Transferable skills with a PhD

• Define a problem and identify possible causes
• Identify a question that needs to be answered
• Identify the information that might be needed to answer that question
• Choose the best method(-s) to gather and analyse information
• Comprehend large amounts of information
• Form and defend independent conclusions
• Design an experiment, plan, or model that defines a problem, tests potential resolutions and implements a solution

• Facilitate group discussions or conduct meetings
• Motivate others to complete projects (group or individual)
• Respond appropriately to positive or negative feedback
• Effectively mentor subordinates and/or peers
• Collaborate on projects
• Teach skills or concepts to others
• Navigate complex bureaucratic environments

Your project will have stakeholders, just like any commercial or professional enterprise. Your university, your research group, your supervisor and your funder: all will be invested in the success of your PhD and all will seek particular outcomes from it. Your funder, if other than the university, may want to ensure you address some very specific topics in which they have a vested personal, charitable or commercial interest. These might not be the most exciting features of your PhD from an academic point of view, but you’ll need to give them sufficient attention. Your university, on the other hand, may want to ensure that your individual project support its wider research culture and longer-term objectives. Similarly, your supervisor will be concerned that your scholarly development (and conduct) reflects well on them. These interests are unlikely to conflict in any significant way, but you’ll need to satisfy them during your project. That could involve some careful expectation management as well as good interpersonal skills.

Doing a PhD you’re the ‘lead’ for your project. Even where that doesn’t involve leading other people, it still means being ultimately responsible for key acts of decision making and for meeting important targets. There are also likely to be times when you’ll need to demonstrate leadership in a more conventional sense. Many PhD candidates work as a part of larger research teams, collaborate on shared projects or help organice conferences and events. All of these require leadership and cooperation. PhD candidates are also normally employed as junior academic staff and many have a full year of duty work on teaching. The skills you develop when teaching undergraduates aren’t just useful in education (though they clearly are very relevant to appropriate professions). You’ll ‘lead’ students through part of a course, but you’ll also guide their development through group discussion and feedback. Becoming a leading authority in your field is key to a PhD, but that leadership and authority can be about more than academic expertise.

• Manage a project or projects from beginning to end
• Identify goals and/or tasks to be accomplished and a realistic timeline for completion
• Prioritize tasks while anticipating potential problems
• Maintain flexibility in the face of changing circumstances

You will manage a long project, taking it from proposal to submission and being ultimately responsible for the success of that process. What’s more important, however, is how you’ll do that: the challenges you’ll face, the techniques you’ll have to master and the specific kinds of experience you’ll gain. Individual chapters, experiment designs, presentations or publications will all involve their own miniature ‘project cycles’. Often you’ll be managing more than one at once. Thought about in these terms, a PhD really is an exercise in high-level project management, with a lot to offer your CV.

All sorts of careers require workers to focus upon a specific topic, in great detail, for a specific length of time, in order to solve a problem or to achieve a specific goal. As a PhD you are trained in complex research methods, and clearly skilled within this field. Both for qualitative and quantitative resarchers complex skills are required: 

• Ability to choose a suitable method for a specific task to be solved
• Data collection skills
• Interpersonal skills (gain access to data, work with respondents, taking different perspectives, professional distance)
• Systematic data analysis skills
• Writing skills
• Ability to be reflexive

Data collection requires training in a specific research method, as well as an awareness of a broad range of methods in order to make an informed selection. This approach is very useful for future project, both in and outside academia. The most common methods within the Social Sciences are: Interviews, Observations, Field studies, Questionnaires, Documentary Analysis

Qualitative research analysis especially requires the researcher to:

• Make sense of and transform massive amounts of data, which can be both textual and visual
• Identify significant themes and construc a conceptual framework
• Have considerable skill in transforming data into theory

Quantitative research analysis especially requires the researcher to:

• Determine a suitable Sampling and Sample Design
• Gather data, or get access to data
• Have complex statistical analysis skills
• Indentify patterns

• Identify sources of information applicable to a given problem
• Understand and synthesize large quantities of data
• Design and analyze surveys
• Develop organizing principles to effectively sort and evaluate data 

Putting together a business plan requires research skills. Designing and developing a new product requires research skills. Deciding upon political and social policy requires research skills. Identifying new markets and audiences requires research skills. Writing a Norwegian Official Report (NOU) and even writing for a website requires research skills.

• Work effectively under pressure and to meet deadlines
• Comprehend new material and subject matter quickly
• Work effectively with limited supervision
• Demonstrate an ability to specialize
• Keeping motivated

As a PhD candidate you don’t have a teacher who imparts knowledge to you: you have a supervisor who guides the development of your own ideas. You don’t follow a curriculum with set academic content: you set the parameters for your own questions and seek out the answers yourself. You don’t progress through a series of regular checkpoints with summative feedback: you manage your project independently and it succeeds or fails according to your ability to do that. It will come as no surprise that being a researcher is not continuously exciting and stimulating. It often is, but any activity carried out to the exclusion of others becomes monotonous, while there are some aspects of research that demand attention to tedious detail. Keeping the motivation and progress even though is in fact a significant skill.

All sorts of careers require workers to focus upon a specific topic, in great detail, for a specific length of time, in order to achieve a specific goal. That’s exactly what you do during a PhD and it demonstrates adaptability, flexibility and a big portion of self-management.

• Prepare concise and logically-written materials
• Organize and communicate ideas effectively in oral presentations to small and large groups
• Have the ability to present results usefully and effectively to an appropriate audience
• Write at all levels — brief abstract to book-length manuscript
• Debate issues in a collegial manner and participate in group discussions
• Use logical argument to persuade others
• Explain complex or difficult concepts in basic terms and language
• Write effective grant proposals

Whatever your discipline, there will be technical and literary skills to be learnt as you progress through your research. Every researcher will need fairly advanced IT skills either for all of, or combinations of, reviewing literature, collecting data, data analysis and presentation through PowerPoint, Prezi, interactive whiteboards or other written forms. During a PhD it is common to attend a number of different courses to learn reasearch tools (systems of references, tools to analyse data etc.). These skills are valuable and may strengthen your CV.

This text is a collocated text mainly from the websites to the University Career Center, University of Michigan and  www.findaphd.com

Web page sources (9 March 2020): 

https://www.findaphd.com/advice/blog/1971/transferable-skills-with-a-phd

https://careercenter.umich.edu/article/phd-transferable-skills

http://www.restore.ac.uk/Benchmarking/workshop/Facilitators_Guide_1.pdf

https://methods.sagepub.com/book/developing-transferable-skills/i345.xml