Personal (e.g. satisfaction, motivation)	“self-affirmation”
4. Employability (e.g. career / earning potential)	“forwarding your career”
5. Other (e.g. lifestyle, philanthropy, social)	“continuing student lifestyle and making friends”

Table 3 Categories assigned for Question 2, (In what ways, if any, has your research degree experience been helped by personal and professional development opportunities by your university?) with examples of student responses assigned to those categories

Data-Derived Category	Example student response assigned to this category
Confidence / Motivation	“more confidence”
Networking / Peer support & learning	“comradeship”
Other specific skills	“better presentation skills”

Table 4 Categories assigned for Question 3, (How might future personal and professional development opportunities at your university assist you in completing your research degree and prepare for the world of work?) with examples of student responses assigned to those categories

Data-Derived Category	Example student response assigned to this category
General career management	“more general career development opportunities”
Specific career management	“more info on what specific options are available to PhDs”
Other specific skills	“ability to self-evaluate skills more effectively”

Once all student responses had been elicited to a given question (each student was able to contribute as many times as they like and were encouraged to “piggy-back” on the ideas of others), and after congruent items had been deleted after group agreement (i.e. very similar, if not the same, responses to a given question), participants were then given the individual opportunity to vote on their top responses which they personally considered to be ‘most important’ for each question. To do this, each student was given 5 voting cards — a 1, a 2, a 3, a 4 and a 5. The students were allowed to use each voting card only once per question. As there were 3 questions, students therefore voted 3 times. Although students were not forced to vote — if they found only 3 of the responses most important for example — in the event, everyone used all of their voting cards. This voting process enables ranking to take place and the identification of general trends in the results.

Data Standardisation

To adjust the raw data in order to reflect the fact that there was some variation in the group sizes between the 3 universities (ranging from between 4 people and 12 people), the votes for each NGT response were converted to percentages to standardise the results. The number of votes that a response received expressed as a proportion of the total vote available in answer to a question is expressed as the % total available vote (TAV). The TAV is obtained by adding all votes per student (5, 4, 3, 2, 1) in the group together. For example, where the number of students in a group was 12, the TAV is 180 (12 students, 15 votes per student). The %TAV is thus the vote that a response achieved expressed as the total available to that response and, because each student was only permitted to use one voting card against a specific response (5 or 4 or 3 or 2 or 1), the maximum possible %TAV for a single item is 33% (5/15). In summating the results into categories and across universities, to weight against the disproportionate impact that the smaller groups would have using this method alone, the %TAV of each response was multiplied by the proportion of the total number of participants between the 3 universities it represents. For example, where the group size was 4, as a proportion of 24 (the total number of students in the study) the TAV percentages are weighted by 0.125. Thus, each group has equal weighting in the summated results. The weighted percentage TAVs (%WTAV) are summarised in Figure 1.

In short, the higher the %WTAV (see Figures 1 to 3 below), the stronger the overall group’s commitment (across all 3 universities) to that (category of) response. This method enables the extraction of an overall picture in respect of student responses to each of the three NGT questions posed. It therefore allows some general conclusions to be drawn, within natural limits given the scope of this study and the limited sample size.

Results and Discussion

In this section all verbatim student quotes are italicised.

Question 1

A graphical representation of the responses generated in response to Question 1 can be found in Figure 1 below.

With respect to Question 1, what is most striking is the importance of employability and careers (%WTAV=40) in students’ thinking about the main purposes of a research degree. This is perhaps not surprising in that many PhD students currently pay considerable sums of money to undertake a PhD and invest years of their life (up to 7 years parttime). Therefore, one would expect that ensuring a good return on that investment was important to them in terms of future earning potential and career opportunities. Typical student responses to this question included “better understanding academia”, “future employment enhancement” and “access to higher salaries”. It would, of course, be interesting to dig deeper here and explore these issues further.

