Stories from Beyond Academia #18: Billy Bryan
(PhD in Medical Education)
Curious about PhD-holder perspectives on the PhD process? In this interview, we talk to Dr Billy Bryan who has some research findings to answer this very question.
Billy is an Evaluation and Research Leader at RAND Europe, working in the Science and Emerging Technologies team in the UK.
Billy’s PhD is in Medical Education, and he got us thinking about clinical skills in a whole new way by drawing a fascinating parallel between sports performance and clinical performance. His PhD research focused on the benefits of breaking down clinical skills and providing feedback as they are performed, just like coaches of an elite football team might break down and provide feedback on a penalty kick.
While he was doing his PhD, Billy found himself saying yes to a series of extra-curricular opportunities, and it was from these experiences that he became interested in how graduates feel about their PhDs. Billy shares with us some of his findings from this second research stream, including a conceptual model that he and his colleague, Dr Kay Guccione, developed for judging the value of the PhD, and his recommendations for improving the doctoral experience.
We confess, this bit was pretty close to our hearts. Billy pretty much summed up our reasons for starting this work when he talked about more honest expectations about what the PhD is going to look like, more openness about and acceptance of the various career pathways that can follow a PhD, and more opportunities for hearing stories from beyond academia.
There’s also a brief but glorious discussion on what kind of ‘fun’ a PhD might constitute, and we think this might need to be a topic we revisit sometime very soon!
Jonathan McGuire: Hi Billy, thanks so much for joining us! I’m keen to talk about your career path, the work you've been involved in for over a decade now both in and around student employability, and to hear your thoughts on what’s to be gained from doctoral degrees. But first up, can you tell us what you were looking at in your PhD?
Billy Bryan: Hi, and thanks for having me! My PhD was in Medical Education even though I don't have a medical background, instead I have an exercise science undergraduate degree. What my PhD ended up being was an educational psychology/behavioural study of medical students and their clinical skills, because there's a lot of crossover between sports performance, sports psychology, and the performance of clinical skills like venepuncture, catheterisation, and so on. You can break those skills down in the same way that you can break down a penalty kick in football. One might be thought of as more high stakes than the other, although which is which might depend on who you talk to!
My PhD was at the University of Sheffield Medical School. My supervisor was the Head of Medical School and very interested in feedback mechanisms, so we targeted medical students in their early years, doing simulated clinical skills. For instance, working on rubber arms in a facility where they could make mistakes and try things out before they got into the clinical world. The idea was that if the students were taught and given feedback, breaking down the skill, trying to improve their confidence and self-regulation, then that would lead to them doing better at their clinical skills and having an easier transition to performing those procedures on real people. Because if you're taking blood from a rubber arm then it's much easier, the vein is always where you expect it to be, whereas if you're taking blood from someone who's elderly or has sunken veins then things might not quite be as you expect and it's much harder. So if you are given feedback and taught in a way that you can self-regulate a bit better, then you can cope better with the uncertainty that comes as part of that transition.
It was not really a randomised control trial (RCT), but our experimental manipulation was group-wise with a treatment (with the new teaching method) and a control group (usual teaching), taking measurements before and twice after (immediately, then some months after). And we did find that there was a difference in people's self-efficacy and self-regulation, qualitatively with the teachers as well. So that was really interesting, and I would say that I got a lot from that in terms of research methods. I did focus groups, interviews, statistics, surveys, ethnography, systematic review, everything really.
I really enjoyed the experience doing that research, but eventually got to the point where I kind of figured out that academic research wasn't really for me.
JM: I've never really thought about the analogy between these two high-stress, high-stakes fields. Like sporting events where you absolutely must perform at your peak for a really specific set of actions at a really specific time, where it doesn't matter how you felt when you woke up this morning, you just have to run very fast for 100 metres. And what it must be like for a physician going in and it doesn't matter if you just had to deliver some bad news or whatever to the previous patient, you now have to turn on your skills, be there, do whatever clinical intervention it might be with this new patient and absolutely nail it. It's a really interesting analogy.
