{"id":2288,"date":"2021-10-04T16:13:02","date_gmt":"2021-10-04T15:13:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/careers\/?p=2288"},"modified":"2025-10-22T15:14:57","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T14:14:57","slug":"managing-your-career-in-the-second-year-of-your-doctorate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/careers\/2021\/10\/04\/managing-your-career-in-the-second-year-of-your-doctorate\/","title":{"rendered":"Managing your career in the second year of your doctorate"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Managing your career in the second year of your doctorate
Usually at this time of year I write a blog post on how to get started with planning your career in the first year of your PhD. This year I thought I\u2019d do something different and write something on steps you can take to move towards your post-PhD path if you\u2019re going into the second year of your doctorate.
I remember hearing about some research that suggested the second year is when most doctoral students start thinking seriously about their career, and you might find that having passed your confirmation and moved into a new year provides an ideal time to pause, reflect and start to plan your next steps. Here\u2019s a few practical steps you can take to make career thinking a little bit easier as you progress into the next stage of your doctorate.

Take stock<\/strong>
A year into your doctorate \u2013 when hopefully you\u2019ve started to clarify the direction of your research and get involved in a range of research-related and other activities \u2013 is a good time to take stock of what you\u2019ve achieved in the past year and where you need to make progress. What are you proud of? What can you do now that you couldn\u2019t a year ago? This could be one-off things like getting to grips with a new technique or technology, expanding your knowledge into a new field or success in an extracurricular activity, or broader things like starting a PhD during a pandemic, moving your research online or adapting to a new team. Think about the things you have enjoyed and the things you\u2019ve done well. This might be harder to do when things have been far from normal, so can I encourage you to start from now to notice \u2013 and ideally write down \u2013 the things you do in a typical working day and week and which aspects of your work you enjoy and are good at. Thinking forwards to your post-PhD career, which bits of \u2018now\u2019 might you want to take into the future?\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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Explore <\/strong><\/p>\r\n

\u00a0In encouraging you to pay attention to how you feel about where you are now, I\u2019m really encouraging you to explore yourself and what matters to you. Few of us take the time to do this but it\u2019s actually really hard to start to make decisions about next steps without some sense of what\u2019s important to you. Other ways to do this include thinking through your values and what sort of person you are \u2013 you can do this through using the Careers Service\u2019s Find your Future tool <\/a>and MyProfessionalDevelopment<\/a>.
The other thing to start exploring is potential career options. It can be tricky to know where to start with this; you could start by exploring a few sectors<\/a> you might be interested in, or watch this short video<\/a> which outlines career options for researchers. If you want to stay close to your research or subject area (and I know lots of you do), check out the Faculty-specific careers information<\/a> on our website and the Prospects \u2018What can I do with my degree\u2019<\/a> pages. Reading the career stories of other doctoral graduates can also give you some useful insights into where others have gone and the steps they took to get there; we have some of our own on our blog<\/a>, and link to many others from our Get Started Guide for Researchers<\/a>. Have a look at job descriptions for roles you might be interested in; you can find these through our vacancy sites for researchers<\/a> and this list<\/a> of vacancy sites for different sectors.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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Connect<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

People are very often the best source of career information and opportunities, so it\u2019s vital to start connecting with people in sectors and roles that interest you. Start by mapping out all the networks you\u2019re part of \u2013 research groups inside and outside of Bath, contacts from previous professional experience, external partners and collaborators, as well as personal networks (friends, family, out-of-work interests). Think about all of the people who could potentially help you with your career, and remember that this is never \u2018using\u2019 people \u2013 networking is a two-way process so also think about how you could help others.
Be curious about what others do \u2013 book them for a chat about their current job and how they got there \u2013 questions like \u2018what does a typical day look like\u2019, \u2018what are the best and worst things about your job\u2019 and \u2018what advice\u2019 would you give to me\u2019 can help you work out whether you would want to take a similar path.
Bath PhD graduates can be invaluable sources of careers information and advice \u2013 connect with them through LinkedIn and Bath Connection<\/a>; your supervisor or other academics may also be able to put you in touch. And yes, we have another handy little video<\/a> on career networking as a researcher.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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Develop<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Once you\u2019ve taken time to think about yourself and what\u2019s important to you in your career, and started to do some research into possible career paths, this should put you in a good position to plan some steps that will help you get to where you want to be. Planning next steps and development needs will be something you do anyway as part of working out what you need to do to complete your research, and the two things are interconnected. As well as thinking about the technical and research skills you need to complete your doctorate, think about skills and activities that may be related to but separate from your research, such as teaching, public engagement<\/a>, communicating your research to wider audiences through activities like Three Minute Thesis<\/a>, peer mentoring, enterprise<\/a> and research commercialisation<\/a>. Develop your experience of working on short term projects through taking part in I Keep<\/a> or the Vertically Integrated projects<\/a>, boost your skills through online courses<\/a> or consider some short-term work experience or an internship<\/a>. If you have even vague thoughts of working in sectors other than academia, experience of working with other groups (including voluntary experience) and in other settings will always add value.
If you\u2019re considering a career in academia, this information page<\/a> has some thoughts on areas you need to be taking action on, such as getting a sense of your future research direction, building collaborations internally and externally, getting some teaching experience and planning publications.
If you\u2019re unsure of your career direction, often the best advice is to take opportunities whenever they come up \u2013 this will broaden your network and can lead to some unexpected places.

Finally, remember you can talk things through in a careers appointment<\/a> whether you have clear ideas on your future career path or no idea at all.

<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Managing your career in the second year of your doctorateUsually at this time of year I write a blog post on how to get started with planning your career in the first year of your PhD. This year I thought...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":389,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[748],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/389"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}