Perhaps our students in this study would be heartened by a recent research project (UKGRAD, 2004) which found that “PhD graduates are more geographically mobile, and more fully employed than less highly qualified graduates. Not only is their unemployment rate at just 3.2% less than half that of first degree graduates, but only 1% are in ‘stop gap’ jobs which bear no relation to the level of their qualifications”. The study’s data also challenges the view that a PhD leads only to a career in academia or research. In fact less than half of this cohort are employed in the education sector, fairly equally divided between teaching and postdoctoral research and significant numbers are found in all sectors of the economy. Despite this there still remains a paucity of data on whether PhDs command a significantly higher salary premium, and “have access to higher salaries” or ”speedier career progression”. Some employees in a study on employers’ perceptions of recruiting research staff and students (EMPRESS, 2005) stated (perhaps understandably) a preference for competence rather than academic title. Further studies around the value-added of PhDs in terms of career options, recruitment practices, salary premiums and fast-track promotion would certainly be welcomed at a national aggregate subject level, and also at a GEES level.

Figure 1 Votes for each category across all 3 universities expressed as a percentage of the weighted total available number of votes (%WTAV) for Question 1 (What do you consider to be the main reasons for embarking on your research degree?)

The second most important category in this study in terms of students’ thinking about the purposes of a research degree is personal/professional (skills-focussed), which came above all of the other categories, including the personal/professional (knowledge-focussed) category. This could perhaps be because the institutions at which all these students are enrolled for their research degrees have well established training programmes and engagement by students in the training is overall very encouraging, although specific data on this cannot be published in this study.

Therefore, students may be more aware of the “skills-agenda” within their respective institutions and therefore talking about skills acquisition through the PhD (e.g. “to enhance networking skills” and “to demonstrate core skills”) comes more naturally. It is fair to say that compared to just 4 years ago, there has been a step-change in skills provision at all of these HEIs, as a result of the RCUK training agenda, and therefore most, if not all, research students will be inducted into the generic training provision (in the form of workshops, seminars etc) which are offered by the institutions. It could, of course, be that the generic training agenda has had little influence and that students already understood and were able to articulate the skills-acquisition within a research degree. However, from experience in my own institution, the skills-agenda at research degree level has resulted in quite a cultural shift over the last 4 years and it is now seen as much more of an integral and legitimate part of research degree training.

Acquiring knowledge (e.g. “contributing to a larger body of research” and “establishing a personal and strong knowledge foundation”) is of importance to some in a research degree in this study, but perhaps skills are seen as more important, as one recognises through the process of discovery and research how much knowledge is contested, debated and can quickly become out of date, especially within the confines of a PhD project.

Finally, it is interesting to note that “personal” and “other” reasons for doing a PhD, including “self-discovery”, “personal development”, “personal satisfaction and fulfilment”,” testing of own abilities” together with philanthropic/social reasons such as “making a difference in the world” and “making friends” are important to some, but that these reasons alone are perhaps not enough in terms of justifying why one would embark on such an intensive postgraduate programme. This may, therefore, explain the relatively lower %WTAV scores for these categories.

Overall, from the students represented in this study, the idealist or even romantic view of the scholar in terms of pursuing research for the sake of discovery alone is perhaps much less important than the core (and even level-headed) business of skills acquisition and its link with future employability and career aspirations. Taken together, these 3 categories account for nearly two-thirds of the student vote with respect to this question about the reasons for pursuing a research degree (% WTAV totals = 65 in Figure 1).

Question 2

A graphical representation of the responses generated in response to Question 2 can be found in Figure 2 below.

Given that skills, employability / careers seems to collectively account for the majority of the rationale for the purposes of a research degree, it is interesting to then identify how any institutional programmes may have assisted in this process.

According to the students in this study, the greatest asset of these training programmes is in terms of confidence and motivation (%WTAV=53), (e.g. “carrying on whatever happens” and “motivation and renewed enthusiasm”) followed by the networking opportunities (e.g. “celebrating small victories with others” and “networking with those who have different or more experience than you”) such events and workshops present, and the peer support (e.g. “comradeship”) that is associated with this.