BB: It was really interesting. It made a lot of sense to me, and it continues to do so.
JM: And it sounds like you were very mixed-methods in that research?
BB: Yeah, it comprised maybe around 70 or 80, interviews, focus groups, three rounds of surveys. I think I managed to get experience with essentially all the methods that you can think of for that kind of work really.
JM: You said that towards the end of that research you realised that academia wasn’t for you, and I believe you went into a research consulting role straight out of the PhD? Can you tell us a bit about what made you realise academia wasn't for you and how you landed on research consulting as the next step?
BB: I hadn't really done much in my undergraduate with regards to student societies or anything, I just did my degree and jobs on the side to pay the rent. And then when I got into my PhD, I became Student representative in the medical school and co-chair of the medical postgraduate society. That set off a lot of other things that I did on the side: Alongside teaching, I was also the counsellor for doctoral students at the Union, I would go to the Student Union Council and advocate on behalf of PhD students, and then became a Student Trustee of the Union after an election. I also worked at the Career Service for two years during that time, helping people with their CVs and cover letters. I just added so many different things. I was an event manager for something called ‘Pint of Science’, which is a science communication initiative where you get people to present their research at pubs and bars, which is great. And then I also started writing and doing the work I mentioned earlier with Dr Kay Guccione, who's now at Glasgow University. She worked in Researcher Development at Sheffield at the time, focused on doctoral education and wider researcher development.
I also found that I liked doing a lot of different things at one time. Part of that, maybe the majority of that, was to do with earning extra money so I could afford my living costs. This extra money was important to me because I knew that whatever I would do at the end of my PhD, I wanted to move away from Sheffield, so I'd need to be able to afford it. And once I figured out that I quite liked doing all these things at once, I tried to think of a career that would allow me to do that.
I was conscious that I didn't have what I would call a trade: I wasn't an engineer, I wasn't a medic, I wasn't a psychologist. I really was a generalist as a researcher. I'm struggling to remember why I thought about consulting initially, but I think it was from doing a lot of reading of these kinds of self-help books, organisational psychology stuff, and I came across consulting. That was all the ‘big four’ consultancies (BCG, McKinsey, KPMG, PWC), and I figured out that some of them did higher education consulting, which is what I’d become interested in after working with Kay. Asking questions like ‘how can we run our higher education systems better?’ So I applied for those kinds of roles, including strategy work so I applied for that as well through those consulting opportunities.
But I found that it was not quite what I thought it would be and that it was very, very difficult to get into, with all the psychometric tests and case study interviews. It wasn't really for someone like me, who's got a middling undergraduate grade, no Master’s, and a generalist PhD. I immediately failed all of those psychometric tests, I only got one interview and the culture at the place sounded awful. But I was doing a lot of volunteering, hosting events for the Medical Research Staff Association. They did a careers day and I got asked to MC the event last minute. One of the speakers, Mark Matthews, came and presented, and he’s the kind of consultant I am now. He was talking about all these interesting transport studies, green energy, and higher education studies in the UK, Australia and the US. I just immediately thought: that's exactly what I want to do. So I essentially made him be my mentor one coffee and beer at a time! He kindly let me keep bothering him and asking him if he knew of any opportunities, and eventually he referred me to one of the bosses at Technopolis, which was the job I ended getting after a few interviews.
At that time, I was also being offered a lecturer position in my Medical Education department with my supervisors, who had been excellent mentors by the way. I remember being a bit torn about that, but I think I knew I was going to leave: I wanted to do ‘lots of things at once’, I wanted to do a bit of travel, and I just knew that I wouldn't be as engaged if I stayed and focused on one thing.
