The limits of graduate professional development

Graduate professional development (GPD) has come a long way since it started taking shape in the late 2000s as a key feature of graduate education in Canada. Underlying much of its growth has been a simple problem with no clear solution: a drastic lack of permanent academic positions compared to the number of PhD graduates produced in Canadian universities. GPD programming now provides career support for PhD students that was often absent in the past, and it has undoubtedly aided many PhD students in preparing for the transition away from academia. The underlying problem, however, has not gone away, and neither PhD programs nor the job market show signs of adapting to accommodate the overproduction of PhDs. When it comes to facilitating career transition, have we reached the limit of what GPD can offer within the structural constraints of the university system and the Canadian job market? I pose this question as we enter a time of austerity for higher education in Canada, knowing that permanent academic jobs or postsecondary teaching positions of any kind will become increasingly scarce, and that broader economic troubles may also be on the horizon.

GPD, from the beginning, has focused on skills rather than knowledge — the latter being the domain of the various academic disciplines. A key document in the development of GPD in Canada is the 2012 report prepared by Marilyn Rose for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in which she identified a need for training in transferable skills for graduate students, as well as for instruction on how graduate students can reframe their academic skills and describe them to potential employers. This focus on transferable skills and skill translation is now a key part of GPD.

The hard reality that this skills discourse continues to obscure, however, is that no student completes a PhD program for the sake of developing transferable or translatable skills. It is also not clear to what extent high-level academic skills — in critical thinking, deep analysis, knowledge synthesis, and similar — are transferable or translatable from one realm of knowledge to another, or if those gained from a PhD are that much different from those gained from a master’s degree once they are removed from a disciplinary context.

There are limits in the non-academic job market as well, which still does not demand PhDs. (The 2021 report by the Council of Canadian Academies, Degrees of Success, addressed this problem.) While PhD graduates are typically capable people who will eventually find decent work, we know that there are still few non-academic jobs that require PhDs or make full use of PhD-level academic skills. Certainly, there are none that provide opportunities for self-directed research of the scope and depth that is characteristic of academic research.

So is this it? Is this the best we can do? It may be all we can do as people working in GPD. There could, however, be something that disciplines can do by rethinking the purpose of PhD programs. By this I do not mean making PhD programs something different than what they have always been. What makes PhD programs important and worth keeping is not ultimately the skills they provide but the disciplinary knowledge they help create, preserve and transmit. PhD programs socialize students within an academic discipline and train them to be scholars. I suggest that instead of relying on GPD and the language of transferable and translatable skills to expand the definition of what PhD students can do, academic disciplines can work to expand the definition of what constitutes scholarship, who can carry it out, and where it should take place.

Will professional academic research remain an all-or-nothing career option, confined to lifelong institutional positions accessible to comparatively few PhDs, or can it be somehow distributed among the vast numbers of PhDs whose knowledge and academic skills remain chronically underutilized?

We can encourage public scholarship — as GPD programs increasingly do — but for most PhD students, any skills they develop in this field will be put to use after graduation in contexts outside of the realm of specialized disciplinary knowledge. In the end, it is up to faculty to decide how to create sustainable futures for their disciplines and how society can harness the collective disciplinary expertise of the PhDs they have trained. I can only say that GPD and the skills discourse, however crucial they are for helping PhD graduates make the best of an unfortunate situation, will not be enough. We seem to have reached a limit, and the question is where to go from here.