Interestingly, however, the “other specific skills” category does not rank as highly (%WTAV=17%), suggesting that perhaps the social and professional networks are perceived to be more important than the actual skills acquired (which included responses such as “better information retrieval skills”, “ improved interpersonal skills” and “better time management and project management”). This is, in fact, not so surprising, and is supported by feedback from evaluation forms handed in at the end of workshops etc, which often state the main benefit of the session was “meeting others” and “sharing ideas / concerns with people from beyond my subject area”. In other words, the “hidden” outcomes, as opposed to the “intended or learning outcomes” (which all universities in this study articulate prior to participants attending), are perhaps more powerful in terms of enhancing the learning experience, than the actual intended focus of the session on any particular skill type (e.g. project management, managing the supervisor, communicating a conference paper). However, this assertion would clearly need further testing; while every student who participated in this study had engaged in generic researcher training provided by their university, no data was collected on exactly which sessions had been attended.

Figure 2 Votes for each category across all 3 universities expressed as a percentage of the weighted total available number of votes (%WTAV) for Question 2 (In what ways, if any, has your research degree experience been helped by personal and professional development opportunities provided by your university?)

Given that the training programmes in this study are intended to make our early career researchers more competent researchers for the future, perhaps the real benefit of these programmes is the networking and peer learning and support, a finding which may not be entirely palatable to those who fund such programmes.

Indeed, this assertion is supported by research evidence by Ahern and Manathunga (2005) who reported that reasons for non-completion in PhD programmes often included feelings of lack of academic and social integration into the department on the part of the student, leading to negative feelings and isolation finally leading to non-completion or delay. Given that “many research students go through periods where their research seems to stall, their motivation drops, and they seem unable to make any progress” (ibid, p. 237) and that blocks in research can occur in the cognitive (thinking) and affective (feeling/social) domains (and that these are often overlapping), the peer support and networking of bespoke PhD training programmes should perhaps be regarded as highly desirable hidden outcomes of these programmes in what can be regarded, at some points in the PhD journey, as quite an isolating Higher Education experience. Perhaps through discussion with others, demonstrating a clearer sense of a researcher community, utilising distinct postgraduate training space, a feeling of enthusiasm and comradeship are engendered.

Question 3

A graphical representation of the responses generated in response to Question 3 can be found in Figure 3 below.

In terms of student opinions on how their own universities might provide better / enhanced personal and professional development opportunities, career management in some form or another is significant (%WTAV=81). Moreover, the need for specific career management advice, training, support and guidance strikes a chord (%WTAV=57). Student responses here were typified by comments such as “how to specifically contextualise my PhD for future employers”, “(more) focussed career development on specific career sectors and for specific subjects” and “more relevant subject-focused training”. This is interesting because from Question 1, it is apparent from those interviewed in this study that research students are seeing the PhD as a means to an end; in other words as a period of training to become a professional researcher and to utilise these skills (to their advantage) in their future employment. Yet, students in this study have identified career management and guidance to be the most noticeable area for improvement.

Figure 3 Votes for each category across all 3 universities expressed as a percentage of the weighted total available number of votes (%WTAV) for Question 3 (How might future personal and professional development opportunities at your university assist you in completing your research degree and in preparing you for the world of work?)

This mis-match is perhaps not surprising, since students who embark on a PhD, are, by their very nature, becoming specialists in sharply focussed academic fields. Naturally, one would expect specialist careers advice to be a legitimate and predictable demand to meet at an institutional level during PhD programmes. One might ask, however, how a careers service would be able to respond to such specific subject-based requests? Many careers services are often geared towards undergraduate education and can be quite generic in depth and breadth. This is perhaps due to the sheer number of students with whom careers services are expected to engage and the small proportion of PhDs as a % of the overall student population in most universities.

The next most important category rated was about general careers advice, and responses such as “more general career advice”, “general CV and interview advice” and “general advice on job markets” were also common, suggesting that some students may just want some basic training before they start to make more specialist career decisions. Given that less than half of the national PhD cohort stays in the education sector, in HE or otherwise, and that they are fairly equally divided between teaching and postdoctoral research (and that there is no evidence to suggest that GEES students are different), significant numbers of PhDs are found in all sectors of the economy (UKGRAD, 2004). Thus, generic, more transferable advice is perhaps also important for the cohort researched in the current study, although anecdotes from the focus groups suggest that many of them intended to stay in research and HE, which perhaps explains why specific advice has more resonance for them.

