For the first time, UBC Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies has tracked PhD career outcomes, starting with the 3805 graduates from 2005 to 2013. We have made the results of our survey available through a report and a website, where you can explore the data for yourself. You can also login to our Faculty and Staff Portal, and explore additional department specific data.
Through our survey, we discovered that 97% of our PhD graduates are working or doing postdoctoral fellowships. The larger project (including internet research on graduates who did not respond to the survey) showed that 51% are in higher education, 26% in the private sector, and 13% in the public and non-profit sectors. Sixty of our graduates have founded their own companies, and around 150 are self-employed. In the survey comments, graduates shared stories of their success and challenges in finding work and discussed aspects of their education and experience that they found helpful, as well as offering suggestions for what would have been useful.
As UBC continually works to improve doctoral education, learning more about the career paths our graduates take is essential. This survey information will inform our work and discussions over the coming years, and we plan to repeat this survey at intervals, to continue gathering data on the many paths taken by our graduates.