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Working with postdocs
In this article we cover what we consider to be the key points around working with postdocs as a staff group. You may not have worked directly with postdocs before, so this article is aimed at getting you up to speed quickly. If you’re experienced in working with postdocs you may want to skip ahead to the challenges and recommendations.
What is a postdoc? What do you call them and why it matters
Postdoc is a term that is short for postdoctoral researcher. They are usually employed on fixed term research contract as part of a grant awarded to an academic (principal investigator). Some may have independent fellowships (postdoctoral fellow) but still work within a research group headed by an academic. You’ll find postdoc contracts advertised ranging from around 6 months to 5+ years. Both examples are extremes, many postdoc contracts fall within 1-3 years in length. If they are on a ‘permanent’ contract this may be ‘permanent with insecure funding’ so their employment ends when the research grant they are paid from ends. For more information on what a postdoc is see our blog part 1 and part 2.
Postdoc are members of staff who hold a PhD qualification, not to be confused with post graduate students (PGRs) who are working towards completing PhD. Postdocs are professional researchers and are often responsible, as part of their job, for (co-) supervision of students (undergraduate, masters and PhD) and, in many cases, delivery of teaching (such as tutorials and lectures). Note that as they are staff they will not be tracked (their next career destination) by your institutions Alumni team.
The terms you use matter. Not all postdocs will self-identify with the term early-career researchers (ECR) so bear this in mind when advertising sessions. For some, the term ECR refers to tenured (permanent) academic staff, so junior lecturers for example, and does not include postdocs.
How many postdocs are there?
There are around 50,000 postdocs working in the UK (Woolston, 2022). If you work in a research-intensive HEI your postdoc population will likely be greater than the number of permanent, tenured academic staff.
Globally there are likely something of the order of 400,000 (p.8, Albrecht and Schaffartzik, 2013), although counting is tricky as there is no clearly globally defined definition of what a postdoc is so this number is very much an estimate.
In broad terms, Biological and Biomedical Sciences typically has the greatest proportion of postdocs, followed by Physical and Environmental Sciences, with Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences having by far the smallest postdoc population. This is the overall postdoc population breakdown, the proportions at your institution may well differ. If you want to read about this in more detail check out our blog.
Understanding postdocs career development needs
It goes without saying that all postdocs are different but here we highlight some things you may find that they have in common or approaches we recommend.
Seek out postdocs at your institution and speak to them about their working life, career development needs and what they would like to see. See if there is a postdoc association, society, research staff grouping, research staff forum or research staff representatives. Look for any formal annual event for postdocs such as a research staff conference – could you speak at any of these?
Postdocs are very diverse and are a highly (often internationally) mobile group, largely due to the short-term nature of their fixed work contracts. This often comes will employment challenges with respect to restrictive government policies on foreign workers (OECD, 2021, p.15), securing or renewing work visas, their ability to bring their partner or family with them or being a dual career couple simultaneously securing work (see Tzanakou 2017 for more details on the ‘two body problem’). English may not be their first language, so language barriers and intercultural differences can create challenges. You may wish to read this Nature article for an example Lenharo, M. 2023. The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers. See our resources on building your intercultural competency and resources aimed at PIs/MoRs.
Some postdocs may have started their role directly after completing their PhD. Whereas you may work with postdocs who’ve been in role for many years (10-20 years+). It’s fairly common to find postdocs who’ve been employed at the same institution on a number of grants or conversely moved between institutions for different postdoc roles.
Not all postdocs have worked solely in academia for their whole working career. You’ll find postdocs who’ve had careers elsewhere, then started their undergraduate degree or PhD as a mature student, perhaps part-time, and gone on to become a postdoc. You’ll also come across researchers post-PhD who’ve worked in industrial settings or archives and then come back to work within academia.
As highly educated professionals, many aspire to a long-term academic career path. They are typically aware that the academic career pathway is challenging. More postdocs want a long-term academic career than the system can support*.
Note that a small fraction of postdocs (for both positive and negative reasons) become what’s been described as long-term researchers, see Menard and Shinton (2022) for details.
Not all postdocs aspire to become academics. In a 2020 survey conducted by Nature, nearly two-thirds (63%) of respondents hope to pursue a career in academia, with around one-quarter (26%) unsure of their career plans (Woolston, 2020). A minority of the overall postdoc population go on to become permanent academic (tenure tracked) staff, in the region of 10% to 15% (Sauermann and Roach 2016, McConnell et al. 2018). The majority of postdocs go on to a career beyond academia. Across the OECD, the majority of researchers (62.5%) eventually end up working in the business enterprise sector (OECD, 2020, p.37). As a comparison, Edwards 2021 (p. 11) longitudinal study of PhD students (science) found that there is no such thing as a ‘traditional’ pathway from the diverse range of careers they observed.
