phd and no job

• 6 . 25 . 20
• Career , Leaving Academia

Have a PhD and Can’t Get a Job? Do 4 SIMPLE Things (2023)

• Posted by: Chris

Updated March 4, 2023

I have a PhD and can’t get a job! What’s wrong with me?

When I finished my PhD, I jumped into a long drought of unemployment. It freaking sucked.

A family friend who heard I had left school very kindly offered me a job. The job was to be a general laborer on a construction site. I was living in my parents’ basement at the time and didn’t have any direction for my degree, and I considered it.  

I listened as he gave me the description of the job: “You’ll have to clean up the equipment and make sure the signs are in place. You’d be doing a lot of independent work, putting up silt fences, manual labor, digging, stuff like that.”

I was almost in tears.

This was what it had come to. In desperation, I was considering a construction job that paid $16 an hour. I thought, surely this couldn’t be all that there is?

Tell me my story doesn’t end like this!

It didn’t, and I ultimately turned the job down and chased something better.

But, without a doubt, it was one of my points of employment rock bottom. I’d done a PhD, and it seemed like all I could do was to get a job that I could have gotten with a high-school diploma.

That hurts.

I meet a lot of PhDs who are in EXACTLY the place I was in. If you’re here right now, if you’re a PhD who can’t find a job, you know what I’m talking about. You’re unemployed with no direction. You are desperately hoping for someone to come and help you, but it feels like nobody will.

If you have a PhD and can’t get a job, it seems that your best options are things like being a laborer, waiting tables, or answering phones.

Worst of all is the feeling of being alone. It’s feeling like you CAN rebuild your life, but not knowing where to start and feeling like you have nobody to talk to.

If this is you, I’ve been in your shoes. I understand what it’s like.

Are you saying, “I have a PhD and can’t get a job?” Here’s how to fix it…

This post contains links to affiliate products, which–if you choose to purchase–pay us a commission at no extra cost to you. This helps to support our work. We only promote products we’ve used and love .

Check out my book about leaving academia– Doctoring: Building a Life After a PhD — read the first chapter for free on Amazon.

1. Get your mindset right

Yes, I feel like a self-help guru here. And I’ll get you to some more “actionable” steps below.

Here’s why I think your mindset is vital.

PhDs get beat up when they go through an advanced degree. In some cases, a person who is ironically referred to as a “mentor” shreds their confidence.

After years of being taught that they’re complete idiots in the academy, and being made to feel worthless by the death of a thousand cuts—not least of which is being paid peanuts for adjunct positions—there’s not much left.

Stepping out of academia into the “real world” and finding that your skills don’t seem to fit anywhere initially seems to confirm what you already believed about yourself: you’re worthless, not good enough to make it in academia, and have nothing to offer the real world either.

I have a PhD and can’t get a job .

Let me tell you something.

Lean in close so you can hear it.

You’re not worthless.

And, to quote Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, it’s not your fault.

You need to light the spark in your soul again . You know, the one that once believed you were great and had amazing things to offer the world.

This isn’t a “law of attraction” thing; I’m not telling you to positive think your way to a career.

But what I am saying is that there’s no way you will do well in building a career if you believe you’re worthless and have nothing to offer.   

You need to light the spark in your soul again. You know, the one that once believed you were great and had amazing things to offer the world.

2. Get clear on your skills

I want you to take a few hours, even a full day if you can, and do a deep dive on LinkedIn. It’s an amazing platform, I can’t say enough about how powerful it is for those who have a PhD and can’t get a job.

This platform alone has everything you need to change your life: the people, the connections, the wisdom, the jobs. (Do create a profile if you don’t have one— I have a guide for that here .)

But for today, I want you to research.

Go find out the types of things that people are being paid to do. I often advise people to type their skills into the search bar at the top of LinkedIn and see which people come up.

Go “creep” them and see the type of work they do. Look at their job history. Pay attention to how they talk about themselves and their work.

Start writing down job titles that might fit you. You NEED to figure out something you can do that people will pay for.

This might be research or writing—these are the usual suspects for PhDs.

But it might also be stakeholder relations, event management, grant writing, project management. Keep an open mind, and make a list of things that people might way you to do.

You’ve got skills. Transferable skills . And THAT’S what you’re trying to figure out. In academia, you celebrated things like publications, awards, and important mentors.

Chances are, nobody gives a crap about that outside of academia. But people will care about your skills… The more high-value skills you bring to the table, the more likely you’ll get hired!

Here are some Skills your PhD probably gave you that can help get you hired:

• Researching
• Presentation
• Public Speaking
• Grant Writing
• Report Writing
• Synthesizing
• Critical Thinking

Pro Tip. Do try to pay attention to things you think you might love doing. There’s no sense in doing jobs because you can, at least in the long term. Start to build a vision of your future .

3. Talk to 10 people in cool roles

I talk about networking as being transformational for PhD job-hunting, and I believe it is.

But when I say networking, I don’t mean handing out business cards, or going to sketchy “networking events.”

I mean talking to 10 people. That’s it.

Over the course of the next 2 months, I want you to set this big, audacious goal.

Talk to 10 people who are doing something you find interesting. These will be the beginning of your network.

Most of us don’t have powerful networks. We need to build them from scratch.

It will take a lot of confidence to reach out to them and ask for their time, and perhaps a little bit of humility too.

I have a whole post on networking tips — but here are 8 ways to find people to talk to:

• Ask a prof you work with for a recommendation. Some profs have great networks outside of the academy.
• Contact the career center at your school to see if they have events or connections they could give you.
• Try your school’s alumni network, which will have both local events and listings of people who might be interesting.
• When you search on LinkedIn, reach out to connect to the interesting people you find. Send a note explaining that you’re a new grad trying to find your direction.
• Join a LinkedIn group for PhDs. This could be the Roostervane LinkedIn group , or one of the many others dedicated to PhDs. Pro tip: look at the group members and connect with those you find interesting .  
• Talk to family, friends, and anybody else you already know about what they do. Ask lots of questions.
• Talk to people in public! If it’s your thing. I have kids, so I often strike up conversations with other parents at the park, asking about what they do. If you want to be really strategic, go to parks in the wealthy areas of your town. Go to a dog park. Join a gym, a church, a special-interest club, or any other place you can meet humans.
• Follow interesting people on Twitter, Instagram, or another social platform—especially if they’re local. See if they’d be a good fit, and message them! Tell them you love their work and you’re curious about what they do.

4. Ask those 10 people for advice on how to get hired

I made a list of informational interview questions you absolutely should ask them when you talk to them!

But one of the best would always be, “What advice do you have for someone trying to get to where you are?”

They’ll tell you instantly where to go. People in positions understand how to get there. They know where the gatekeepers are.

They’ll tell you if you need to take another course. They’ll tell you if there’s a certain person you need to talk to.

They’ll know, for example, that their company always uses a certain job bank or looks for certain keywords on their resumes.

Best of all, they might keep you in mind for future opportunities. When their employer goes looking for someone to hire, there’s a much better chance that your name will go to the top of the list.

