Guide / Career

What to do after your PhD

You finish the thesis exhausted, not even fully satisfied with the goal you reached, and immediately the next conflict arrives: postdoc, industry, or pause to gain experience? It is one of the questions I get most, from PhDs all over the world. Here is how I think about it, with judgement and not cliches.

This is the essentials, the framework I use, not a treatise. Just enough to start well and not waste time. The detail of your own case is what we work through in mentoring.

The root mistake: no clear goals

Before choosing between postdoc or industry, there is a question almost nobody asks and that decides everything: what are your long-term professional goals?

Many people say “I just want to do research” and stop there, defining nothing else. That is not a goal, it is a wish. What do you really want: academic recognition? To earn money? For your work to have impact in industry? To publish in Nature or Science? Each of those answers leads to a different decision. If you are not clear on them, any advice about postdoc or industry is noise. Start here.

The decision depends on your discipline

There is no single answer, and one of the variables that weighs most is your field:

• Basic sciences. Here a postdoc is usually almost essential for an academic career. It lets you go deep into an area, publish, and build national and international connections that are worth a lot in academia. In very competitive or specialised fields, a postdoc makes the difference.
• Social sciences and applied fields. Here professional experience can be worth as much as a postdoc, or more. It gives a broader perspective, real-world skills and connections in industry or the public sector. Especially useful if your goal is outside academia.

Those are the two extremes, in black and white, to make the idea clear. In between there are a thousand shades, but the principle holds: the more basic your science, the more a postdoc weighs; the more applied, the more experience weighs.

The factor nobody wants to look at: money and time

A postdoc is a large investment of time and energy, and in most cases with relatively low pay over a long period. Industry usually pays considerably more. It is not the only criterion, but ignoring it is fooling yourself. If your personal life and your finances cannot take three or four years on a postdoc salary, that is information for the decision too.

The practical rule: if you are going to industry, get experience early

If your long-term goal is industry or practice-oriented roles, it is almost always more advantageous to get professional experience as soon as possible. The earlier you enter, the earlier you build a CV and an experience base that let you progress faster. Postponing it or starting late sets you back.

The key asymmetry (this changes the decision)

There is a detail few people take into account and that, from the cases I know, tips the balance a lot: it is considerably easier to start with a postdoc in academia and then move to industry than the other way around.

And you will always be able to return to academia later, with a more practical perspective on top. Imagine you spend a year or two in industry and realise it is not for you: now you know, by elimination, that what you want is academia, and you go back much more focused and clear. That clarity by ruling things out is worth gold. So, in doubt, keeping open the door that is hardest to reopen (the academic one) is usually the safer play.

And do not fall into the exhaustion trap

During the PhD we take on a thousand projects, catch every train, sacrifice free time, family and friends, and convince ourselves it is temporary, that we are padding the CV for the future. The problem: after the PhD that load does not drop, it rises. If your plan for the “after” is to keep running at the same pace hoping it stops on its own one day, it will not. Deciding your next step is also deciding the pace you want to live at. That question is not secondary, it is part of the decision.