The last thing I'll say about that was that at the time there was a lot going on in terms of university pensions and working conditions across UK higher education. The university superannuation scheme in the UK was (and arguably is still) in a lot of trouble. People were seeing contributions go up, but the eventual payouts going down. There were just a lot of issues with finances in general in higher education, and I think I could just see myself fighting against that all the time, instead of at least being in a job where things like pay and benefits are a bit more reliable and progressive, as a corporate, and you kind of opt in to that. There’s a lot of other factors, I suppose, but I think those are the main ones.
JM: I actually considered going into ‘big four’-type consulting too, but only really for about five minutes. I spoke to someone who’s had a whole career in that field and over the course of one informational interview they really turned me off the idea! So what about research consulting? What does the research consulting world entail?
BB: Actually, you’ve just reminded me that I was also speaking to someone who was working in Australia at PWC at the time, Jon Benton, and he was doing higher education consulting. He was an incredible mentor and support for me in making the decisions I did. I think if I had managed to get a job like he had, then I think I would have done it. But yes, research consulting. So I would say this field is almost entirely working for the public sector. The company that I worked in before, and the one I work in now, both were almost entirely public sector contracts.
RAND Europe, where I work now, is a not-for-profit research organisation, based in the UK, with offices in Brussels and Rotterdam. We also have our parent company, RAND, in the US, and a sister office in Australia. Most of what I do now is around space R&D policy and programmes, something I never thought I’d be able to work in with my background!
The way it works is that the government - whether it's Australia, one of the European Union countries, the UK - they will have a Department of Science or Education or Health, and they will do a lot of research internally but they will also commission external research. Usually things like evaluations of their policies. For instance, let's say that they’ve rolled out a housing program for decarbonisation, and they've given people an allowance of 500 pounds per year to get insulation into their houses. The evaluation would be looking at whether that was taken up by people, who actually did it, whether it gave you any carbon savings, some things like that. And those commissioning the research will say, for example, they’re willing to pay up to 200,000 pounds for the piece of commissioned research they’re after, and then various companies in the sector will bid for that contract. And, if you win it, then you do it: it's essentially a piece of research you need to deliver, not all that different from academia. Sometimes you might also be able to bid for funds from the Wellcome Trust or the Gates Foundation or the World Bank or something like that, but in general that’s how it works.
A key difference to academia is that you have bigger teams for this kind of research. You might have a project leader, which is generally what I am now, and under that you have a project manager and then the core team, senior colleagues who QA the work. And you might deliver this work in teams of five or six or many more in some cases. There's several companies out there like this, companies like Ipsos, SQW, Kantar, and many that operate in Australia as well as in Europe and in the UK. We may partner together, or not, so in many ways it's quite similar to academia in that you do collaborate. We also have university experts on my projects a lot of the time.
It's essentially like applying for grant funding, but maybe the success rates are slightly higher in general across the sector. And you've got a lot of freedom over who you choose to involve, you can have quite a decent amount of creativity, you're working with clients who are the people who write the strategies, the people who write the policies. You’re often working on three, four, five, six projects at one time, and I think that’s really interesting.
JM: It does sound perfect for someone who likes to do a lot of different things, all at the same time, having half a dozen projects on the go all at once. And then bringing all that different expertise in too, when you're working in these multidisciplinary teams.
If you’re able to get to the point of earning a salary outside academia comparable to a senior academic in less than the time it would take for you to actually become a senior academic, then that’s just practical isn’t it?
BB: For sure. And I just want to come back to one other major thing I didn't mention about why I was looking beyond academia, if I'm being completely honest, and that is the financial aspect. I’m not from a wealthy background so I knew that I would need some self-preservation and some security.
And I knew that my earning potential would simply be higher outside academia. If you’re able to get to the point of earning a salary outside academia comparable to a senior academic in less than the time it would take for you to actually become a senior academic, then that’s just practical isn’t it?
At the end of the day, some people can't afford to wait that long. So I think financial considerations were an additional factor as well as, I think, this work suiting me more. I think you do have to think of practicality when you're leaving academia.