So right now you have a PhD and can’t get a job. Can I make a prediction? I predict that if you take these steps, you will have some serious traction on your career. If you do this, it will change your life.

If you’re a PhD with no job prospects, I know that these steps will get you traction fast.

But let me tell you one more thing.

Today, the problem is that you have a PhD and can’t get a job.

Once you get that first job, I want you to think a little bigger. Don’t stumble through your life and career. Roostervane is not about getting jobs, believe it or not. It’s about building a career with purpose.

So go get a job. But never stop building a bigger vision for your life and chase that.

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‘There are no jobs’: PhD graduates struggle to build careers in academia

For the first time in decades, Ian Corbin has dental insurance.

Over the past 15 years, Corbin has been a doctoral student, an adjunct professor, and a postdoctoral fellow. And trying to scrape together a living has been tough. “I was always hustling,” he says.

When Corbin — who holds a PhD in philosophy from Boston College and works at the intersection of ethics and medicine — was a postdoc at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2019, he earned about $50,000 a year and had kids to support. “So I was always teaching classes in the evening and publishing articles as fast as I could. Just taking on really anything that anyone would give me,” he says.

Corbin’s story isn’t unusual. For many of those with doctorates, who typically spend between four and seven years in graduate school, the employment picture is increasingly bleak, especially for jobs in academia.

Maren Wood, who founded a firm that helps those with doctorates find jobs, says that the market for full-time professors has collapsed. Between 2007 and 2020, the number of openings in philosophy dropped by roughly half. The number of openings in English fell by about 60 percent .

Universities staffed up to accommodate millennials, she says, and now they’re trying to cope with declining enrollments, which are predicted to continue indefinitely . “There’s nothing wrong with a PhD,” says Wood, chief executive of Beyond the Professoriate, whose platform is currently used by Harvard and BC . “The problem is there are no jobs.”

Wood holds a PhD in history, and her breaking point was in 2011 when she came in second place for a job thousands of miles away. The gig was a one-year position. In Reno. And she was told the pay wouldn’t even be enough to live on.

The woman doing the hiring encouraged Wood. “You came in second place!” she exclaimed.

“For what?” Wood asked.

Wood had hoped to be a professor. She had been a top student and earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina. But it didn’t take long to realize: Despite the fact that she had a prestigious degree, there were virtually no decent jobs in universities.

Often, those with doctorates serve as adjunct professors — sometimes while they look for a more permanent gig. To students, adjuncts and tenure-track faculty may appear to be the same. They have PhDs. Students call them “professor.”

But when it comes to stability, they’re worlds apart. Adjuncts rarely get health care. They’re generally paid between $3,000 and $7,000 per class, and you might have to drive considerable distances to get from one job to another.

Over 30 percent of nontenure-track educators in higher education make under $25,000 a year, according to a 2019 survey by the American Federation of Teachers . Another 30 percent make between $25,000 and $50,000 a year. But over the past few decades, the number of adjuncts has grown much faster than the ranks of full-time faculty.

The dearth of jobs has been particularly tough on those in the social sciences, humanities, and some sciences, including biology. Richard Larson, a professor of data, systems, and society at MIT, has noted that many professors churn out lots of doctoral students over the course of their careers — and a good chunk of those students would like to be professors themselves.

But the math simply doesn’t work. Only a few of those grad students — fewer than 20 percent — can get the sort of job that their advisers have. (Though there are certainly disciplines — including chemical engineering and computer science — in which graduates can find jobs fairly easily, often in industry.)

Kristina Aikens, who earned her PhD in English from Tufts University, initially tried to piece together a living as an adjunct. For a year and a half, she says, she was teaching four or five classes in two or three locations, which is a common — though brutal — workload.

Aikens doesn’t believe that doctoral students — particularly in humanities — understand the real threat of finding themselves in an unstable position. “I think people think it won’t happen to them,” she says. “It’s not because they think that they’re better than anyone else. It’s just a denial that they’re in.”

But the threat of job instability is considerable. Massachusetts is not only the state with the highest percentage of people with undergraduate degrees; it also has the highest percentage of those with graduate degrees . And while many of those degree holders are thriving, too many live in precarious situations — situations made all the more precarious by the extraordinarily high cost of housing in the Boston area.

So if the supply of academic jobs has waned, why don’t doctoral programs simply slim down and admit fewer students?

Most of the people I spoke with noted that professors may be loath to give up their graduate students because they genuinely enjoy working with them. Grad students can talk about esoteric areas of scholarship, built on years of deep study.

“I think that faculty want to believe that they’re doing good,” says Wood. “I think that graduate deans generally believe that graduate education does good. And the fact that universities have paid so little attention to career outcomes means that they don’t actually have good data to work with.”

It’s also possible that schools’ reluctance to admit fewer graduate students is financially motivated. Universities often run on the work of grad students, as the Boston University strike has demonstrated . Grad students teach sections of large classes. They work in labs. They perform in-the-field research.

“The business model only works with a lot of cheap labor,” Corbin says. “I think it’s bad. I think it’s bad for students. I think it’s bad for the classroom. I think it’s bad for the grad students and the perennial adjuncts.” But, he believes, doctoral students represent an enormous pool of untapped talent.

Corbin is now a tenure-track researcher in neurology at Harvard Medical School, with a secondary appointment in bioethics. It’s a job he likes, and life feels much more stable. “It’s becoming less desperate,” he says.

Aikens — who now serves as the program director of writing support at Tufts — says she doesn’t regret getting a doctorate, and she doesn’t think we should preclude people from pursuing that sort of intense study.

Coming from a working-class background in West Virginia, she had wanted to see if she could do it. And the six years she spent getting a PhD were hard. But she knew that success wouldn’t necessarily lead to employment:

“At my graduation, literally at the ceremony, I turned to my friend and said: ‘Should I apply to law school? Because I don’t think this is going to work out.’”

Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time

The disposable academic.

The Economist

This article originally appeared in the 2010 Christmas double issue of The Economist.

On the evening before All Saints’ Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year.

In most countries a PhD is a basic requirement for a career in academia. It is an introduction to the world of independent research — a kind of intellectual masterpiece, created by an apprentice in close collaboration with a supervisor. The requirements to complete one vary enormously between countries, universities and even subjects. Some students will first have to spend two years working on a master’s degree or diploma. Some will receive a stipend; others will pay their own way. Some PhDs involve only research, some require classes and examinations and some require the student to teach undergraduates. A thesis can be dozens of pages in mathematics, or many hundreds in history. As a result, newly minted PhDs can be as young as their early 20s or world-weary forty-somethings.

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”

Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.

Rich pickings

For most of history even a first degree at a university was the privilege of a rich few, and many academic staff did not hold doctorates. But as higher education expanded after the second world war, so did the expectation that lecturers would hold advanced degrees. American universities geared up first: by 1970 America was producing just under a third of the world’s university students and half of its science and technology PhDs (at that time it had only 6% of the global population). Since then America’s annual output of PhDs has doubled, to 64,000.

