Facing Disorienting Dilemmas in Professional Transitions. A Narrative Research on PhD Graduates' Experiences

A PhD graduate’s current chance of ultimately attaining a permanent position in academic research is a few per cent on average and the Italian context is in line with the European trend: a recent study carried out by ADI – the national association of PhD students and PhD graduates – predicts that only 6.5% of current Italian Post-doc researchers will obtain long-term academic positions (ADI, 2016). The result is that PhD graduates are increasingly turning to non academic labor market, often considering this as a second-choice option. The risk of over-skilling and skill mismatch (Flisi et al., 2014) is an actual threat that poses to universities new dilemmas about their role in training these professionals and problematise the traditional distance between the academic sphere and the private sector (Slowey & Schuetze, 2012). If researchers are asked, as many contemporary professionals, to develop competences that go beyond their own specific field throughout their careers (OECD, 2012), little space is dedicated to analyze and interpret experiences of those who faced the challenge to translate their competences in new professional contexts. This contribution will present an ongoing qualitative research based on narrative interviews addressed to PhD graduates that experienced a professional transition. The construction of the research sample entailed different choices, first of all the decision of interviewing PhD graduates coming from a wide range of disciplines in order to be coherent with the nature of transversal competence - described as interdisciplinary in itself. Another criteria for sampling was the diversity of professional trajectories in terms of destinations: from contexts more familiar with academic research (e.g. a big company research centers) to others more "unconventional" (e.g. small and medium enterprises). This variety enhanced the possibility to explore a wide range of assumptions and dialogues coming into play during the transitions. Big companies or public research centres are, for example, more used to understand the value of a PhD graduate and to adopt ideas and languages more coherent with the academic ones. On the contrary, in many cases more "unconventional" professional contexts don't even know what a PhD actually is. Participants' narratives highlight moments in which taken for granted assumptions and courses of action seemed not being useful anymore for making meaning in the new professional context. These situations are experienced as very challenging and disorienting situations, often requiring a transformation of previously structured frames of reference (Mezirow, 2000). New learning processes are described, resulting in new positioning on a variety of dimensions involved in the transition: explicit and tacit knowledge acquired during PhD training, one's own professional identity or aknowledgement needs. Dealing with all this issues is often a very demanding endeavour that cannot be solved only through instrumental thinking but requires also relational and imaginative resources.