More than half of PhD candidates wants to stay on at university, according to the study ‘PhDs in the Netherlands’. Expectations vary widely: in humanities, 73 percent hopes for an academic career – in technology, it’s forty percent. Many of them are disappointed: only a third of PhD graduates moves on to an academic position at a Dutch university right away.

And although that’s nothing new, it’s the first time a survey shows how PhD graduates prepare for life after their dissertations.

Less than half of PhD candidates thinks about the future. As their graduation date approaches, that number rises, but by that time 25 percent still hasn’t made any career plans. In the last phase of their research, sixty percent of PhD candidates are not yet looking for a job.

There may be only few PhD graduates who land a job in the world of academics, but PhDs are definitely no prelude to unemployment. Most doctors find a new job fairly quickly. It does, however, take a while before they receive the same paycheck as peers who’ve started working immediately after they received their master’s degree: twelve years on average.