As the then Director of talent and skills at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Rory Duncan stated, ‘It should be clear to everybody, including postdocs and supervisors, that these roles are temporary and developmental’ (Woolston 2020 p.507). Many postdocs are unsure of their next career step; others will be committed to an academic career. Some may have decided to leave academia but are currently in the process of exploring their options. Some might have applied for their own independent academic positions but have not been successful so far. Some may be sure that they do not want to be academics with their own research groups or teaching responsibilities, but they like being researchers in an academic environment, so are open to staying or moving elsewhere.
Postdocs often work in isolation to a degree (due to their research specialism) and so can often feel disconnected or unrelated to other postdocs. We’ve commonly found postdocs feeling that they’ve been the only one to feel like this or going through things alone with respect to their career development. See ‘my own development’ page for suggested ways to address this.
Some of the different duty's postdoc’s may be responsible for include:
- planning and executing research,
- presenting at local and international meetings/conferences/seminars/workshops,
- writing papers/manuscripts/monographs for publication (and managing this process, responding to reviewers’ comments),
- writing grants, applying for funding and fellowship applications,
- formal or informal management responsibilities of people and/or processes (such as managing junior members of a research group or managing something operationally like dealing with suppliers, equipment or consumables for a laboratory or local health and safety requirements),
- planning projects and supervision of students,
- coordinating departmental seminars and guest lectures,
- running local groups and postdoc associations/postdoc representation,
- designing and facilitating workshops/tutorials/labs with undergraduate students,
- lecturing and marking of course work and exam scripts,
- public outreach projects/public-facing communication (including things like writing news articles or social media posts),
- liaison with industry/working with industrial partners,
- involvement/collaboration with a university spin-out company/research commercialisation.
Challenges you might encounter when working with postdocs
In addition to the challenges included in ‘my own development’ page we’ve included some extra challenges you may encounter when offering postdoc career development.
We found during our two pilot cohorts that postdocs often reported feeling that they were ‘falling behind’ in their career development or that they were concerned they weren’t ‘doing it correctly’. This was despite us stating verbally and in writing that the career development on offer was designed to provide them choice of what they engaged with, and all available on-demand. You may need to reassure your postdocs that career development is very individual and not a completist exercise, with no expectation on them to engage with everything on offer.
We found some postdocs wanting to know ‘what they should be doing?’ in terms of career development - we created some FAQs and our response to this question was: There is no ‘should’. You are in control of your own career development, what you do is up to you. You decide what you engage with and to what extent.
You may find some postdocs who’ve an expectation that you will give direction as to what career they should do, rather than seeing it as a process where they come to decisions based on an understanding of their personal strengths, skills, interests, motivations and values. You may need to consider ways you can ensure the postdocs feel empowered to have ownership of their own career development.
We found that most postdocs levels of engagement with career development ebbed and flowed over their time on the pilot cohort. You may also find postdocs who are initially engaged with their career development but that this deceases overtime or they appear to drift away. In our experience we found a few factors this appeared to be due to. It could relate to the urgency of their personal situation, perhaps they are close to their contract end date. Alternatively, it could be due to the control they have over how they spend their time day-to-day. Some postdocs will plan to be really involved at the start but find that other things (usually pressures of research or personal issues) get in their way. As a researcher developer you can encourage and provide practical support around time prioritisation and so on, but some factors may be beyond your control.
You may encounter postdocs with a narrow view of what career development is. You might find that they expect any events/workshops/activities around careers as simply being about ‘creating a CV’ or a job application, rather than a broader, self-driven activity.
You may also find a tendency amongst postdocs towards gaining an extra qualification, whether they really need it in their desired career path or not. So, you may get requests for things like project management qualifications, as studying to gain a certified qualification is within the postdocs comfort zone.
Some postdocs may approach career development a little cautiously and be unclear as to relevance of career development to them, to their individual circumstances or how it relates to their career as a researcher. You may notice this particularly for postdocs that really strongly wish to remain in academia and don’t see how engaging in career development will help them. They may have been advised (or gained the impression) to solely focus on writing papers and getting grants as the most important form of academic career development.
Whilst postdocs are a diverse group of staff we’ve come across some commonly held assumptions. These are by no means held by all, but you may notice them arise from time to time.
- SHAPE postdocs (and those in maths) often think that STEM postdocs have a clearly defined career path (or are more readily employable) compared to them.
- Hard work/dedication will secure an academic position.
- Careers other than in academia are a failure/are less worthwhile.
