Myths and Realities of Highly Qualified Labor and What It Means for PhDs
- PDF / 316,134 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 11 Downloads / 198 Views
Myths and Realities of Highly Qualified Labor and What It Means for PhDs Leonid Gokhberg 1 & Dirk Meissner 1 & Natalia Shmatko 1
Received: 21 July 2016 / Accepted: 1 August 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract Competencies and skills of the doctorate holders are frequently perceived a guarantee for professional careers in many occupations and a solid contribution to scientific excellence, country innovation capability, and economic and societal development. The assumption that doctorate holders are easily integrated in economic endeavors proves wrong which calls for a revision of the widespread thinking about this extremely specialized and trained people. Ongoing debates neglect the fact that doctoral degrees are academic degrees which testify degree holder’s competence in research which is to be viewed a profession with specific skills. Innovation per se is hardly included in this profession. Also, PhDs are expected to engage in teaching but against their teaching duties they are not obliged to receive education or training of teaching skills. This is even more remarkable since teachers at primary and secondary level are always educated in teaching methods but tertiary level teachers are not. The essay argues that PhDs should be viewed as research professionals and research as a profession. This requires a change in the perception of both by policy makers but does not say that there is an urgent need for policy intervention in regulating the competencies and skills which are included in the respective professional standards. Keywords Doctorates careers . Research profession . Researcher competencies . Qualified labor
Leonid Gokhberg, Dirk Meissner and Natalia Shmatko contributed equally to this work.
* Dirk Meissner [email protected]
1
National Research University Higher School of Economics, Myasnitskaya Street, 20, 101000 Moscow, Russia
J Knowl Econ
At a Glance There has been a decade of lasting discussion of political, economic, and scientific communities about the outstanding importance of people’s qualification for scientific achievements, technological breakthroughs, and innovation excellence. Although this sounds plausible at first sight, we need to remember that each community has its own dedicated interests in such debates. Where the political community argues in popular words to address society, the economic/industrial community expects labor-trained for their dedicated short-term needs and the established scientific community wishes to preserve the status quo. Obviously, these intentions are contradictory in themselves (Devos and Somerville 2012. What followed the discussion is that the number of doctorate holders multiplied in many countries which caused an intensified discussion about the supposed (mis)allocation of the respective competencies. This is at least partially driven by the use of the number of tertiary graduates and doctorate holders especially as proxies for assessing and comparing the innovation performance of countries frequently resulting in country rank
Data Loading...
