Knowledge brokering in professionally integrated PhDs: Students’ perspectives on opportunities, challenges, and support.
Maria Cervin-Ellqvist, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
There is currently a push for doctoral education and research to be more relevant and applicable to the wider society. Universities need to increase collaboration with non-academic organisations, and doctoral education must prepare students for careers both in and outside of academia, or in collaboration between the two. Consequently, professionally integrated doctorates are on the rise, including the industrial PhD (IndPhD) where a doctoral project resulting in a PhD is conducted in collaboration between an employing organisation and a university. Such doctorates provide both opportunities and challenges, which require further investigation. In this project, we examine the opportunities and challenges of IndPhDs from a student perspective, focusing on students’ roles as brokers of knowledge across industry and academia. How can this role be supported and students’ skills development promoted? Based on survey data from 152 IndPhD students and 12 interviews with individual students, we found that IndPhD students face multiple challenges in brokering research knowledge across contexts, receive little support to learn skills specifically needed in brokering, and often struggle to navigate contexts and find their role—especially in industry. While expressing frustration about lacking support in and across academia and industry, our participants also recognised that they constitute an important brokering function across two communities of practice, where they can provide industry with relevant research and academia with an understanding of current industrial problems. Moreover, a majority of the students interviewed appreciated and wished to maintain their brokering role. This finding speaks to the potential of professionally integrated doctorates to promote increased collaboration and knowledge transfer even after the completion of the PhD project. In this presentation, we further unpack our findings and discuss implications for policy and practice, focusing on training and structural support needed for professionally integrated doctoral students, such as IndPhD students.
Maria Cervin-Ellqvist is a PhD student at the Department for Communication and Learning in Science at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, supervised by Professor Raffaella Negretti and Dr Lisa McGrath. Originally from a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) background, she holds degrees in both bioengineering and teaching. In her interdisciplinary research, she explores communication, learning processes, and learner experiences in higher education, currently with a focus on industrial PhDs in STEM. In all her research, the implications for practice as well as policy are central. Her research has appeared in Higher Education and Journal of Writing Research.