- Networking or socialising with peers as part of their career development is a waste of time.
- Only career discussions with postdocs from their own discipline/research niche is worthwhile.
- Some postdocs express discomfort around research in for-profit companies, raising concerns about rigor, ethics and research integrity.
- Belief that academia is the only employment setting where they’ll be able to have the intellectual freedom and support to pursue the research of their dreams
All of these assumptions can be sensitively challenged. Giving your postdocs opportunities to air their assumptions can be beneficial, as you or their peers can ask probing questions. The use of postdoc testimonials or postdoc ambassadors to speak persuasively on the benefits of peer networking (or other assumptions you come across) can also be very effective.
You as a researcher developer may hold your own assumptions about postdocs. We encourage you to explore and challenge these periodically.
For example, as postdocs are great at research, you may assume that they will readily see the parallels between these research skills and those they need to use for job hunting. Typically, we’ve found this not to be the case and this has had to be clearly highlighted to postdocs. An example of this is in the information we’ve created around considering possible roles beyond academia in the Career exploration section of Explore.
Recommendations
- Encourage postdocs to prioritise their own career development, particularly setting time aside to do it.
- Emphasize the importance of a thriving community of researchers.
- Support postdocs to raise their gaze, expand their horizons and look carefully and critically at all career options open to them (not just within academia alone).
- Highlight the importance of career development regardless of remaining length of contract or career pathway your postdocs are on.
- Get to know what the postdocs at your institution want in terms of career development.
- Challenge the postdocs to explore any assumptions they hold about particular careers, especially if they are holding them back, and get them to discover if there is any truth in their assumption/belief.
- Persuade postdocs to think about their skills development more broadly than in terms of gaining an additional qualification.
- Refresh and revisit your own assumptions about postdocs regularly.
- Celebrate all career development progress and outcomes within or beyond academia.
References and footnotes
*The chances of becoming a faculty or tenure tracked academic are increasingly slim, with the rise in the numbers of PhD graduates coupled with a decrease in the rate at which academics are exiting the career due to better health/healthier aging and the removal of the compulsory retirement age (OECD, 2021, pp.15-16).
PhD graduate production is escalating year on year (Albrect and Schaffartzik, 2013, p.8). This increase in the number of PhD graduates has led to an increase in the number of postdocs. As an example the number of postdocs in the USA grew by 160% from 19,000 in 1987 to 49,000 in 2014 (Andalib, Ghaffarzadegan and Larson 2018). Looking on a global scale, Albrect and Schaffartzik predicted a postdoc population of around 400,000 by 2013 (p.8). This steep increase in the number of PhD graduates and postdocs has not been mirrored in the number of academic positions available, which have remained broadly static across a similar time period (Schillebeeckx, Brett and Cory 2013 p.938).
References
Albrecht, F. and Schaffartzik, M. 2013. Postdoctoral Career Paths 2.0: The Golden Triangle of Competitive Junior Investigators, Adequate Academic Systems, and Successful Careers. https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/pls/web/docs/F3356/iab_brochure_2013.pdf: Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Andalib, M. A., Ghaffarzadegan, N. and Larson, R. C. 2018. The Postdoc Queue: A Labour Force in Waiting. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 35, 675-686.
Edwards, K. A., Acheson-Field, H., Rennane, S. and Zaber, M. A. 2023. Mapping scientists’ career trajectories in the survey of doctorate recipients using three statistical methods. Scientific Reports, 13, 8119.
Menard, C.B. and Shinton, S. 2022. The career paths of researchers in long-term employment on short-term contracts: Case study from a UK university. PLoS one, 17, e0274486-e0274486.
McConnell, S. C., Westerman, E. L., Pierre, J. F., Heckler, E. J. and Schwartz, N. B. 2018. United States National Postdoc Survey results and the interaction of gender, career choice and mentor impact. eLife, 7, e40189.
OECD, 2020, Main Science and Technology Indicators, Volume 2019 Issue 2, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/g2g9ff07-en.
OECD, 2021, Reducing the precarity of academic research careers, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, No. 113, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/0f8bd468-en
Sauermann, H. and Roach, M. 2016. Why pursue the postdoc path? Science, 352, 663-664.
Schillebeeckx, M., Maricque, B. and Lewis, C. 2013. The missing piece to changing the university culture. Nature Biotechnology, 31, 938-941.
Tzanakou, C. 2017. Dual career couples in academia, international mobility and dual career services in Europe. European Educational Research Journal, 16, 298-312.
Woolston, C. 2020. Uncertain prospects for postdoctoral researchers. Nature, 588, 181-184.
Woolston, C. 2022. Lab leaders wrestle with paucity of postdocs. Nature
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