Main Content
Session Information
22 SES 03 B, PhD Careers and Employability
Symposium
Contribution
A recent study carried out by ADI – the national association of PhD students and PhD graduates – predicts that only 6.5% of current Italian Post-doc researchers will obtain long-term academic positions (ADI, 2016). The result is that an increasing number of PhD graduates is turning to the non academic labor market, often considering this as a second-choice option. The contribution from Italy will present an ongoing qualitative research based on narrative interviews addressed to PhDs graduates that experienced a professional transition and faced the challenge of "transferring" competences developed during the academic training into new contexts (OECD, 2012). The construction of the research sample entailed different choices, first of all the decision of interviewing PhDs coming from a wide range of disciplines in order to be coherent with the interdisciplinary nature of transferable competences. Another criteria for sampling was the diversity of professional trajectories in terms of destinations: from contexts more familiar with academic research (e.g. a big company research centers) to others more "unconventional". A key example of an “unconventional” context is the world of small and medium enterprises that is almost never mentioned as possible professional destination for PhD graduates although it accounts for the greater part of European (and Italian) entrepreneurship (Galimberti & Ratti, 2018). This variety enhanced the possibility to explore a wide range of of assumptions and dialogues coming into play during transitions. Big companies or public research centers are probably more used to understand the value of a PhD and to adopt ideas and languages more coherent with the academic ones. "Unconventional" contexts, on the contrary, in many cases don't even know what a PhD actually is and may offer more challenging and difficult encounters. Participants' narratives highlight moments in which their taken for granted assumptions and courses of action seemed not being useful anymore for making meaning in the new professional contexts. These situations are experienced as very challenging and disorientating events, often requiring a transformation of previously structured frames of reference (Mezirow, 2000). New learning processes may be triggered, resulting in new positioning on a variety of dimensions involved in transitions (Fenwick, 2013): explicit and tacit knowledge acquired during PhD training, one's own professional identity or aknowledgement needs. Dealing with all this issues is often a very demanding endeavour that cannot be resolved only through instrumental thinking but requires also relational and imaginative resources.
References
ADI (2016) VI Indagine Adi su dottorato e Post-Doc. Retrieved from: https://dottorato.it/sites/default/files/survey/vi-indagine-adi-postdoc.pdf Fenwick, T. (2013). Understanding transitions in professional practice and learning: Towards new questions for research. Journal of Workplace Learning, 25 (6), 352-367. Galimberti, A., Ratti, E. (2018). Continuity and discontinuity around the academia. The "FindYourDoctor" project as a space for researching and facilitating learning careers. In Merrill, B., Galimberti, A., Nizinska, A., Gonzàlez-Monteagudo, J. (Eds) Continuity and discontinuity in learning careers. Potentials for a learning space in a changing world. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers (In Press) Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning to think like an adult. Core concepts of Transformation Theory. In Learning as Transformation. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. OECD (2012). Transferable Skills Training for Researchers. Supporting career development and research. Paris: OECD Publishing
Programme by Network 2019
00. Central Events (Keynotes, EERA-Panel, EERJ Round Table, Invited Sessions)
Network 1. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations
Network 2. Vocational Education and Training (VETNET)
Network 3. Curriculum Innovation
Network 4. Inclusive Education
Network 5. Children and Youth at Risk and Urban Education
Network 6. Open Learning: Media, Environments and Cultures
Network 7. Social Justice and Intercultural Education
Network 8. Research on Health Education
Network 9. Assessment, Evaluation, Testing and Measurement
Network 10. Teacher Education Research
Network 11. Educational Effectiveness and Quality Assurance
Network 12. LISnet - Library and Information Science Network
Network 13. Philosophy of Education
Network 14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research
Network 15. Research Partnerships in Education
Network 16. ICT in Education and Training
Network 17. Histories of Education
Network 18. Research in Sport Pedagogy
Network 19. Ethnography
Network 20. Research in Innovative Intercultural Learning Environments
Network 22. Research in Higher Education
Network 23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Network 24. Mathematics Education Research
Network 25. Research on Children's Rights in Education
Network 26. Educational Leadership
Network 27. Didactics – Learning and Teaching
Network 28. Sociologies of Education
Network 29. Reserach on Arts Education
Network 30. Research on Environmental und Sustainability Education
Network 31. Research on Language and Education (LEd)
Network 32. Organizational Education
The programme is updated regularly (each day in the morning)
Marginal Content
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.