CDH

Description

The ’Survey on the careers of doctorate holders (CDH)', jointly carried out Eurostat, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and UNESCO's Institute for Statistics (UIS). The survey covers most of the Member States of the European Union (EU), of EFTA as well as some of the most important other members of the OECD, such as the United States and Australia.

The core objectives of CDH are to better understand the labour market, career path and mobility of the doctoral population.

The study did not adopt a specific definition of or framework for research careers. International comparative classifications were used to define educational degrees (ISCED), professional occupations (ISCO) and sectors of employment (NACE).

The survey proposed the definition of a “research career path job” as a job that will help further career plans in research or is a job in research, in which the respondent wants to make his/her career.

The CDH questionnaire addressed the following aspects of doctorate holders’ careers:

• PhD duration and country
• Attributes and behaviours (including competences) after completing PhD
• Early career research positions
• Employment situation: sector, occupation, earnings, full time / part time, temporary /permanent of current / last job and previous job within the last 10 years
• Behaviours – attitudes (competences) in current principal job
• Overall time working as a researcher
• Reasons for working as a researcher
• Mobility: time in each country of work, reasons to move, links and collaborations with origin country

An interesting variable within the CDH data collection is the perception of the relation between doctoral training and current job among doctorate holders.

The CDH project provides some interesting insights into the employment role and labour market relations. It also provides interesting data on the perception of doctorate holders of the suitability of their PhD training for their work. The limited coverage of countries limits the comparative potential of the CDH data, as does the inconsistency in the questions asked in different countries – which further reduces the number of available country comparisons.

The CDH project was assigned a negative priority from Eurostat in 2011. Since then the data collections remained either unpublished or data collection was simplified. Thus, there is limited consistency between iterations of the CDH surveys and between the years in which they were deployed in different countries.