Other countries are catching up. Between 1998 and 2006 the number of doctorates handed out in all OECD countries grew by 40%, compared with 22% for America. PhD production sped up most dramatically in Mexico, Portugal, Italy and Slovakia. Even Japan, where the number of young people is shrinking, churned out about 46% more PhDs. Part of that growth reflects the expansion of university education outside America. Richard Freeman, a labour economist at Harvard University, says that by 2006 America was enrolling just 12% of the world’s students.

But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009 — higher than the average for judges and magistrates.

Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships. Using PhD students to do much of the undergraduate teaching cuts the number of full-time jobs. Even in Canada, where the output of PhD graduates has grown relatively modestly, universities conferred 4,800 doctorate degrees in 2007 but hired just 2,616 new full-time professors. Only a few fast-developing countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs.

A short course in supply and demand

In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of academia”, do much of the research these days. There is a glut of postdocs too. Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that if American faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20% of students would land one. In Canada 80% of postdocs earn $38,600 or less per year before tax — the average salary of a construction worker. The rise of the postdoc has created another obstacle on the way to an academic post. In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.

These armies of low-paid PhD researchers and postdocs boost universities’, and therefore countries’, research capacity. Yet that is not always a good thing. Brilliant, well-trained minds can go to waste when fashions change. The post-Sputnik era drove the rapid growth in PhD physicists that came to an abrupt halt as the Vietnam war drained the science budget. Brian Schwartz, a professor of physics at the City University of New York, says that in the 1970s as many as 5,000 physicists had to find jobs in other areas.

In America the rise of PhD teachers’ unions reflects the breakdown of an implicit contract between universities and PhD students: crummy pay now for a good academic job later. Student teachers in public universities such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison formed unions as early as the 1960s, but the pace of unionisation has increased recently. Unions are now spreading to private universities; though Yale and Cornell, where university administrators and some faculty argue that PhD students who teach are not workers but apprentices, have resisted union drives. In 2002 New York University was the first private university to recognise a PhD teachers’ union, but stopped negotiating with it three years later.

In some countries, such as Britain and America, poor pay and job prospects are reflected in the number of foreign-born PhD students. Dr Freeman estimates that in 1966 only 23% of science and engineering PhDs in America were awarded to students born outside the country. By 2006 that proportion had increased to 48%. Foreign students tend to tolerate poorer working conditions, and the supply of cheap, brilliant, foreign labour also keeps wages down.

A PhD may offer no financial benefit over a master’s degree. It can even reduce earnings

Proponents of the PhD argue that it is worthwhile even if it does not lead to permanent academic employment. Not every student embarks on a PhD wanting a university career and many move successfully into private-sector jobs in, for instance, industrial research. That is true; but drop-out rates suggest that many students become dispirited. In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%. Worse still, whereas in other subject areas students tend to jump ship in the early years, in the humanities they cling like limpets before eventually falling off. And these students started out as the academic cream of the nation. Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam.

Even graduates who find work outside universities may not fare all that well. PhD courses are so specialised that university careers offices struggle to assist graduates looking for jobs, and supervisors tend to have little interest in students who are leaving academia. One OECD study shows that five years after receiving their degrees, more than 60% of PhDs in Slovakia and more than 45% in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany and Spain were still on temporary contracts. Many were postdocs. About one-third of Austria’s PhD graduates take jobs unrelated to their degrees. In Germany 13% of all PhD graduates end up in lowly occupations. In the Netherlands the proportion is 21%.

A very slim premium

PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree.

Dr Schwartz, the New York physicist, says the skills learned in the course of a PhD can be readily acquired through much shorter courses. Thirty years ago, he says, Wall Street firms realised that some physicists could work out differential equations and recruited them to become “quants”, analysts and traders. Today several short courses offer the advanced maths useful for finance. “A PhD physicist with one course on differential equations is not competitive,” says Dr Schwartz.

Many students say they are pursuing their subject out of love, and that education is an end in itself. Some give little thought to where the qualification might lead. In one study of British PhD graduates, about a third admitted that they were doing their doctorate partly to go on being a student, or put off job hunting. Nearly half of engineering students admitted to this. Scientists can easily get stipends, and therefore drift into doing a PhD. But there are penalties, as well as benefits, to staying at university. Workers with “surplus schooling” — more education than a job requires — are likely to be less satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are going to leave their jobs.

Academics tend to regard asking whether a PhD is worthwhile as analogous to wondering whether there is too much art or culture in the world. They believe that knowledge spills from universities into society, making it more productive and healthier. That may well be true; but doing a PhD may still be a bad choice for an individual.

The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD students on the other are not well aligned. The more bright students stay at universities, the better it is for academics. Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors’ publication records. Academics pick bright undergraduate students and groom them as potential graduate students. It isn’t in their interests to turn the smart kids away, at least at the beginning. One female student spoke of being told of glowing opportunities at the outset, but after seven years of hard slog she was fobbed off with a joke about finding a rich husband.

Monica Harris, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, is a rare exception. She believes that too many PhDs are being produced, and has stopped admitting them. But such unilateral academic birth control is rare. One Ivy-League president, asked recently about PhD oversupply, said that if the top universities cut back others will step in to offer them instead.

Noble pursuits

Many of the drawbacks of doing a PhD are well known. Your correspondent was aware of them over a decade ago while she slogged through a largely pointless PhD in theoretical ecology. As Europeans try to harmonise higher education, some institutions are pushing the more structured learning that comes with an American PhD.

The organisations that pay for research have realised that many PhDs find it tough to transfer their skills into the job market. Writing lab reports, giving academic presentations and conducting six-month literature reviews can be surprisingly unhelpful in a world where technical knowledge has to be assimilated quickly and presented simply to a wide audience. Some universities are now offering their PhD students training in soft skills such as communication and teamwork that may be useful in the labour market. In Britain a four-year NewRoutePhD claims to develop just such skills in graduates.

The interests of universities and tenured academics are misaligned with those of PhD students

Measurements and incentives might be changed, too. Some university departments and academics regard numbers of PhD graduates as an indicator of success and compete to produce more. For the students, a measure of how quickly those students get a permanent job, and what they earn, would be more useful. Where penalties are levied on academics who allow PhDs to overrun, the number of students who complete rises abruptly, suggesting that students were previously allowed to fester.

Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.

Written by The Economist

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Are There Too Many Ph.D.s And Not Enough Jobs?

Our country needs more people with science, math and engineering degrees — at least, that's the common refrain among politicians and educators.

American students lag behind the rest of the world when it comes to math and science test scores, and the president and others have called for a change in immigration laws that would make it easier for people who come to the U.S. to get technical degrees to stay in the country permanently.

The number of PhD students who had a job by graduation has been going down, while the numbers of those who didn't or those who were continuing with studies is going up.

Source: The Atlantic

Credit: Courtesy Jordan Weissmann

But job numbers released by the National Science Foundation show that people with doctoral degrees in those technical fields are struggling to find work in their industries.

Jordan Weissmann, an editor at The Atlantic, analyzed the latest NSF figures. Upon graduation, he says, "Ph.D.s in general have a less than 50 percent chance of having a full-time job, and that percentage has been decreasing for about 20 years."