In terms of other specific skills, there was some demand for “more training on communication skills” and “more teamwork training”. Given that all of the GEES students in these studies were not part of large research groups and were largely working with one or perhaps two supervisors alone (even during fieldwork which is often associated with teamwork), teamwork and communication were perhaps recognised as areas for further work, despite all HEIs in this study offering opportunities to enhance these skills. By way of comparison, in the ‘hard’ science subjects (i.e. Physics, Chemistry, Biosciences and Engineering), teamwork and communication are perhaps more endemic due to the large research infrastructures that are naturally more associated with such subjects in the UK and internationally, where teamwork and communication are more endemic. An alternative explanation, of course, is that the students in this study were dissatisfied with the skills training around these areas within their respective universities.

Conclusions

From this small and limited pilot study, six general conclusions can be drawn with respect to students’ perceptions of their research degrees and respective institutional research training programmes:

1. GEES students in this study see the PhD as a means to an end. In other words, the “process” (the period of training), is intended to assist in their future employability (one might argue the “product” or outcome of their investment).

2. The second most voted category in terms of rationale for undertaking a PhD was skills acquisition, which one might argue is inextricably linked to employability.

3. At a macro-scale, there is nothing to suggest in this study that research training is perceived as a negative external imposition which is ‘bolted-on’ and a distraction from the core business of doing research in one’s discipline. The GEES students in this study were very forthcoming in their response to Question 2, and identified many ways in which research training was valuable and enhanced their learning experience — from academic reasons (e.g. skills acquisition) to non-academic reasons (e.g. enhanced motivation).

4. There would appear to be plenty of “hidden” outcomes of the training programmes in terms of enhancing confidence and motivation and bringing people together, sharing ideas and concerns and, engendering a peer-assisted community of practice. Such outcomes may be regarded as lacking academic focus and inherently difficult to measure by managers of programmes, but nevertheless the students clearly value these social opportunities.

5. These hidden outcomes, according to the students in this study, are more important than the actual skills and knowledge-focus of the sessions in which they have engaged. This is not saying that any skills acquired are unimportant, rather that fostering a network of like-minded scholars has real resonance for the participants. In the PhD research process, which one might argue can lead to feelings of isolation and over-independence, this is perhaps not surprising.

6. Despite skills acquisition and employability being the main reasons for embarking on a research degree, students feel that the career management training at the HEIs could be improved, in order to better prepare them for the world of work. This advice is needed mainly at a specialist level, but also at a generic level. There would appear to be a mis-match in terms of why students embark on a research degree and what HEIs involved in this study actually deliver in terms of supporting students’ needs. In short, more work is needed in helping students fulfil the requirements of Section F of the Joint Skills Statement (see Appendix 1).

Constraints of this Study

This research is not without its limitations. Firstly, only 3 institutions are represented. Furthermore, the data are derived from a limited number of students within the departments represented. The representativeness of these results could, therefore, be open to question. Furthermore, the modest numbers of students who engaged in this research did not permit (for reasons of data integrity and validity) a more detailed interrogation of results, such as disaggregating between HEIs. In addition, a natural but minimal level of subjective judgment was required on the part of the facilitator in the category assignment process, but the vast majority of student responses were in fact clearly articulated, obvious in meaning and any ambiguity was resolved in the event by student verification on the spot. This assignment method to ‘best-fit, data-derived’ categories was used simply to impose order on what could otherwise be a chaotic data set to analyse. As detailed above, however, the student responses did in fact represent a high level of group consensus on the issues involved, across the 123 responses elicited. Given that the same facilitator ran all the focus groups, any inter-facilitator bias was also eliminated. In recognition of the above though, a larger study would prove most interesting, especially within the GEES disciplines.

Possible Recommendations

These data suggest that the affective and academic responses of students to ‘generic/transferable’ research degree training may have important implications for future programme design. Firstly, perhaps more time and experiential learning activities could be built into training programmes to maximise peer support and learning, and the motivational benefits that this clearly brings. How one would market these “hidden outcomes” (which may sound rather nebulous to supervisors, and even students who have not engaged in generic training) may prove to be the challenge here.

