Alumni in the News: Kris Gies on Alternative Careers for PhDs

After completing a PhD in history at the University of Guelph, our own Kris Gies moved into publishing sales and marketing with University of Toronto Press. This week he writes in University Affairs about promising new ways in which PhD graduates are learning about all the great careers they can build with their degrees...

"The prevailing conditions of today’s academic job market bring pause. The number of PhDs awarded each year remains high despite comparatively few tenure-track positions. At the same time, university teaching is increasingly performed by contingent faculty for low pay and with little job security. These trends have led to a situation where scholarship and a stable career have become mutually exclusive...

 for many talented, motivated men and women. Moreover, little guidance about non-academic careers has been offered to doctoral candidates during their education, a point expressed in reports by both HEQCO and the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars/Mitacs. This represents a longstanding failure of Canadian doctoral programs to adapt to current realities. To counter these trends, what measures can we take to minimize the all-too-common outcome for a newly minted PhD, facing either precarious employment in the academy or a steep, and not always successful, learning curve pursuing opportunities outside the academy? This question is especially pertinent for doctoral students in the Arts. Growing awareness of the realities facing new PhDs has led to some positive steps."

Read the rest of the article at University Affairs.