An online consultation among potential employers outside academia surveyed the importance of transferable skills acquired by PhD holders on the labour market.
This report presents the results of the online stakeholder questionnaire conducted by the European Science Foundation within the DocEnhance project in November 2021.
At the start of the DocEnhance project, four regional workshops were held with partners’ non-academic stakeholders to explore PhD employers’ needs and their perception of the skills acquired and added-value of the doctorate degree.
This wider online consultation aimed to complement these workshops by reaching out to more potential PhD employers outside academia to better discern any gaps in the transferable skills needed for PhDs on the non-academic labour market. It also builds upon DocEnhance’s career-tracking survey, carried out with 2000+ recent PhD graduates from nine participating European universities, complementing their views with the views of non-academic employers.
Attention is particularly paid to comparing skills acquired by doctorate holders at the completion of their doctorate and the importance given to these skills by non-academic employers.