It’s a strange paradox. The more highly educated someone becomes, the less prepared they often feel for their career. At undergraduate level, identities are still fluid and students can explore plural options. By the doctoral and especially postdoctoral stage, identity and belonging are so tightly bound to the university that stepping outside can feel like stepping outside oneself.
This isn’t about individual weakness. It’s about the way higher education rewards one way of working, what I call “depth mode”, while employability now demands another: “outbound mode”.
- The aspiring academic’s career path from PhD to professor
- Playing the promotion game: how to navigate upshifting
- How to balance teaching and research
And here’s the twist: the better you get at depth mode, the harder it becomes to imagine outbound mode. The very strength of academic identity can turn into the barrier that keeps people from moving.
‘Depth’ mode and ‘outbound’ mode
- Depth mode (the mode higher education rewards) develops mastery, authority and belonging. It thrives on depth but discourages plurality. Feedback is narrow, cycles are long and value is conferred by academic peers and hierarchies.
- Outbound mode (the mode employability now demands) develops adaptability and traction. It requires learning from multiple sources, producing shorter-cycle outputs and testing whether ideas resonate outside the university.
Both modes are valid. Of course, real careers are more complex than two categories. But naming them makes the switch teachable. We train people to research everything except their own futures. That is the employability gap in a sentence.
Why this matters
These aren’t abstract categories. Evidence shows the costs of rewarding only one mode:
- The Institute of Student Employers’ 2024 survey reported declining “career readiness” among graduates.
- The OECD’s Skills Outlook highlights persistent overqualification and mismatch.
- Vitae’s What do research staff do next? found that many researchers experienced career change as identity loss as well as opportunity.
The point is not that researchers lack skills or motivation. It’s that they have been socialised into the university’s way of working so completely that trying another mode can feel like leaving the self behind.
Four steps universities can take
1. Name the modes explicitly
Give researchers a language. Once they can name depth and outbound, they begin to notice which one they are in and when they need to switch. At first, switching feels clumsy. That awkwardness isn’t failure; it’s data. It signals that academic identity, reinforced over years, is beginning to stretch.
2. Create composite career sessions
When insiders and outsiders sit together, researchers often feel nervous: “Will my skills hold up?” “Will I sound naïve?” Lean into that unease – it’s the edge where learning happens.
Unlike traditional panels, which reinforce a hierarchy in which experts speak and researchers listen, composite sessions are designed for co-creation. Safety is built in from the start: begin with simple neutral warm-ups, such as images or metaphors unrelated to work. This softens hierarchy and allows people to arrive as humans before they arrive as roles.
Only then move into mapping competences across contexts. A researcher might describe a method – an outsider might reframe it in their world. The moment of discomfort is often the moment researchers realise their expertise travels.
3. Strengthen career literacy through plurality
Many career decisions rest on too narrow a base: a supervisor’s opinion, a peer’s anecdote or a single job advert. That isn’t enough for today’s wide career landscape.
Instead, help researchers map their research impacts – in the economy, in health, in charities, in methods – and turn those impacts into search questions. Career exploration stops being “What else could I do?” and becomes “Who uses methods like mine, who benefits from impacts like these and how do I find them?”
4. Teach traction as a future skill
Employability is not just about having skills but about generating traction – evidence that ideas create pull beyond their home base.
At first, testing traction feels alien. A LinkedIn post doesn’t look like “real” data. A follow-up meeting feels too small to matter. But those signals are the point: observable proof that expertise connects. Traction reframes the question. It’s no longer “Do I have the right skills?” but “Where does my expertise connect?”
Employability as switching
Employability is less about a checklist of skills and more about the ability to switch, with confidence, between depth and outbound.
Universities that name the modes, create safe composite spaces, teach broader career literacy and help researchers notice traction will not weaken academic identity but expand it. The risk is not that researchers lack skills. The risk is that we keep rewarding them for researching their fields while never inviting them to research their own futures.
Alys Kay is research culture consultant and career coach at the University of Liverpool.
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