Outside academia, in my view, you’re likely to earn more and you will likely get a permanent full-time position, as opposed to having to reapply for your job every year or two years. So that was also a huge consideration.
JM: Absolutely, I think there’s a reluctance to talk about money, but I think it has to be a consideration. And hearing more about research consulting, it does sound like a really direct transfer of your research skills into your work. Aside from the “hard skills” we’ve already talked about, are there other skills, experiences, attitudes that you've picked up during your PhD that have carried over into the work you've done since?
BB: I think an appreciation for the strength of evidence is quite important. And the rigour and robustness of how you conduct analyses and write about evidence. We see that sometimes people who have Master’s degrees, instead of PhDs, do need more support around how to talk about evidence: what you can confidently say or confidently conclude about a piece of data or how best to then link that to a recommendation for policy. I think it is something I've definitely learned as a methodology. Research methods are really important and have been an incredibly useful and direct enabler for me in this job because I do it literally every day. I still interview people. I still run focus groups. I still do surveys. It's still the same methods. I think there is certainly an attitude towards evidence that the PhD gave me that I still apply now.
I think an understanding of the academic world was helpful as well, because we do work with academics as subcontractors, but also a lot of the work I do is evaluations of R&D programs so inevitably we're talking to researchers at universities. I probably speak more to innovators at companies now, but certainly for the space-related work that I do, there are a bunch of strong space academic researchers that we talk to, and so understanding the language of academia is really helpful.
I'm looking at a fellowship program at the moment actually which is about academic leadership, and understanding how even the job grades work at university: if you’re a Reader or Professor or Senior Lecturer what the relative differences of those are. These university-specific things are useful to know.
And I still do volunteering outside of work too. I'm a trustee at Sussex University Student’s Union, which is in Brighton in the UK. I picked up a taste for volunteering at university, particularly in my PhD: I felt like I could give something back and I continued to do that. I was school governor for a while and I'm an advisor on various panels, which I definitely understood the value of, and my PhD did instil some of that in me.
JM: That's a good segue into your research project about the perceived value of doctoral degrees. We recently read the ‘worth doing but not worth having’ paper and it was really fascinating the way people disaggregate their attitudes towards what they got out of their PhDs. How did you get into that line of research?
BB: As I mentioned, I did my PhD in a Medical School. Medical Schools are not just about education aspects, most also have departments for immunology, some cardiovascular research and neuroscience. But I was in the Department of Medical Education, which has the most students and was the biggest but doesn't do as much research. I was the only PhD student in my department when I started, and the cohort that I joined had 40 or 50 or so that year who were all scientists, usually quantitative, and I was the only qualitative person in that cohort. But I learned a lot about how science works, the culture and behaviour in labs, the good and the bad. And my friends, who also were in the society I was in, I spent a lot of time with them, getting to know them and hearing about the difficulties of working in science. Particularly as women or people of colour and finding that there is such a variety of experiences doing a PhD.
I think for me, a PhD has definitely been the biggest turning point I can point to in my own life. I think I was not really ever meant to have the life I have now unless I had got the PhD, and so for me, it was a 100% positive thing. Whereas I found that for many of my friends it wasn't. It was, in fact, really harmful for them in some ways, and many of them don't do research anymore because of the culture and the experiences they had. So I questioned the value of this. You're told that you're going to earn money, that it's going to be so good in terms of your skills, your networks, but there is this undiscussed side about what it actually means to the individual.
A friend of mine and brilliant researcher, Dr Furaha Asani, and I got together and wrote an article for Times Higher Education about whether it is worth doing a PhD: there’s so many issues around mental health, paying your fees, finishing late, whether you get a job or not. That took off and got something crazy like 25,000 reads within the first few weeks. And we were just at the end of first year/beginning of second year PhD students with a bit of an idea.
