Why Transferable Skills Are Essential During the PhD — Not Just After
Why Transferable Skills Matter During the PhD
There is a common misconception that transferable skills are only useful for career progression beyond the PhD, particularly outside academia. In reality, these transferable and professional skills are essential to succeeding during the PhD itself and are a core part of effective researcher development.
Being a doctoral researcher means developing a wide range of PhD skills alongside subject expertise. These can include managing complex projects, navigating uncertainty, communicating clearly, collaborating effectively and balancing competing demands, often without the training, support or knowledge of how to do this.
At QPR 2026, there was much discussion about transferable skills, from the perspective of both the researcher developer and the researcher being developed, being as much about the here-and-now as they are preparing for the future. Allowing the researcher to research.
There is a common saying that a PhD is 90% persistence and 10% intelligence. Developing these transferable skills is not separate from doing research well; it’s about making that 90% easier so you can make the most of the 10%! It’s an integral part of becoming an effective, confident and resilient researcher.
A PhD is a complex project
Vitae’s RDF highlights project management as a core competency in researcher development, while the Project Management Institute defines a project as a temporary endeavour to deliver a unique output. This definition describes the vast majority of work we are undertaking on a day-to-day basis – doing new things to deadlines. It is also a perfect description of a PhD. Unfortunately, many researchers are never explicitly taught project management approaches that support long-term, complex research.
Project management for researchers is increasingly recognised as an important part of doctoral researcher development as so much of the PhD effort involves:
Planning and prioritising – what should I be focusing on now, what can wait
Managing competing demands – PhD research, writing papers, administration, going to conference, possible teaching/demoing, personal commitments
Handling setbacks – bouncing back from inevitable missteps, delays and (hopefully constructive) criticism
Maintaining focus and progress – keeping moving forward with the rigour required for doctoral level research without getting derailed by fascinating, yet ultimately tangential, topics
Sustaining momentum – retaining motivation, morale and engagement over 3-4+ years
Supporting postgraduate researchers in these skills is not the cherry on the cake, it’s an integral ingredient in successful completion. To continue the cooking analogy, transferable skills are the baking powder that makes the cake rise!
Communication and Collaboration Are Core Research Skills
Further to the project management and personal effectiveness skills helpful during the postgraduate degree, communication and collaboration is at the heart of all research. Sometimes a PhD can be a solitary undertaking, maybe even isolating at times, but strong communication skills for researchers are essential.
Communicate and collaborate with key stakeholders:
Individual – eg supervisors, participants, laboratory technicians
Research community – journals (editors, reviewers, readers), conferences (posters, presentations)
Group – teaching, demoing, research group colleagues
Knowledge dissemination – the ultimate output of the PhD is the thesis followed by the Viva!
Communication doesn’t happen by accident, it should be planned, and collaboration is an integral part of any research, even if it’s just debating with supervisors what to include and what to leave out. These skills are an essential part of any researcher’s toolkit and a key contributor to successful completion, not just an optional add-on.
How Transferable Skills Support Wellbeing and Resilience
Transferable skills also play an important role in researcher wellbeing, resilience and sustainable ways of working. PhD research is inherently uncertain and often involves competing priorities, shifting expectations and high personal pressure. Dealing with perfectionism and imposter syndrome, managing workload pressure, and maintaining healthy boundaries are significant challenges.
Developing the transferable skills mentioned previously help PhD students feel more in control of their work, reduce stress and navigate this uncertainty more confidently.
Researcher wellbeing is increasingly recognised as a central part of doctoral researcher development. Researchers who develop effective ways of working are better placed to manage stress, maintain momentum and build resilience throughout their careers.
Effective Researcher Development That Fits The Journey
My own doctoral research found that effective doctoral training in transferable and postgraduate researcher skills works best when the learning is practical, applied and directly relevant to the challenges faced by the participants. Furthermore, I’ve learnt through the experience of training thousands of PhD candidates that often targeting researcher development and skills training to different stages of the PhD can help researchers build confidence and capability progressively without overwhelming them at the start. For example:
In the early stages, where uncertainty abounds, requires skills to deal with
imposter syndrome
self-organisation
communication (particularly in establishing supervisory relationships)
Often around the 9-12 month mark, the focus shifts more towards
detailed project planning as the PhD starting to take on more form
personal time management
For year 2+ where often the in-depth research begins, skills are required to support
resilience and dealing with stress as changes occur
overcoming procrastination
dealing with setbacks
And as the end is in sight, the emphasis should be on
completing on time
staying motivated towards the end
preparing for the Viva
These complement the more traditionally ‘academic’ skills developed during the PhD, such as critical thinking, academic writing, research design and literature review. The timely delivery of skills training ensures that the learning is relevant and applicable, and, as a result, is more embedded than front-loading and potentially overwhelming the researcher. Targeting support and levelling provision over the PhD lifecycle, also assists researcher development teams better manage waiting lists and the ever increasing demands to do more with less.
How Transferable Skills Shape Future Opportunities
Transferable skills support researchers far beyond doctoral study. Within academia, they contribute to successful funding applications, interdisciplinary collaboration, leadership and research management. Beyond academia, professional and transferable skills such as communication, project management, decision making and collaboration remain highly valued across industry, government and the public sector.
Increasingly, employers are looking not only for expertise, but for people who can apply that expertise effectively—working with others, managing complexity and adapting to change.
An email I still cherish came from an attendee who had participated in one of my courses several years previously
“I found out this week that I was successful in the interview! Thanks again for the PM training and introducing me to a career I had previously never thought of.”
So transferable skills development during the postgraduate process is also about broadening the horizons of PhD researchers and offering career pathways beyond the obvious application of the degree. Developing these skills during the PhD enables researchers to make meaningful contributions across a wide range of roles, sectors and contexts throughout their careers.
Developing Researchers, Not Just Research
Transferable skills are not “extra work”, they are integral to supporting the PhD endeavour. Of course, it’s possible to complete a postgraduate degree focusing solely on the research but the output, the experience and the person is greatly enriched by developing these complementary professional and research skills.
A PhD is experienced uniquely by every student, however there are commonalities in many of the issues encountered. In our book, Rosie and I subtitled each chapter with the issues that were most commonly raised on our training courses, such as How To:
Create a useful plan when you don’t know what you’re doing
Get going again if you get stuck
Stop worrying and start working
Get the most out of every day
This is to emphasise that if you’re doing a PhD, you are not alone! Thousands of others are having similar experiences but help is available. At the beginning of the PhD the researcher will not have all the skills required to complete the PhD, indeed they will not know all the skills they will require. Just as the research idea matures and develops over the lifetime of the project, so do the skills of the researcher.
The most meaningful development happens when practical insight, lived experience and reflective learning come together in ways that researchers can immediately apply to their own work and then take forward with confidence into their future careers.
- Fraser, Director & Lead Trainer
References:
Vitae (2025). Researcher Development Framework. Available at: vitae.ac.uk (Accessed: 12th May 2026).
Project Management Institute (2021). A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® guide) (7th ed.). Project Management Institute.
Robertson, F (2015). Participant Perceptions of Value: A Qualitative Framework for Evaluating Project Management Training [Doctoral Thesis]. Edinburgh Napier University
Doyle, R & Robertson, F (2023). The PhD Handbook: How to take care of yourself, your research project and your future. Open University Press