Secondly, perhaps more institutional ‘Roberts’ funds can be invested into the career management areas of the Joint Skills Statement, to bridge the gap between the students’ justification for doing a PhD (and their associated needs in terms of skills acquisition and employability), and what institutional training programmes actually deliver in terms of high quality specialist and generic career management provision, preparing our research students for academia or beyond. Clearly, there is work to be done in effecting better links between HEI research training programmes and the careers service in those universities involved in this study.

Thirdly, given that RCUK is funding the majority of research training programmes in the UK, it is important to note that the students in this study are very much “on cue” with the rationale for research degree programmes to offer transferable skills training. In short, the “process” of longerterm skills acquisition and employability (one might call continuing professional development) is clearly important to PhD students, as is the “product” of this process — a well developed set of transferable skills which a competent researcher should be able to put in to practise in a wide-variety of employment sectors. On this positive note, continued funding for effective researcher development would be welcomed.

Finally, the use of NGT provides an interesting and useful evaluation tool for HEIs considering undertaking more in-depth analyses of student feedback from training programmes. It is easy to use and the results can be much more representative than opinions/data obtained from more open discussions.

Interesting Future Questions

This paper has just dipped into a much wider agenda with respect to current national debates and drivers with respect to the UK doctorate. For a more comprehensive exposition of such issues, including international comparisons, the reader is referred to the excellent work of Park (2007) (a paper commissioned by the Higher Education Academy). Indeed, some of the astute and crucially important questions raised at the end of Park’s discussion paper, written to help frame and inform a debate about the future of the UK doctorate, also seem appropriate to reproduce and amend for GEES disciplines. The questions hopefully provide some food for thought about doctorate programmes in general, and perhaps in GEES subjects. They are:

1. Is the doctorate really about the product (thesis) or the process (developing the researcher)? This has implications for how time is spent during the doctoral degree, and about how the degree is examined. In GEES subjects, for example, should the ability to conduct fieldwork or lab-work be assessed in the viva?

2. Is the UK doctorate about education or training, or both? How important are research training and the development of generic skills compared with actually doing the research and learning more about the subject? Should generic research training be compulsory or optional?

3. If the skills articulated in the Joint Skills Statement of Appendix 1, cannot be articulated, should the student fail a PhD? This may sound an absurd proposition (although enforced by at least one, nameless, major research-intensive university in the UK), but otherwise how are any national ‘skill requirements’ really ‘standards’? How might different GEES subjects vary in their opinions here? A national debate, perhaps coordinated by the GEES Subject Centre, would certainly be timely and interesting.

4. In what ways is the revised QAA Code of Practice (2007) improving the quality of the doctoral student experience? And, in what ways are part-time and distant students disadvantaged by current institutional training provisions and arrangements? In GEES, many of our students are based overseas for part of their PhD programmes. What are the implications here in terms of equity of training provision and parity of the research student experience?

5. How can the employability of doctoral students in GEES subjects be enhanced? How can they acquire the right mix of skills, competencies and experiences to make them more attractive to appropriate employers above and beyond a bachelors or masters award? This may seem obvious to those of us in HE, but to employers the differences may not be so apparent. What is the ‘value-added’ of a PhD and how might we articulate and market this to employers? And, how can we start to move away from an often traditional and somewhat outdated (and even myopic) view that a PhD is a period of training to become an ‘academic only’, rather than a period of training in the research process, for careers in a much wider range of fields (especially when 50% of PhDs nationally leave academia). How can the transition between being a doctoral student and adding real benefit to their employer be made shorter, easier and less stressful?

Comments / responses gratefully received by the author.

Appendices have been placed on the GEES SC web site at: www.gees.ac.uk/xxx

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues in the 3 HEIs and the students who participated in this study, who were always high spirited and optimistic in their research endeavours and open-minded about future opportunities in a highly competitive job market. I would like to wish all the students the best of luck in their PhDs, and beyond. Finally, I would also like to thank the HEA Subject Centre for GEES for their small-scale project funding and support, understanding and patience in conducting this small study.