Then the researcher developer at our university at the time, Dr Kay Guccione, spoke to us and said, ‘You're making really good points’ so we talked about doing a very small research project, which we did. Kay and I did something like 23 or 24 interviews and wrote that up for a publication. And that took off really well too. That was the first paper called ‘Was it worth it?’ It took off I think because it was maybe the first time that those stories have been told that way, whether you're in or outside of academia, asking ‘was my PhD worth it?’, and we came up with that model.
So it was very much couched in my own experiences and those of my friends and asking those questions. That's how it all originally started, I just thought it would be a small research project. And I guess at the time, when you're doing a PhD, you may do these small things. And it was a lot more work than I originally thought but the benefits were also really high as well. We did the data collection for the second study during my PhD as well, so that ended up being a lot of work, but definitely worth it. My supervisor kind of tolerated it and I'm very grateful that she did because there have been huge benefits for me and I’ve got a lot out of it.
JM: Can you give us a rundown of what you've found so far in that research?
BB: We asked people to tell us why they decided to do a PhD, what they got out of it, and whether it was worth it. It was very simple. The original study was really quite open-ended and unstructured: just interviews with people we could get in touch with that had done PhDs. We tried to get a bit of a cross-section from people working in different countries, in media, consulting, academia, professional services.
And we came up with a conceptual model of value with four core elements:
Career value, which is relatively obvious, something like ‘the PhD helped me get my job’ or ‘the PhD helped me earn more money’;
Personal value, which is ‘I feel proud to have achieved it and it has changed me as a person’;
Social value, which is about social ties. You may actually be surprised about how many people get married to other students in their cohort! I think it really bonds people together, people develop great friendships and great professional networks; and then
Skills, which is very straightforward and which we've already talked about.
If you can imagine these four core elements as the central elements that form your judgement: if you feel good about three or four of those, then you're probably going to say it was worth it. Then, surrounding these four core elements are four lenses of influence on the core elements. And there are some key influences like supervisory relationship. You could have had an amazing social time, got a lot of skills and career value out of the PhD but if you had a nightmare of a supervisor that could tip the balance as to whether you think it was worth it or not, and that was a really strong one. Another was social capital, where people found that they got a lot of special recognition from having a PhD. The third of these lenses was networking, and the fourth was time since graduation. For that last one, although we didn't get anything statistically from this, we found that the people who had more years between graduation and when we were speaking to them generally had a better view, they thought better of their PhD over time, as opposed to the ones who’d just finished. Part of that might be something to do with some of the core benefits lagging a little bit. Or sometimes there could be rose-tinted glasses, where any bad experiences are fresher and more intense immediately after graduation but that fades a bit over time.
That was the model we came up with, and we wanted to try and validate it in a larger sample. So we did a qualitative survey of about 260 people with a career question, a social question, a skills question, a personal question, and a final one of ‘was it worth it and why?’ And we did validate the model but we found that some domains were stronger than others. We found that if the PhD yielded you a good job that you wanted, and you personally got a lot of value out of it, then that could outweigh the fact that you had a rubbish supervisor or didn't make any friends or struggled in other ways.
The other interesting thing, which comes in the title of ‘worth doing but not worth having’, is the kind of strange phenomenon that 15% or something of people described having had a terrible time emotionally and personally, that they didn't get the job they wanted, didn’t think they got any skills out of it, but would then say it was worth doing it. We thought this was a bit odd, but then, when you think about it, would you admit that something you’ve spent three or four years of your life on wasn't worth spending that time on? We thought there may be a bit of the ostrich problem there, which we mentioned in the paper, it's difficult to say that actually that time and effort was not worth it, it’s not necessarily a bad thing but it's an overall judgement.
We published that second paper, then presented the findings at various conferences, the UK Council of Graduate Education was interested, it appeared in the media a few times as well, and I've written a few things since, around what we should be doing better to support alternative careers. It really did become its own thing, and whenever you start talking to people about it, particularly people who've got PhDs, they get very interested.
