Canada needs to do a better job of capitalising on the knowledge and skills of its doctoral graduates – both home-grown and recruited from abroad – to contribute to the country’s economic success.
The Conference Board of Canada, a national think-tank, has called for more work-place skilling for doctoral graduates and more advocacy in business communities to show the benefits in hiring them.
The Conference Board of Canada has conducted a multi-year study of higher education challenges in Canada today. It has also highlighted the significant number of foreign-born PhD holders in the country.
Speaking about the barriers to employment for doctorate degree holders, Michael Bloom, vice-president of industry and business strategy at the Conference Board, praised PhD graduates as “intelligent, driven folk,” and valued those from abroad as capable self-starters.
Though well-versed in their field, PhDs have not been trained to explain their worth to private industry
“For Canada, if we help them, they can do more and they can do it faster and be productive and contribute more,” he says. “We need that in a global economy.”
Despite a 68% increase in the number of doctorates awarded in Canada between 2002 and 2011, Canada lags behind other countries in turning out doctoral graduates.
“We produce significantly fewer PhDs than Germany or the Scandinavian countries, or the UK or US,” said Bloom, citing statistics from a board report released this month. “To get to the level of the population where in Germany, 2% of adults 25-64 have a PhD, here in Canada we are at 1% [compared to] the average of developed countries [of] about 1.5%.”
Thanks to a welcoming immigration policy that encourages foreign students to study in Canada – and stay on after graduation to work – there is an almost 50-50 split between Canadian and foreign-born PhDs according to a February 2015 Conference Board study “Immigrants with PhDs: Difficult Transitions, Marginal Advantages”.
The same study notes, however, that foreign students with a PhD earned outside North America or the UK have a harder time landing a relevant job in Canada compared to immigrants who earned their PhDs in North America or the UK.
That’s a problem, said Bloom, who described foreign-born PhDs as “an important source of very high-end talent.” Without them, he adds, “we would have significant shortages of capacity to undertake both basic and applied research.”
Still, finding the right career fit for PhDs is not easy. About 20% of PhDs land a tenure-track position, a dwindling option in higher education, with another 20% in non-tenure track jobs according to Inside and Outside the Academy, a report released by the Conference Board last November.
“We produce significantly fewer PhDs than Germany or the Scandinavian countries, or the UK or US”
That leaves about 60% of PhDs in search of career-relevant jobs with private sector employers. According to the board’s Academy report, 60.6% of PhDs in Canada in 2011 worked outside academia, with the bulk of them employed by private companies and government and non-governmental organisations in natural and applied sciences, heath, education and law.
Bloom said that PhDs, though well-versed in their field, have not been trained to explain their worth to private industry. In turn, he said, employers are unfamiliar with the potential of doctoral students beyond their academic expertise.
“They [employers] may not realise what is their worth and, when they hire them, how to make full use of them.”
On a positive note, he cites growing efforts by universities to provide mentorship and other support for post-doctoral graduates to establish private sector careers. In addition, Mitacs, a national not for profit organization, works with academe and industry to provide paid internships and other training for doctoral students to gain valuable work-experience while completing their studies.
Bloom urged an expansion of such mentoring and work-experience opportunities along with a campaign to educate employers about the value of PhDs to the bottom line. “More employers need to find out how helpful doctoral people can be to them beyond the laboratory,” he said.