Worse yet, as of 2011, approximately one-third of people graduating with a doctoral degree in science, technology, math or engineering had no job or post-doctoral offer of any kind.

These figures are not surprising to many young scientists and engineers who feel the employment squeeze.

John Choiniere, who lives in Seattle, earned a doctorate in analytical chemistry in December. Now, he's unemployed.

"I really want to be able to support my family, and I thought getting a Ph.D. in chemistry would be a great way to do that, but so far, not a lot of luck with that," he says.

But, Weissmann says, there is a silver lining: Those who earn doctoral degrees in technical fields are not likely to face chronic, long-term unemployment.

"I think you look at the science and engineering fields in general, and across all age groups they tend to have extremely low unemployment. You know, maybe 3 percent or so," he says. "I think the question isn't necessarily unemployment, but underemployment certainly is a very live issue in these fields."

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• CAREER FEATURE
• 07 November 2022

‘I don’t want this kind of life’: graduate students question career options

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Chris Woolston is a freelance writer in Billings, Montana.

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One-third of respondents to Nature ’s 2022 global graduate-student survey are lukewarm about the value of their current programme. Sixty-six per cent of the PhD and masters’ students who responded think that their degree will “substantially” or “dramatically” improve their job prospects, but the rest see little or no benefit. Less than one-third agree that they expect to find a permanent job within one year of graduating, or that their programme is leaving them well prepared to eventually find a satisfying career.

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The Bleak Job Landscape of Adjunctopia for Ph.D.s

Ruthless labor exploitation? Generational betrayal? Understanding the job crisis in academia requires a look at recent history.

By Kevin Carey

The humanities labor market is in crisis. Higher education industry trade publications are full of essays by young Ph.D.s who despair of ever finding a steady job. Phrases like “ unfolding catastrophe ” and “ extinction event ” are common. The number of new jobs for English professors has fallen every year since 2012, by a total of 33 percent.

In response to these trends and a longer-term decline in academic job security, the Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has made a proposal. In exchange for federal funding to reduce public college and university tuition to zero, he said, at least 75 percent of college courses would have to be taught by tenured or tenure-track professors. Currently, that proportion is less than 40 percent and dropping.

How this happened is a story of a rupture in the way the academy produces and consumes people with scholarly credentials.

In 1995, roughly 940,000 people were employed teaching college. Of those, about 400,000 had tenure or were on track to get it. They enjoyed professional status, strong job security, relatively good pay (on average), and the freedom to speak their minds.

The rest were so-called contingent or adjunct faculty: some employed full time, others filling in a course or two per semester. They had lower pay, less status and tenuous job security, particularly if they spoke their minds . There were also thousands of graduate students, not counted in the numbers above, teaching as part of their training. (The University of California, Santa Cruz, which is known to be progressive even by the standards of academia, recently fired 54 graduate assistants who were striking for higher pay.)

The percentage of professors on the tenure track had been slowly declining since the 1970s. In the late 1990s came a demographic event that would ultimately throw the university labor market into a tailspin: the first college years of the so-called millennials, those born from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s.

Colleges swelled with students over the next decade and a half, with undergraduate enrollment increasing from 12.2 million in 1995 to a peak of 18.1 million in 2011. Colleges needed to hire hundreds of thousands of additional professors.

Administrators had options. They could have kept the ratio of tenured to nontenured about the same, using new tuition revenue to create more tenure-track positions.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the number of contingent faculty more than doubled, to 1.1 million. The number of tenured and tenure-track faculty, by contrast, increased by only 9.6 percent, to 436,000.

It is not the case, as is sometimes said or implied, that there are fewer tenured college professors now than there used to be. In absolute terms, there are more. But 94 percent of the net increase in college professors hired to teach the millennial generation were contingent, meaning off the tenure track.

For colleges, this was cheaper. The halls of academe are known to be hospitable to people with radical views on power relationships between capital and labor, but colleges themselves are often merciless actors in the labor market. Many adjuncts earn only a few thousand dollars per course, with no health insurance or retirement benefits. Twenty-five percent of part-time faculty receive some form of public assistance. Some adjunct postings don’t require doctorates.

At the same time as the contingent ranks were growing, a new generation of students was completing bachelor’s degrees, and enrollment in Ph.D. programs increased. Because doctorates can take eight years or longer to complete, many millennials were still in graduate school when the higher education industry took a turn for the worse after the Great Recession.

The 2008 economic downturn hammered state budgets, resulting in major cuts to public university funding that persisted well into the 2010s. At the same time, the millennial demographic wave crested. Undergraduate enrollment dropped by 1.2 million between 2011 and today. Universities needed fewer professors, and they had less money to pay them.

The timing of the recession surprised many experts. But universities knew that the business cycle still existed. They knew when the demographic tide would recede, it being a function of the number of births that had occurred 18 years earlier. (The total number of undergraduates declined significantly even after a huge increase in the number of international students from China and elsewhere.) And they understood the academic labor market, since they created and controlled its conditions.

Yet at no point did universities seem to consider slowing the flow of students into the Ph.D. pipeline. The opposite happened. In 1988, the number of doctorates in the humanities conferred was estimated to be 3,570, and it increased to 5,145 in 2018.

Tenured professors like having graduate students around. They teach the boring undergraduate sections for little or no pay and provide inexpensive research assistance. For many veteran scholars, training the next generation is one of the most rewarding parts of the job.

There was another complication. In 1994, a new federal law outlawed the widespread practice of requiring professors to retire at age 70. The effects of this accumulated as the baby boom generation aged. The oldest tenured boomers turned 70 in 2016, just in time to not retire and not create room for millennials hitting the job market with newly minted Ph.D.s.

Consumer preferences also shifted. Stung by ever-rising tuition costs and anxious about a treacherous job market, many students left the humanities for more job-focused majors after the Great Recession.

All of this resulted in a severe misalignment of supply and demand. Universities had spent the better part of two decades training more people for jobs that universities simultaneously decided they didn’t need, just as economic, demographic and legal conditions began further depressing the need for professors. It’s no wonder that many humanities majors are using their considerable creative and rhetorical skills to liken their job searches to various post-apocalyptic imaginings.

As competition for tenure-track jobs becomes more fierce, only the graduates of top-ranked programs have a realistic chance, and even they increasingly settle for positions at less prestigious institutions that emphasize teaching and service over research. For example, the University of Michigan’s English department is ranked in the top 12 by U.S. News & World Report. Of the approximately 50 scholars who have graduated from the department and won tenure-track positions since 2008, only one is employed at a top 12 department, and that is Michigan itself.

Senator Sanders’s proposed legislation would be a highly unusual federal intrusion in the way universities conduct their academic business, and would probably be attacked by the higher education lobby . Some have looked to the example of K-12 teachers, who have used mass strikes and protests to earn substantial wage increases in recent years.

But there’s a crucial difference between schoolteachers and college professors. Elementary, middle, and high school teachers all have versions of the same job. They sink and swim and bargain together. The academy is a two-tier caste system, split between those who won the tenure tournament and those who lost.

