GRASP

Staying in Research(?) - Career pathways for HDR candidates

August 26th, 2026, by Gretchen Benedix and Karen Miller Tag(s): Life after PhD

This post is adapted from a talk by Prof. Gretchen Benedix, Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research, Curtin University at a recent Research Student’s Summit organised by the Curtin Student Guild and Postgraduate Student Committee.

If you’re partway through a PhD (or just finishing one), you’ve probably asked yourself some version of: what happens after this? For a long time, the unspoken assumption in academia was that the answer was to remain in academia to teach or conduct research. That assumption doesn’t hold up anymore and probably never fully reflected reality. Research happens in many places, not just universities, and the skills you’re building right now are useful in all of them.

Your PhD is a research licence, not a job title

It’s easy to describe a PhD in terms of its output — a thesis, a handful of papers, maybe a conference talk or two. But the more valuable and portable part is the capability set you build along the way:

  • Inquiry - finding the question nobody has posed yet, and being able to defend why it matters.
  • Method - building rigorous approaches to messy problems and knowing what accounts as reliable evidence.
  • Synthesis - absorbing a field quickly, judging quality, and pulling a clear line through the noise.
  • Delivery - years of self-directed work under real constraints, ambiguity, and deadlines.

All of these skills are transferable to almost any environment where good thinking and follow-through matter.

Where the skill set can take you

Broadly, there are four territories where research capability is valued, with different rewards.

  1. Academic research - postdoctoral positions, research fellowships, teaching-and-research appointments, research centres and institutes. These roles reward publications, grant success, growing independence.
  2. Industry & government R&D - corporate and start-up labs, national agencies, clinical and defence research, technical consultancies (e.g. government departments, CSIRO, and similar bodies). These roles reward applied results, collaboration, commercial awareness.
  3. Research-enabling roles - research management and strategy, grants and funding, ethics and integrity, data stewardship, core facilities. These roles reward systems thinking, precision, stakeholder skills.
  4. Knowledge translation - policy and evaluation, science communication, academic publishing, data science and analytics. These roles reward clear writing, pace, judgement about audience.

Most researchers move between these territories more than once. Your first role after your PhD is just a starting point.

Four habits that compound in every research-adjacent career

Whichever path you lean toward, a few habits pay off no matter what you do:

  1. Learn to translate. Practise explaining your research to a non-specialist in ninety seconds. That single skill opens an enormous number of doors - in interviews, networking conversations, and job applications.
  2. Publish and present. Every output is evidence of your capability. Talks, preprints, datasets, and code all count, not just journal articles.
  3. Collect evidence of impact. Keep a running record of what changed because of your work, and for whom. This is much easier to do in real time than to reconstruct later.
  4. Build networks on purpose. Most research roles come through personal interactions, either yours or your supervisory team’s. Networking isn’t a “soft skill” side project but is core career infrastructure.

Start where you are

You don’t need a finished plan but a next move, and this depends on where you are at in your candidature.

Early candidature

  • Join a network beyond your own lab or school
  • Say yes to one conference or symposium
  • Start a running record of skills and outputs

Mid candidature

  • Do an internship, placement, or industry project
  • Co-author or co-present something
  • Meet three people in roles you’re curious about

Final year and beyond

  • Map roles and skills, not job titles
  • Draft two CVs: one academic, one non-academic
  • Talk to graduates who stayed in academia and to those who left

Final thoughts

The pathway is built, not found. There’s no single “correct” track waiting to be discovered. Rather, you construct it through the choices you make along the way, one conversation at a time.

What’s one conversation you could have this month?

Disclosure: The slides upon which the talk was based upon were designed by GenAI tool Claude.

Please make any anonymous comments/ feedback, or suggestions for further posts at this link. If you would like to get in touch, or write a post for the Ideas Hub blog, please email karen.miller@curtin.edu.au.

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash.