Abstract:

Over the last decades, the number of doctoral students enrolled in engineering doctoral programmes, as well as the number of academic researchers in engineering, has increased. This poses major challenges to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), which have the societal responsibility to promote their PhD candidates’ employment but also employability prospects.

In many educational systems, the doctorate programmes are almost exclusively research-based and the skills-set developed during it, is left to the candidates’ voluntary choices and opportunities that arise. Other educational systems which offer doctoral programmes with a taught component usually teach highly technical and discipline-specific skills, and barely address the development of transferable skills.

These technical and discipline-specific skills may be enough to promote the candidates’ employment prospects, in their field of study, but they do not promote employability perceived as “intangible” competencies that often separate highly qualified employees from average workers. Supporting this, stakeholders inquiries often point out that PhD candidates, although demonstrating a wide range of technical skills, still need to develop more of the transversal and transferable skills required to succeed in the workplace, such as leadership, communication, and teamwork skills. Therefore, there seems to be a décalage between what skills are promoted and developed during a doctoral programme and what skills the labour market expects and requires of a PhD graduate. Aligned with these industry’s perspectives, literature has been pointing out that 3rd cycle studies do not prepare PhD candidates for jobs outside academia (2,3) and many scholars have recommended the redesign of engineering doctoral education programmes in order to tackle the skills gap, and support PhD graduates transition from education into employment (4).

Some companies have long tried to mitigate the impact and effects of the competencies gap by considering the Peter Principle (4) and appropriately adopting an optimal strategy of Human Resources Management (HRM) by promoting competencies training. We propose a similar framework of Doctoral Candidates Management by timely and intentionally promoting formal opportunities of transversal and transferable competencies development. This paper will focus on the need to adopt an HRM framework for Doctoral Candidates in order to overcome the gap between academic perceptions on what should be a PhD candidates’ training and the labour market expectations for a PhD graduate. It will also be discussed how HEIs can implement the competencies training.

Keywords:

Doctoral training, Doctoral Education, Human Resources Management, Framework, Management by Competencies.