JM: There's so much in there that resonates for me. I'm now 10 years post-PhD, and I had an amazing supervisor – shout out to Robyn! – but there were definitely some pretty uncool times during my PhD, so it's interesting to reflect on the domains that you pointed out and think about how I would respond.
The other thing that occurred to me as you were describing the research, and this might seem like a strange analogy, is that in the outdoorsy community, for instance in rock-climbing, there’s this concept of type two fun. This is something that is not fun while you're doing it, but on reflection, afterwards, is actually fun. Something like, “Oh that climb was rubbish, the rock was so chossy, the protection was really bad, and then that storm rolled in and we got drenched, it was just so awful. I had the best time!” And now I feel like there is an element of type two fun to the PhD process.
BB: I think there is something around satisfaction of hard work, or having gone through something and maybe you feel stronger afterwards. I've always had a bit of a problem with the concept of resilience, because it implies suffering – that you have to suffer in order to be resilient, which I don't think you do. But we heard from a lot of people, some with really horrible stories, or PhDs that were just difficult and they didn't need to be. And I think that stuff didn't need to happen for that person to have learned how to be resilient, they could have just been supported through that instead of being left to suffer alone. I completely agree with you on the idea of type two fun, but I feel like we did see a lot of experiences that didn't need to be as hard as they were. If they were more supported, they maybe wouldn't have had to deal with years of kind of working that through emotionally.
JM: For sure, and you mentioned you've written a few things about what we can do better. I'm going to assume that less suffering is at the top of the list. What else are you recommending in terms of how we can do doctoral training better?
BB: Well, the caveat to what I say here is that I'm not a practitioner, there are some really great researcher developers, Kay among them, who do really hard work in this area, so I won't try and cover the direct training and support too much.
I think in general there needs to be a much better route into doctoral education, and better and more honest expectations around it. And that can be so many things – not trying to be negative, but there were some supervisors who really should not have been allowed to have students, based on some of the stories that we received. There needs to be a better set of expectations for students and supervisors going into that relationship. It is also a wider, higher education issue, that you're either sinking or swimming.
I think the funding structures could be better: I think there needs to be more and better support for studentships. And I don’t know how people do it self-funded, it must be so, so difficult. I think there needs to be much better financing around it, particularly for those who maybe are self-funding but could do with a bit of extra support.
Talking of expectations, I think people who are considering a PhD should be given all the options, not just told of a PhD because they're in a lab in their Master’s and someone wants them to do a PhD. And that might even be not to do the PhD in that lab anymore, but to try a different lab. Because that’s often how it works: undergrad, Master’s, PhD all in the same lab. And that can work well but sometimes it doesn’t. I just think there needs to be more choice. There are great people working toward this, like Mark Bennett at findaphd.com trying to understand the issue better and give a better choice. So that's the input side.
I think during PhD studies, it’s about making sure to provide a well-rounded education inside and outside the department, providing opportunities for secondments, placements. These kinds of collaborative industry PhD are really good, but just getting people to participate in the community. Even some PhD students that I know now are just completely tied to the building that they're working in. Not for lack of trying, they’re just not really being given opportunities to participate in a wider community which we know gives a lot of social value and personal value and skills.
There's also this idea that you're being trained for an academic career and there's not much opportunity to do anything else. I'm not saying that supervisors should be career coaches because they're academics and there's only so much you can say about a non-academic career that you've never done. So it’s important to be otherwise shown the other options available, even if that’s professional services in academia but getting people in to talk about what they’ve done – and I've done this before, I've come back to the university and given talks about what I do, which I found super helpful to hear when I was in their position. Instilling as part of the PhD, whether it's formally in the curriculum or not, that academia is not your only option and you've got a huge amount of value outside.
it’s important to be … shown the other options available … as part of the PhD, whether it's formally in the curriculum or not, that academia is not your only option and you've got a huge amount of value outside.
