Preparing for Life “Beyond Academe”: Professional Skills Development for Graduate Students in Canadian Universities

It is a well-known fact that the vast majority of today’s graduate students will need to find employment in non-academic settings. More specifically, it is currently estimated that as few as 20 percent to 25 percent of today’s PhD graduates are likely to find work as academics in the disciplines in which they have been trained.¹

While some argue that we are simply preparing too many graduate students—especially doctoral students with their deep investment in years of advanced study—for too little available work, research suggests otherwise. Brent Herbert-Copley, Vice President, Research Capacity at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for example, notes that the need for PhDs in Canada is actually growing but that our students are graduating into “an increasingly complex, globalized labour market” and universities have been slow to develop strategies that will “align doctoral studies more effectively with a range of jobs beyond academia,” which is where the opportunities are most plentiful at present.

One of those methods of alignment is the development of professional skills training for graduate students while they are completing their graduate programs. It is true that all too often students emerge from Canadian graduate programs without a clear sense of how to seek work beyond academic environments and particularly without awareness of how to present themselves as viable candidates with relevant expertise for positions in other kinds of workplace settings. However, universities have begun to address this issue, and my own recent research project, Graduate Student Professional Development: A Survey with Recommendations (2012),² examines the range of professional skills training programming in place for graduate students in universities across Canada.

That report, which was begun as my seven-year term as Dean of Graduate Studies was drawing to a close, arose from my own increasing concern— and that of both sshrc and the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies, which sponsored the report—about whether or not we were doing enough in Canadian universities to help graduate students while they were completing their degrees to prepare themselves for finding meaningful work after graduation in workplace environments of all kinds. By “professional skills,” I refer to programming in universities that is dedicated to the acquisition of transferable skills and competencies, which is to say “carry-forward” or “work-ready” skill sets relevant to competing for positions within, but especially beyond, the academy.

What I discovered is that there is a tremendous amount of activity in place at Canadian universities with respect to two kinds of skills training. The first is what I call “academic skills” training, which refers to research and teaching competencies—those areas that many universities have dedicated themselves to for some time, and do very well. The second type involves the acquisition of competencies sometimes referred to as “soft skills,” which have to do with self-development, self-management, self-presentation, communicating effectively to targeted audiences, and above all the ability to “translate” their achievements as graduate students—their knowledge, experience, and transferrable competencies—into language that can be understood and respected by potential employers outside the academic sector.

Terms such as “soft skills,” “interpersonal skills,” or “self-marketing skills” are not universally embraced by academics, given their own understandable focus on what they see as the “hard skills” relating to research and research dissemination that are their primary focus in supervising graduate students. Yet the challenge of marketing themselves to potential employers who might not speak the esoteric language of our cherished disciplines is a very real issue for students seeking meaningful work in other than academic settings where they can apply what they have learned through their highly-specialized graduate programs of study.

As is to be expected, such programming takes different forms in our widely differing institutions. For some of the smaller universities with few graduate programs and few resources available for dedicated work with graduate students, programming is minimal: typically student service units offer some workshops or special guidance for graduate students focusing on work-readiness skills, and these offerings are supplemented...