And the academic labor market crisis is, in many ways, good for the winners. When a flood of Ph.D.s desperate to keep a toehold in academia depresses adjunct wages, that makes it cheaper for universities to hire them to teach classes and free up time for tenured researchers to do what they enjoy: conduct research. The more tenure becomes a rare prize, the more the victors may see themselves as uniquely deserving.

Until that changes, the academic labor market will most likely continue to feel like a wasteland .

Kevin Carey directs the education policy program at New America. You can follow him on Twitter at @kevincarey1.

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Analysis that explains politics, policy and everyday life..

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N.Y.C. Neighborhoods: We asked New Yorkers to map their neighborhoods and to tell us what they call them . The result, while imperfect, is an extremely detailed map of the city .

Dialect Quiz:  What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer these questions to find out .

The Ever-Tightening Job Market for Ph.D.s

Why do so many people continue to pursue doctorates?

If you’re a grad student, it’s best to read the latest report from the National Science Foundation with a large glass of single-malt whiskey in hand. Scratch that: The top-shelf whiskey is probably out of your budget. Well, Trader Joe’s “Two Buck Chuck ” is good, too!

Liquid courage is a necessity when examining the data on Ph.D.s in the latest NSF report, “ The Survey of Earned Doctorates ,” which utilized figures from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. The report finds that many newly minted Ph.D.s complete school after nearly 10 years of studies with significant debt and without the promise of a job. Yet few people seem to be paying attention to these findings; graduate programs are producing more Ph.D.s than ever before.

Getting a Ph.D. has always been a long haul. Despite calls for reform , the time spent in graduate programs hasn’t declined significantly in the past decade. In 2014, students spent eight years on average in graduate school programs to earn a Ph.D. in the social sciences, for example. It takes nine years to get one in the humanities, seven for science fields and engineering, and 12 for education, according to NSF. In other words, Ph.D.s are typically nearing or in their 30s by the time they begin their careers. Many of their friends have probably already banked a decade’s worth of retirement money in a 401K account; some may have already put a down payment on a small town house.

While most doctoral students rely primarily on some combination of grants, teaching assistantships, and research positions to cover tuition and living expenses, they also often use personal savings, spouses’ earnings, and student loans. Consequently, more than 12 percent of all Ph.D.s complete their doctoral programs with over $70,000 of combined undergraduate and graduate student-loan debt. Rates are especially high in the social sciences and education. Those debt levels are alarming, especially because fewer students have jobs lined up immediately after graduation than was the case 10 years ago.

The job market for those with advanced degrees is clearly tightening, according to the NSF study, with many more Ph.D.s in all fields reporting no definite job commitments in 2014 compared to 2004. Nearly 40 percent of the Ph.D.s surveyed in 2014 hadn’t lined up a job—whether in the private industry or academia—at the time of graduation.

It may not be surprising that Ph.D.s in the humanities and social sciences are struggling to find tenure-track faculty jobs. After all, graduate schools produced two new history Ph.D.s for every tenure-track job opening in 2014. However, with the heavy push towards STEM at universities and opportunities for positions in the private industry, the employment woes for engineering and science Ph.D.s are puzzling.

Ph.D. graduates who reported that they had accepted positions found work in the private industry, academia, or as post-docs. Most Ph.D.s in the humanities, education, and social sciences who have secured plans will work in academia—but the report does not indicate whether they are employed in tenure-track positions, in non-tenure track jobs, or as temporary adjunct jobs , which have grown in popularity in recent years.

A Ph.D. who wins the rare job as a tenure-track professor earns on average about $60,000 per year, according to the NSF report. In contrast, post-doc positions—temporary research spots that are most common in the sciences and draw 39 percent of the Ph.D.s with post-graduation commitments at universities—pay a little over $40,000 per year. Incidentally, the median entrance-level salary for college graduates with a B.A. in 2014 was $45,478 .

It’s unclear what happens to the 40 percent of Ph.D.s who don’t get a job of some sort—even of the post-doc variety—after graduation. Perhaps some move onto other professions after a year or so. Maybe some work for peanuts as adjuncts. Others may rely on their partner’s income. What’s more, as Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik notes, the tightening job market means increases in job-market competitiveness, as new Ph.D.s must compete for positions not only with their own cohort but also with the unemployed Ph.D.s. who graduated in previous years.

So, you would think that this kind of information, which has already been discussed in many news articles and books over the years, would dissuade universities from admitting more students. You might even think that super-smart students would try their hands at other careers. After all, when news about the bad employment market for lawyers came out, the number of applications to law schools plummeted . Wouldn’t the same thing happen to Ph.D. programs? Apparently not.

In 2014, doctoral programs in the United States awarded 54,070 Ph.D.s—12,000 more than 2004. All fields, except for education, saw an increase, with the biggest increases in science and engineering.

Why hasn’t all this information helped winnow down the ranks of aspiring professors—why hasn’t it proved to be an effective Ph.D. prophylactic? Are people risking so much in the hopes of getting a cushy job with a six-figure salary and no teaching requirements? Is it because academia is a cult that makes otherwise sane people believe that there is no life outside of the university? Are graduate programs failing to inform their students about the realities of the job market? There are no answers to those questions in the charts and graphs from the NSF.

Without serious changes in higher education, such as higher pay for adjunct professors or decreasing the time spent in graduate school, chances are thousands of new Ph.D.s in their early 30s will be struggling this fall.

Australia has way more PhD graduates than academic jobs. Here’s how to rethink doctoral degrees

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Teaching Associate, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Monash University

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The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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This article is part of our series on big ideas for the Universities Accord . The federal government is calling for ideas to “reshape and reimagine higher education, and set it up for the next decade and beyond”. A review team is due to finish a draft report in June and a final report in December 2023.

One of the key reasons for doing a a doctoral research degree or PhD is to pursue an academic career. But this dream is becoming increasingly far-fetched, due to a decline in academic positions and a steady increase in Australians undertaking PhDs.

The number of PhD completions has been steadily growing over the past two decades, from about 4,000 to about 10,000 per year.

According to our calculations* based on the information available , the cumulative number of people in Australia with a PhD has increased from about 135,000 in 2016 to about 185,000 in 2021.

But the number of academic positions has shrunk. Australia saw a significant decrease in academic staff from 54,086 in 2016 to 46,971 in 2021 as universities cut costs during the pandemic.

As the Universities Accord review examines how our higher education system needs to work, we need to rethink who is doing a PhD and how their degrees are structured.

Why has the number of PhDs grown?

There are plenty of incentives to keep PhD candidates coming through the system. Some federal government funding to universities is based on research degree completions . PhDs are also free for domestic students.

On top of this, universities put pressure on academic staff to supervise successful PhD students. This is used as one of the criteria for promotions.

Where do PhD graduates go?

There is no official data on how many PhD graduates go on to work in academia. About 25% of PhD graduates got some employment in academia according to a small-scale survey in 2011.

Our estimates suggest this figure has not changed much as of 2021. If there are about 185,000 people with a PhD, this is four times higher than the number of available academic positions (46,971).

We also know some PhD students struggle to get work outside of academia, despite the prestigious nature of their qualifications.