I think if you look at national strategies, and it’s probably the same for Australia as well, we need highly-skilled people to come into non-academic roles, whether that's government or the not-for-profit sector, not just industry. And history PhDs working in museums is a very good thing. It just doesn't have to be aerospace engineers with PhDs working in space companies or whatever. And therefore, I think there needs to be better career support for PhDs within the existing careers centres. When I was at university there was one person supporting PhDs. She had other roles as well, but she was one person and there were 4,000 or 5,000 PhD students at the university. I worked there for two years and had access to that support, but still I really did struggle with psychometric tests. But that service really helped me: they did mock interviews and they helped me with my cover letters. They were great, but so severely under-resourced.
I think after the PhD that there should be better links back to the university. As I said, I’ve been asked back to talk at various Universities and that’s been valuable to the PhDs to hear me talk about my work. So then once you're out into industry or charity sector, then communicating back to your University or the government to say, ‘here's the kind of skills that we would need in the workforce as a highly-qualified PhD, so we recommend that these skills might be added to the program’. I wrote about this in Nature Communications, about a supply chain style support mechanism. I described the input side, the middle bit, and the output side, and the things that we could be doing to support people like that. I'm not ‘on the ground’, frankly, so I can't help or recommend much there, but I feel like I can say something about the funding system and the apparatus around education. So that's where my recommendations are.
JM: I've been nodding my head a lot in what you've been saying there. I was definitely told that I was being trained for an academic career. The final question I have for you, thinking about all those students and that one researcher development member of staff, what advice would you give to someone who's considering a switch from academia into non academic roles?
BB: I asked the same question when I was thinking about that as well. And I can't remember where I heard this, I think I heard it on a podcast or something, but the advice was to speak to people in those jobs. And at that time, I was quite quiet and shy and I didn't really know how to do that. But eventually I kind of got over it somehow and just started sending out messages on LinkedIn and finding people's email addresses and sending out some emails. And you'd be surprised how many ‘yes’-es you'll get when you ask to chat! I've spoken to some extremely senior people at places like the big four consultancies, just from asking them about their job and what it is like to do that job. People were saying yes, and letting me call them on the train and in between meetings and stuff, people really did make time for five or 10 minutes. And I’d ask ‘do you think I should do this’ and they'll tell a bit about what the job is like.
For me, that really removed a lot of the mystique and mystery around what these jobs could look like for me. For instance, consultancy is a big area, there's lots of different elements, there's government, professional services, whatever else and that can seem quite big and scary. But as soon as you talk to someone that does that job, it very much kind of removes that scary sense and you think okay, this is just another job that I could get.
You don't have to be the absolute best of the best or the absolute perfect candidate to get these jobs. And you're not going to be immediately discounted just because you have a PhD. You'd be surprised about how many people out there are really crying out for someone like you. One of the most difficult things to begin with is that first Google search for ‘jobs for PhDs outside of university’. A lot of people I speak to find it so challenging just to do that first Google and I get it. But once you get some information, then you really just start learning so much, it makes it less scary and then you can think about the next step of chatting to someone.
It's quite simple advice, but it tends to make a big difference.
And with that, we thank Billy for sharing his career story with us - as well as his research findings, thus far, on PhD perspectives…
Speaking of, if you are a PhD who has moved beyond academia and you are interested in sharing your story, please get in touch with us via our LinkedIn pages - Sequitur Consulting, Sam, Jonathan - we’d love to hear from you.
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by persons interviewed in this series are solely that of the persons interviewed and do not reflect the views, opinions, or position of Sam, Jonathan or Sequitur Consulting.
Dr Billy Bryan is currently serving as an Evaluation and Research Leader at RAND Europe; however, the views, opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations contained herein are the author’s alone and not those of RAND Europe or its research sponsors, clients, or grantors. He is also a trustee at the University of Sussex Students’ Union, a member of the UK Government’s Evaluation and Trial Advice Panel (ETAP), and an advisor to Rocket Science ltd.