Researchers’ career insecurity needs attention and reform now, says international coalition
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The precarious career outlook for junior researchers must be addressed, says the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Credit: Getty
Nations, universities and research institutions around the world must redouble efforts to expand training for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers to prepare them for jobs outside academia. So urges a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental coalition of 38 nations. The report, the result of a nearly two-year investigation into the job security and working conditions of junior scientists, also concludes that nations and institutions should more closely track career outcomes for PhD holders to improve understanding of local challenges and opportunities.
“We all agree that there’s a problem with researcher precarity all over the world,” says Luis Sanz-Menéndez, a science-policy researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid and a co-chair of the expert group that issued the report. But precarity — persistent insecurity — takes different forms in different places, he says, making it difficult to find one-size-fits-all solutions. “We don’t know that an advance in one country would work in another country,” he says.
