What Nobody Tells You About Career Paths After Your Thesis

You’re somewhere near the end of your dissertation, or perhaps you’ve just submitted, and someone asks the question. ‘So, what are you doing next?’ Career paths after your thesis can feel impossibly vague at this point. You know roughly what you’re good at. You’re less sure whether anyone outside academia will care. And the idea of planning feels absurd when you’re still recovering from the thing you just handed in.

Here’s something worth knowing, though. A 2026 paper by Maria Zackariasson in *Human Arenas*, titled ‘The Role of Serendipity and Agency in Descriptions of Academic Career Trajectories’, makes a quietly radical point. When researchers describe their own careers in retrospect, they tend to present them as deliberate and strategic. However, when you look more closely, serendipity keeps showing up. Chance meetings, unexpected opportunities, a supervisor who happened to know someone. This doesn’t mean planning is useless. It means that rigid five-year plans are largely fiction, and you should probably stop feeling guilty for not having one.

Career Paths After Your Thesis Don’t Have to Be Linear

The academic job market is genuinely difficult right now. Research by Dent et al., published in *Physiology* in 2026, estimates that only around 20 to 25 percent of postdoctoral researchers end up in faculty positions within five or six years of completing their doctoral research. That figure isn’t meant to depress you. It’s meant to free you from the idea that academia is the only legitimate destination for someone with a research degree.

The skills you’ve built are real and they’re transferable. You can synthesise large amounts of complex information. You can spot weak arguments. You can write under pressure and meet a deadline even when every part of you wants to disappear. These matter in policy, publishing, research management, consultancy, data analysis, and a dozen other fields that actively want people who can think carefully.

So, concretely, here’s what to do. Write down every skill your dissertation required, not just the subject knowledge. Interviewing participants, coding data, running statistical models, writing literature reviews, managing a project over three years with no one checking on you daily. Then look at job adverts in three sectors outside academia and see how many of those skills appear. You’ll be surprised.

Understanding What You Actually Want

This sounds obvious. It isn’t. Many postgrad students have spent so long inside a single institution, working on a single problem, that they genuinely don’t know what a normal working week in other sectors looks like. As a result, they apply for jobs based on vague impressions rather than real information.

Fix this by talking to people. Not networking in the horrible conference-badge sense, but genuinely asking people in roles you’re curious about for a twenty-minute conversation. Most people say yes. You ask them what they actually do on a Tuesday afternoon, what they wish they’d known, and whether your background would be relevant. You learn more from three of these conversations than from six months of staring at LinkedIn.

Also, consider what you don’t want. If you hated the isolation of your dissertation, a solo research role probably isn’t right. If you loved teaching but found grant writing miserable, that tells you something. Your preferences are data.

Making Yourself Visible Before You’re Desperate

The worst time to start building a professional presence is after you’ve submitted and you’re already anxious. Start now, even if ‘now’ means the middle of your final year. Write one short piece about your research for a general audience and put it somewhere public, a blog, a university news page, even a well-written LinkedIn post. This does two things. It forces you to explain what you do without jargon, which is a skill in itself. In addition, it creates a small, findable record of who you are and what you think about.

Update your research profile pages. Make sure your university repository listing is accurate. If you’ve presented at a conference, note it somewhere a future employer can find it.

Zackariasson’s point about serendipity cuts both ways. Yes, chance plays a role in career paths. However, chance tends to find people who are visible, curious, and talking to others rather than waiting quietly for something to happen.

So here’s the honest question to sit with this week. If someone outside your field asked you what you’re brilliant at, could you answer in two sentences without mentioning your thesis topic?

Image: Photo by Evan Mach on Unsplash

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