Years post-PhD: is there a better indicator of career stage?
In previous sections, I described ways in which academic institutions have attempted to discretise career paths as well as estimate achievement relative to career stage using the concept of years post-PhD. In this final section, I shall return to this point and discuss this concept in more detail because it bears relevance to how fairness can be attained in competition pools in discretised academic classes (e.g., early careers, established professors).
Discretisation of academic careers is an attempt to make the competition for distributive goods fair. After all, a scientist with one year experience post-PhD has had different experiences and opportunities than an established scientists with twenty years or more of career in the field. However, this discretisation is rather arbitrary and, as I shall argue below, ineffective. For once, the length and structure of PhDs vary widely between countries and the career paths before and after the PhD also vary widely between and within countries as well as between individuals. For example, some individuals obtain a master’s degree while others move straight to the PhD. While these are different strategies, the offer different opportunities to the individuals that can influence their competitiveness for goods later in their career. In this system, with the arbitrary landmark of ‘post-PhD’, it is in theory more profitable for a candidate to obtain multiple master’s degrees, or at least extend the length of a master’s degree already underway, provided that this will increase the number of publications to the individual. Likewise, during the PhD, is advantageous to an individual to extend the length of the PhD to as long as possible given the constrains of funding and/or the University, as this can allow the individual to maximise publication numbers prior to the start of the post-PhD ‘countdown’. In doing so, the individuals can become more competitive after graduation, placing the individual in a better position to obtain jobs, fellowships, and to advance in academia. Combine this with the obsessive focus on publications and awards in the current academic context, and we have a system that is unfair. In fact, challenges with the definition of career stage based on years post-PhD have received attention in the literature because career path after graduation is subject to ecological factors (e.g., job availability, family commitments) (Bosanquet, Mailey, Matthews, & Lodge, 2017). While there has been claims that an self-definition is a better estimate of career status (Bosanquet et al., 2017), the subjective nature of self-definitions may be criticised due to vulnerability to exploitation. Here, I propose that a fair and objective metric for career stage is years post-first authorship publication. This is because in many academic fields, the first author is considered to have contributed the most to the work from experimental design through to manuscript writing (Riesenberg & Lundberg, 1990). This implies that the individual has gained enough skills to lead a research quest from start to publication, and therefore is, in theory, a functional unit within the academic environment and capable of continuing to publish in the same or different settings. This definition accounts for differences in postgraduate programs worldwide while eliminating the relativistic nature of years post-PhD. One issue that emerges from this concept, which is worth mention here, is for disciplines that use alphabetical ordering in authorship list in manuscripts. In this case, two alternatives are possible: (1) consider the landmark as years post-first publication, if authorship in manuscript of this disciplines involves equal amount of work for all listed authors or (2) formalise the authorship contribution statement and consider years post-publication with significant contribution. Whether or not the alternative discretisation landmarks are useful and fair will require further studies, for example, comparing the estimated experience and career forecast of individuals in discretised distributions using post-PhDversus post-first authorship publication (or the discipline-specific variants). Nonetheless, the landmarks proposed here remove the relativistic nature of the concept of post-PhD years and inherently account for differences in PhD structure and career paths between individuals across contexts.