I’ve done a PhD: Does that make me a ‘project manager?’

You’ve done a PhD… that means you’re already a project manager!

I hear this A LOT. I *may* even have said it at some point. But the more I’ve heard it, the more I’ve started to doubt it… or at least critique it.

For example, back in October I had the pleasure of working with Matteo Tardelli on a post about professional ‘culture shock’ when moving from academia to industry. In that post, Matteo said:

‘We’re told that project management is something we acquire in our PhD… but it’s not the same! Managing one single PhD project over several years can be very different from managing several projects on a biweekly deadline.’

This comment got so much solidarity that I thought it was worth further investigation. Are PhDs really project managers? Does a PhD give you the kind of project management skills that employers beyond academia are seeking… or is it all deception?!

So, for this month’s post I caught up with Ben Salisbury: a history PhD graduate now working in a project delivery role in the Civil Service. Ben had loads to say about PhDs and project management, and how to use examples from your own PhD to demonstrate project-related skills to potential employers.

So, let’s dive in!

First of all, I wanted to know what a Postgraduate Researcher/ grad student can really claim by way of project management skills, from a professional project management perspective?

I’m a PhD: am I a project manager?

I want to point out, Ben explains at the outset, that PhD researchers DO have a well-rounded skillset that is easily applicable to working in a project management role. Examples of these skills would be things like:

• Written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to manage your time
• Juggling multiple ‘projects’ (e.g., thesis work, teaching, conferences, etc.)
• Getting to grips with new topics
• Managing large amounts of information

Sounds good so far. I could feel a ‘but’ coming, though.

BUT… (told you) … there are things that the PhD doesn’t teach you, around the application of these skills.

So what, according to our resident Project Delivery Professional, are the main differences between ‘commercial’ project delivery, and working on a PhD research project?

1) Pace and frequency of applying your skills

One key difference is that in most cases, doing a PhD doesn’t give you experience of using all those skills, all at once, all within the same hour. To sum it up, doing a PhD does help you to develop these skills, but it doesn’t usually involve using those skills to the level, pace, or frequency that project delivery work requires.

Good point well made. After all, in a PhD we have time and space to ‘go deep’ into one narrow subject area, to really get to grips with it. When it comes to working in a project management or project delivery setting though, Ben was clear that such work requires applying the skills that you have much faster, and in a shorter timeframe, than academia allows.

In the words of my favourite film of 2023 so far, you have to apply Everything Everywhere All at Once.

2) The burden of responsibility

The next difference Ben highlighted focused on responsibility for different aspects of a project.

Ben explained to me that in project delivery land, there is something called a RACI chart. In the business RACI stands for:

• Responsible
• Accountable
• Consulted
• Informed

The RACI chart for a project therefore maps which members of team are:

• Directly responsible for delivering the work and making tasks happen
• Accountable for making sure that tasks get done on time and to an appropriate standard
• Consulted for their input before starting the project/task
• Informed about the progress of the project

In your PhD project, Ben explains, you are responsible for everything on the RACI chart. You plan the project, deliver it, monitor it, initiate change in it… ultimately, it all rests with you. That being said, there are others around you during your PhD, who can also take on some of the RACI roles. For example, your supervisors are usually consulted and informed on the project.

In project work outside of academia however, you usually only take on one of these roles. For example, you might be a specialist who is responsible for ‘doing’ a part of the project. But if you’re a project manager, you’re not there to ‘do the doing’… you’re there to be accountable for your team, and to make sure that everyone completes their roles and their parts of the project successfully.

This struck a chord with me: even 10 years post-PhD, I still have difficulty surrendering control over some aspects of my work. That ‘I’m so used to doing everything myself’ mindset is definitely still there. It seems I’m not alone, as Ben confesses:

My biggest challenge when I started working in project delivery was learning how to work to other people’s needs and deadlines: letting some things go; delegating things to others; and ultimately being responsible for the delivery of something that someone else carries out.

So, now we know where the ‘gaps’ are when it comes to switching from PhD to project management, are there any ways in which Postgraduate Researchers can ‘practise’ applying their skills in these ways? Or are there things we can do to convince employers that we would make good project managers?

Ben’s first piece of advice on this is to gain familiarity with a project delivery method and its basic terms:

As part of my PhD on the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to complete a PRINCE2 project management course, which is one of the main structured project management methods. I’m highly aware that not everyone has the privilege of being able to access training like this, but you can find YouTube tutorials that will help you grasp the basics of project management methodology for free.

So when you’ve familiarised yourself with the method and the lingo… then what? Ben outlined two ways to help you ‘translate’ your PhD research into terms that will resonate not just with project management professionals, but with industry employers more widely.

Apply the principles of project delivery to your PhD… ideally from an early stage

Project management methodology can actually be really useful to help you manage your research, Ben explains. For example, when putting together a research proposal, you can frame this as a ‘business case’ which outlines the cost, scope, justification, and intended benefits of the work that you’re proposing. You can start to think about your work in these terms, and couch it in this vocabulary, from an early stage.

Ben felt that doing this could have helped him to manage his research more efficiently.

When I started my PhD, I never sat down and considered clear ways to start and end my research. I didn’t really break my project down into a series of stages, which means that the PhD can all blend into one and feel overwhelming. So, as we do in project delivery, it can help to think about your PhD project as a series of stages, each with a start and an end. Drawing up a chapter ‘process’ that you can then repeat for each chapter can help to impose some structure to your PhD, whilst also getting you accustomed to ‘project management’ ways of working.

Take a discrete part of your research and practise couching it in these terms

Chances are you can apply the lingo of project management to a range of aspects of your PhD. As general guidelines, you could work to something like this:

The conference paper/ thesis chapter/ article/ whatever it is – that’s the PRODUCT.

The thing you write in support of that product, to convince someone to publish/ present/ feature that thing (e.g. abstract, research proposal etc.) – that’s the BUSINESS CASE.

The points that you make in your ‘business case’ as to why your article/ chapter/ paper/ poster is original and makes a useful contribution to your discipline – those are the BENEFITS.

And finally, your product achieving the benefits that you’ve set out in the business case – that’s the REALISATION of the benefits.

For benefits to be ‘realised,’ Ben explains, some kind of behavioural change usually has to happen. This is how we tend to think about things in project delivery – that ‘benefits realisation’ means getting other people to respond to the product in some way, perhaps in a way that improves something, increases something, or approaches something more effectively.

To put this into practice, Ben gave me the example of a paper he wrote during his PhD to show that even Roman history can be expressed through the language of project management. Here’s what we came up with:

PRODUCT: 5,000-word article for New Classicist Journal on a set of laws in the early Roman republic.
BUSINESS CASE: the abstract for the article.
BENEFITS: to influence other scholars in the field to recognise that the content and purpose of these laws may not be what we currently think they are.
REALISATION: the article was referenced in the Oxford Classical dictionary, to say that we should think about this set of laws differently because of its findings.

Give it a go for yourself and see how you can express your academic work in terms that resonate with employers beyond academia (both within and beyond project delivery!).

In conclusion, talking to Ben helped to confirm my instincts that whilst doing a PhD doesn’t make you the ‘finished article’ for a career move into project management or something similar:

• It does equip you with relevant skills: you just need to practise (or be prepared to adapt to) exercising these skills at a faster pace, on a more regular frequency, on information from outside of your academic specialism; and
• It does give you examples that you can talk about in applications and interviews: you just need to ‘translate’ these into the language and terminology used by people in the business – on which I hope our examples above have given you head-start!