I’ve always known my sister was brilliant—she has a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a PhD. What I didn’t understand was why she’d chosen to spend so many years in academia. I never went to university, and from the outside, a PhD looked like an enormous sacrifice of time for a title I couldn’t quite make sense of.
Then I read this LinkedIn post by Elena Hoffer, PhD, that changed how I saw it: doctoral researchers don’t just study what other people already know. They work to create new knowledge.
And finally I realized how badly I’d misunderstood what my sister had been doing—and how often businesses aren’t hiring advanced degree candidates because of that same misunderstanding. Here’s what I learned about evaluating PhD (and other higher education degrees) applicants, and how you can use these advanced critical thinkers to your advantage in the workplace.
A PhD is more than a qualification
To complete a PhD, you need to answer a question that hasn’t been solved adequately yet. That can mean designing experiments or other research methods, gathering and analysing data, and changing course when an approach fails.
This Morning
The daily digest for entrepreneurs and business leaders
You have to explain what you found clearly enough for other people to examine your reasoning. All of this happens over years, often alongside teaching, mentoring, collaboration, and the unglamorous work of keeping a complex project moving.
I used to see the finished thesis and never even considered the decisions, setbacks, tenacity and persistence behind it. That is a skill most businesses claim to prize.
Why employers should look past the job title and focus on the skills
Think about the work involved: a doctoral researcher defines a problem, builds a plan, tests assumptions, makes sense of evidence, and communicates a conclusion. When the original plan doesn’t work, they have to figure out what to do next.