The 2022 Graduate Outcomes Survey found 84.7% of research degree graduates (which includes masters degrees by research as well as PhDs) were in full-time employment within six months of completing their studies. This compares with 78.5% of undergraduates.

Read more: Australian unis could not function without casual staff: it is time to treat them as 'real' employees

Where do PhDs want to work?

It is true not all PhD candidates and graduates want an academic career.

A 2019 national survey found 51% of all PhD students surveyed wanted to find a job in business or the public sector.

But here, students’ field of study makes a big difference.

Two-thirds of PhD students in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and maths) were hoping to work in industry. The banking, civil engineering, mining, energy and medical/pharmaceutical sectors are the top employers of PhD graduates .

Meanwhile, two-thirds of PhD students in social sciences (including history, politics, education, sociology, psychology, economics, and anthropology) wanted to stay in academia.

Read more: Why arts degrees and other generalist programs are the future of Australian higher education

To understand how people with social sciences PhDs navigate employment, we conducted 23 in-depth interviews with doctoral graduates from five Australian universities. All interviewees graduated less than five years before the interviews.

Our research uncovered two distinct themes.

1. A stable academic job is almost impossible to find

Of the group, only one had gained a continuing academic position within five years of graduation. Thirteen were on precarious contracts (either casual or fixed-term) while three were doing a “postdoc” or research fellowship (which are also often a fixed-term contract). Six worked in either the private sector or government.

As one interviewee told us:

[PhD candidates should] put aside the assumption that […] because you’ve got a PhD, you will automatically get a job. That’s not the case. There are many many many PhDs out there who cannot find work or are working in what we call menial jobs or ‘survivor’ jobs.

Another emphasised the insecure nature of working in academia:

I’ve been working as a sessional [employed on contracts per semester] in higher education, basically full-time on a million contracts.

Some participants moved in and out of academia while holding a slim hope of finding a continuing position:

If I don’t get an academic job within one year or two years, then it’s kind of over for me […].

2. There is not enough career support or preparation

While ongoing academic jobs were very difficult to obtain, PhD graduates said they were not well-prepared for the labour market outside academia.

There is a sharp contrast between university and non-university occupations in terms of workplace cultures and employer expectations. For example, industry employers want skills needed for work rather than qualifications or publications. PhD graduates moving out of academia have had to re-train themselves.

As one participant told us:

They were less impressed by the publications. They were more interested in the skills that I got. […] So I did some online data courses [like] LinkedIn courses, and then I tried to apply for some jobs with these skills and in this direction.

Another participant said they had to hide their doctoral degree for fear of being seen as overqualified. Meanwhile, meaningful career advice was thin on the ground.

[My university] didn’t actually do anything to support me in getting my job.

Read more: 'Very few companies are open for international students': South Asian graduates say they need specific support to find jobs

How to rethink doctoral education

The diverse and insecure employment outcomes of the PhD graduates in our study strongly point to a need for universities to rethink how they educate PhD students.

Firstly, this includes offering specific career education as part of PhD programs. This may require universities to be upfront about the employment prospects for PhD graduates and research funding climate .

Career consultations from both universities’ career centres and industry experts should be offered early in PhD programs to help students make informed decisions about future options. For those who would like to pursue a traditional academic career, it is important to have ongoing career guidance from their supervisors and research offices.

Secondly, there needs to be more structured work experience. Universities should strengthen their partnerships with industry to facilitate work experience. Those seeking academic jobs also need to be provided with meaningful opportunities to work alongside academic staff in both teaching activities and research projects.

Thirdly, universities need to ensure doctoral programs better prepare students for employment possibilities inside and outside academia.

This includes opportunities to build transferable skills such as teamwork, communication, analytical skills, and leadership.

This specifically needs to include teaching students how to write and speak for different audiences beyond academia, including policymakers and the public.

This needs to include admissions

Lastly, we also need to take a hard look at PhD admissions. There is currently no limit on PhD numbers and the more admissions universities have, the more funding they will earn when students graduate.

To balance supply and demand, the government should consider quotas for funding PhD students in each field. This would also help select the most suitable PhD candidates, who are most likely to benefit from the rigours of doctoral study.

This may not be a popular move – but we have be more realistic about whether accepting more and more people into three-plus years of intense study is benefiting the students, or simply generating funds for universities.

*These figures have been adjusted for life expectancy and overseas PhD graduates returning to their home country.

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About two decades ago, PhDs often chose the traditional academic career route, where one started with a postdoc and later joined as research faculty at an institution. In the past few years, this predefined route for PhDs has drastically changed course, with up to a 10% drop in the number of PhDs who hold an academic tenure-track position 1 . The deficit of academic careers and increased awareness of non-academic career paths have led more STEM PhDs to choose other careers in science. In this article, I cover some of the diverse career paths that are available to PhDs, including but not limited to jobs within industry.

Industry-based careers for scientists

Industry-based positions range from bench-based research scientists to non-bench-based positions, such as business development managers. Many PhDs work as scientists in the discovery phase, in preclinical/clinical research, or in manufacturing and quality control teams at pharmaceutical and biotech firms. PhDs are also hired in the following positions:

• Data scientists: As a data scientist, one uses various data mining techniques to predict results with huge amounts of data. These positions require a background in programming. Many data science boot camps and fellowships are available to PhDs, to equip them with data mining and programming skills for these positions.
• Regulatory affairs: These professionals have critical roles in the pharmaceutical industry where they ensure that the company’s product is compliant with global standards. They also work to expedite the drug development process by analyzing current market standards.
• Medical affairs: Professionals in medical affairs not only educate various departments about the science behind the drug development process but also work with clients to support the launch of new products in the pharmaceutical industry.
• Medical science liaisons: Commonly referred to as MSLs, they have a role similar to medical affairs professionals. Their main duty is to maintain relationships with key opinion leaders in their assigned field and ensure that their products are effectively used and backed with relevant scientific and clinical data.
• Technical product and marketing specialists : Many of us interact with people in these positions during our PhD tenure. These are the specialists who come to maintain or install research equipment at research institutions. Technical specialists also conduct customer service to help troubleshoot specific products and kits used in laboratories. Most of these positions are filled by PhDs.
• Business development managers and consultants: Here, PhDs are valued for their ability to work efficiently by comprehending complex strategies in business and help in decision making. These positions mainly involve planning, management, and development of innovative products or services. They also work in analyzing marketing trends using their scientific and analytical skills.

Careers for scientists beyond academic research and industry

PhDs can also transition into career paths outside academia and industry, including the ones below:

• Intellectual property and legal affairs: Scientists are actively recruited in this area because PhD training enables them to understand scientific discoveries in patent law cases and to accurately analyze the intellectual rights of a product. Many dual PhD/JD degrees are offered to help scientists prep for a career in legal affairs.
• Tech transfer and university incubators : PhDs can also work in technology transfer offices and university incubators where they support the growth of innovative products. Positions here often involve a combination of duties as in legal affairs plus business development manager duties.
• Science policy: Here PhDs work with federal and state government offices in policy development. PhDs can prepare for a career in science policy by gaining experience through internships or fellowships that help to develop skills essential for working with policymakers.
• Scientific conference organization: PhDs make excellent scientific conference organizers because they comprehend the science behind such events.
• Science communication and publishing : There are numerous careers in science communications, such as science journalist/writer, journal editor, science illustrator, medical writer, etc. Many workshops , fellowships and science communication groups offer great exposure to such career paths.
• Library management: Positions in library management are another career option for those who enjoy reading and organization.
• Museum scientists and public outreach : Museum scientists are often STEM PhDs. Public outreach is another exciting career option for PhDs. Volunteering at a science museum near you is a good way to explore this option now.

