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.