What do non academic employers want? A critical examination of PhD shaped job advertisements for doctoral employability

Conventionally the PhD has been positioned as training at the beginning of an academic career, but this original purpose is now under question in many countries. This discomfort about the appropriateness of the PhD, even for its stated purpose of training academics, has a long history. The earliest paper we located on the topic was from 1930 (Dale, 1930) two decades before Australia started offering research training degrees. For at least two decades the changing workforce structures have been noted as a problem for PhD graduates in finding academic employment (Pazeley, 1996). In Australia the number of graduates who end up working outside the academy is likely to be as high as 60% (McGagh, 2016), making it more normal to engage in a non academic career path on graduation than to stay on and become an academic. Governments are starting to recognise the importance of highly trained graduates to innovation, which is increasingly positioned as a future route to increased national prosperity (Access Economics, 2010). In Australia this has translated to policy makers putting pressure on universities to re-think PhD curriculums to make them more industry relevant. However, there is a paucity of data to guide this transition to an innovation economy with a high number of research workers. Data from employers is mostly anecdotal, consisting of retrospective self report from individual employers, chambers of commerce and professional accreditation bodies. This study aims to fill this gap by examining what non academic employers want by looking at job advertisements; aspirational statements about the ideal candidate the company is wishing to hire.