Transitioning from working as a PhD student in an academic setting into a non-academic career can be challenging, especially if one does not know how to start the process. Once you identify your area of interest, informational interviews are a great way to start researching a career path. One of the best approaches to start working toward such non-academic career paths is by networking and finding potential mentors who can help you work your way toward your chosen career path. Various resources, career guidance networks, and organizations help PhDs transition from academia into other career paths. ASCB offers such support to scientists by offering numerous career development courses, workshops, and courses . ASCB also has periodic informational interview posts that describe diverse careers for scientists. The Committee for Postdocs and Students (COMPASS) at ASCB has planned variety of career development panels and seminars that will be offered during the 2019 ASCB|EMBO meeting in Washington, DC.

1.     Katie Langin (2019). “In a first, U.S. private sector employs nearly as many Ph.D.s as schools do” Science Magazine. doi.org/10.1126/science.caredit.aax3138

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Over recent months, tech companies have been laying workers off by the thousands. It is estimated that in 2022 alone, over 120,000 people have been dismissed from their job at some of the biggest players in tech – Meta , Amazon , Netflix , and soon Google – and smaller firms and starts ups as well. Announcements of cuts keep coming.

Recent layoffs across the tech sector are an example of “social contagion” – companies are laying off workers because everyone is doing it, says Stanford business Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer. (Image credit: Courtesy Jeffrey Pfeffer)

What explains why so many companies are laying large numbers of their workforce off? The answer is simple: copycat behavior, according to Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business .

Here, Stanford News talks to Pfeffer about how the workforce reductions that are happening across the tech industry are a result mostly of “social contagion”: Behavior spreads through a network as companies almost mindlessly copy what others are doing. When a few firms fire staff, others will probably follow suit. Most problematic, it’s a behavior that kills people : For example, research has shown that layoffs can increase the odds of suicide by two times or more .

Moreover, layoffs don’t work to improve company performance,  Pfeffer adds. Academic studies have shown that time and time again, workplace reductions don’t do much for paring costs. Severance packages cost money, layoffs increase unemployment insurance rates, and cuts reduce workplace morale and productivity as remaining employees are left wondering, “Could I be fired too?”

For over four decades, Pfeffer, the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior, has studied hiring and firing practices in companies across the world. He’s met with business leaders at some of the country’s top companies and their employees to learn what makes – and doesn’t make – effective, evidence-based management. His recent book Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance–And What We Can Do About It (Harper Business, 2018) looks at how management practices, including layoffs, are hurting, and in some cases, killing workers.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why are so many tech companies laying people off right now?

The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing. If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are the result of imitative behavior and are not particularly evidence-based.

I’ve had people say to me that they know layoffs are harmful to company well-being, let alone the well-being of employees, and don’t accomplish much, but everybody is doing layoffs and their board is asking why they aren’t doing layoffs also.

Do you think layoffs in tech are some indication of a tech bubble bursting or the company preparing for a recession?

Could there be a tech recession? Yes. Was there a bubble in valuations? Absolutely. Did Meta overhire? Probably. But is that why they are laying people off? Of course not. Meta has plenty of money. These companies are all making money. They are doing it because other companies are doing it.

What are some myths or misunderstandings about layoffs?

Layoffs often do not cut costs, as there are many instances of laid-off employees being hired back as contractors, with companies paying the contracting firm. Layoffs often do not increase stock prices, in part because layoffs can signal that a company is having difficulty. Layoffs do not increase productivity. Layoffs do not solve what is often the underlying problem, which is often an ineffective strategy, a loss of market share, or too little revenue. Layoffs are basically a bad decision.

Companies sometimes lay off people that they have just recruited – oftentimes with paid recruitment bonuses. When the economy turns back in the next 12, 14, or 18 months, they will go back to the market and compete with the same companies to hire talent. They are basically buying labor at a high price and selling low. Not the best decision.

People don’t pay attention to the evidence against layoffs. The evidence is pretty extensive, some of it is reviewed in the book I wrote on human resource management, The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First. If companies paid attention to the evidence, they could get some competitive leverage because they would actually be basing their decisions on science.

You’ve written about the negative health effects of layoffs. Can you talk about some of the research on this topic by you and others?

Layoffs kill people, literally . They kill people in a number of ways. Layoffs increase the odds of suicide by two and a half times. This is also true outside of the United States, even in countries with better social safety nets than the U.S., like New Zealand.

Layoffs increase mortality by 15-20% over the following 20 years.

There are also health and attitudinal consequences for managers who are laying people off as well as for the employees who remain . Not surprisingly, layoffs increase people’s stress . Stress, like many attitudes and emotions, is contagious. Depression is contagious , and layoffs increase stress and depression, which are bad for health.

Unhealthy stress leads to a variety of behaviors such as smoking and drinking more , drug taking , and overeating . Stress is also related to addiction , and layoffs of course increase stress.

What was your reaction to some of the recent headlines of mass layoffs, like Meta laying off 11,000 employees?

I am concerned. Most of my recent research is focused on the effect of the workplace on human health and how economic insecurity is bad for people. This is on the heels of the COVID pandemic and the social isolation resulting from that, which was also bad for people.

We ought to place a higher priority on human life.

If layoffs are contagious within an industry, could it then spread across industries, leading to other sectors cutting staff?

Of course, it already has. Layoffs are contagious across industries and within industries. The logic driving this, which doesn’t sound like very sensible logic because it’s not, is people say, “Everybody else is doing it, why aren’t we?”

Retailers are pre-emptively laying off staff, even as final demand remains uncertain. Apparently, many organizations will trade off a worse customer experience for reduced staffing costs, not taking into account the well-established finding that is typically much more expensive to attract new customers than it is to keep existing ones happy.

Are there past examples of contagious layoffs like the one we are seeing now, and what lessons were learned?

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, every airline except Southwest did layoffs. By the end of that year, Southwest, which did not do any layoffs, gained market share. A.G. Lafley, who was the former CEO of Procter and Gamble, said the best time to gain ground on your competition is when they are in retreat – when they are cutting their services, when they are cutting their product innovation because they have laid people off. James Goodnight, the CEO of the software company SAS Institute, has also never done layoffs – he actually hired during the last two recessions because he said it’s the best time to pick up talent.

Any advice to workers who may have been laid off?

My advice to a worker who has been laid off is when they find a job in a company where they say people are their most important asset, they actually check to be sure that the company behaves consistently with that espoused value when times are tough.

If layoffs don’t work, what is a better solution for companies that want to mitigate the problems they believe layoffs will address?

One thing that Lincoln Electric, which is a famous manufacturer of arc welding equipment, did well is instead of laying off 10% of their workforce, they had everybody take a 10% wage cut except for senior management, which took a larger cut. So instead of giving 100% of the pain to 10% of the people, they give 100% of the people 10% of the pain.

Companies could use economic stringency as an opportunity, as Goodnight at the SAS Institute did in the 2008 recession and in the 2000 tech recession. He used the downturn to upgrade workforce skills as competitors eliminated jobs, thereby putting talent on the street. He actually hired during the 2000 recession and saw it as an opportunity to gain ground on the competition and gain market share when everybody was cutting jobs and stopped innovating. And it is [an opportunity]. Social media is not going away. Artificial intelligence, statistical software, and web services industries – none of these things are going to disappear.

I'm a recent college graduate. No one told me it would be this hard to make ends meet.

• After graduating college, I couldn't get a full-time job, so I am working several part-time gigs.
• I am frustrated because I didn't know it would be this hard to make ends meet after college.
• I am trying to look on the bright side and understand that I am learning financial lessons.

After the initial thrill and excitement of graduation wore off, the first few months as a recent college graduate were quickly followed by a blur of job applications, rejections, and figuring out budgeting basics.

I quickly realized that the financial independence I longed for now seemed like a far-off dream.

On the one hand, I gained my independence, but on the other, I now had to navigate issues like rent, groceries, and basic utilities. But since I couldn't land a full-time job in my desired field — as a biotechnologist — I struggled to make ends meet.

I realized I had a lot to learn.

I couldn't get a full-time job, so I struggled to make ends meet

I rarely considered the comfort and stability that being in college had provided. While in school, I could always rely on my family — and even friends — to quickly jump in to support me if I needed financial help . But soon after graduation, I realized I was on my own. I had to quickly understand that the support I once enjoyed had finally dwindled.

The possibility of getting a full-time job seemed almost impossible, so I had to take what was available. I took any odd job: I waited tables, babysat, and even became a part-time receptionist at a hotel.

With the measly paychecks I got, I then had to figure out how to negotiate between my needs and wants. I had to plan every single bit of my income and spending.

Related stories

I remember sitting in bed , surrounded by bills and a spreadsheet that refused to balance. The uncorrelated numbers on my spreadsheet were a stark reminder that my survival jobs weren't cutting it. My pay barely covered what I needed monthly.

That's when I decided I needed at least two part-time jobs to cover my basic needs.

I don't understand how I got here

In the midst of all that was happening, I couldn't quite get my head around the fact that I couldn't secure a future or land a job. I went to college and followed every step I needed to; my future felt like a guarantee. But I'm realizing I was wrong.

I felt like a failure for not being able to get a job, and I also felt let down by the system.

But I am trying to look on the bright side. Learning to manage my finances at such a young age has taught me invaluable lessons. The challenge of having every penny already spent before receiving the paycheck makes saving an impossible but interesting task. I am learning how to save money and how far a dollar can truly go. I am becoming stronger and wiser through this process.

I am still looking to the future

It's been a year since I graduated. Though I am still looking for a full-time job and struggling to make ends meet, I try to remind myself that this is just a phase in a tough labor market . It will just take some patience and practice.

But while I wait for that to happen, I am quickly learning to adapt to my reality and figure it out one day at a time.

I hope that one day, I will look back at these struggles as the foundation of my financial wisdom. The lessons taught me not just how to survive but how to thrive.

Watch: How counterfeit money actually works, according to a former forger

• Main content

PhD (f/m/d) for the X-Ray Spectroscopic Characterization of Functional Interlayers in Perovskite Solar Cells

Job Information

Offer description.

Work group:

Interface Design

Area of research:

Job description:

Reference No. SE 2024/18

The Department Interface Design is looking for

• Characterization of functional interlayers in perovskite solar cells and its interfaces using X-ray spectroscopic methods. The focus is on revealing the chemical and electronic structure of surfaces and buried interfaces in layer stacks provided by project partners. Use of various X-ray probes to analyze the chemical and electronic structure of the involved surfaces, interfaces and material volume, which should provide crucial insights for a knowledge-based optimization approach.
• Support the further development of spectroscopic methods for the characterization of halide perovskite photovoltaics.
• Participate in development of methods and apparatus for operando spectroscopy of photovoltaic materials.
• Writing beamtime applications, organizing and supporting synchrotron measurement campaigns. Coordinating exchange of samples and findings with project partners.
• Presentation and publication of results at international conferences/workshops and in peer-reviewed journals.

Your Profile

• We are looking for a highly motivated and curious scientist holding a MSc degree in physics, physical chemistry, or material science.
• Knowledge in the operation of ultrahigh vacuum equipment and using X-ray spectroscopies is highly beneficial.
• Background in photovoltaic materials research is appreciated but not required (enthusiasm for such topics is strongly recommended!).
• We will expect from you an independent communication and collaboration with project partners to organize sample exchange and measurement campaigns.
• Excellent English communication skills are necessary. Additional German skills are advantageous. High level of intercultural competence and ability to work in a team is necessary.

We ask you to enclose the following documents with your application:

• Motivation letter, including your research interests.
• Curriculum vitae with the stages of your career, publications, research experience and the contact details of at least two scientific references
• Certificates and grades

Further Information

Prof. Dr. Marcus Bär

+49 (030) 8062 - 15641

[email protected]

Closing Date: 09.06.2024

This research center is part of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers. With more than 42,000 employees and an annual budget of over € 5 billion, the Helmholtz Association is Germany's largest scientific organisation.

Requirements

Additional information, work location(s), where to apply.

79-year-old graduates with a bachelor’s degree

MONTGOMERY, Ala. ( WSFA /Gray News) - A 79-year-old Alabama woman has been working for the past four years to graduate from college.

“I don’t give myself any expiration dates on anything,” said graduate Angerline Day.

After retiring from her job at JCPenney, Day said she felt she had more life left to live and learn.

“I think I would like to do something to give back to my peers,” she said.

When she was younger, she said she was thinking of getting a psychology degree but didn’t have the money. After high school, Day was enrolled at Alabama State University but couldn’t afford to finish. After all these years, her sons stepped in.

“He said ‘Well, mom, I’m not going to give you a Christmas present. I’m not going to give you a birthday present, so how about I send you back to school?’” said Day.

For the past four years, Day earned her degree right from her bedroom. She said she loved learning but, like so many students, had her troubles with earning a degree from her desktop.

“I love to read. That’s not a problem, I’ll do the assignment but now, I’m supposed to put it in this computer. How in the hell am I going to do that?” said Day.

Day gave up ... for just one day.

“The feeling of failure kicked in, and I must do this for myself. This is the last opportunity. I’m going to do this this,” said Day.

Fast forward to now: she’s walked across the stage and accepted her diploma from Troy University.

She said she hopes her story will encourage those who don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel or feel their time is running out.

“Life is there because I’m probably close to the end ... and I have to grab it as much as I possibly can while I can,” said Day.

Copyright 2024 WSFA via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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