elButlletí

A quarterly publication of AQU Catalunya

89

April 2018

AQU Catalunya was invited to the 10th Meeting of Young Researchers from Catalonia and other Catalan-speaking regions, which is organised every year by the Catalan Society of Chemistry together with the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC). Anna Prades, project manager at AQU Catalunya, took part at this year's event, which was held at the IEC in Barcelona on 29 and 30 January.

Prades participated in the round table, "What comes after a doctoral degree?" in which there was a discussion on the employment opportunities for doctoral degree holders in Catalonia. In her presentation, Prades discussed the findings of the latest survey of employment outcomes of doctoral degree holders from Catalan universities carried out by AQU Catalunya, with a particular focus on the outcomes in the Experimental Sciences. The round table was complemented with two talks by representatives from multinational chemical companies, who focused on the hiring of PhD holders in private industry.

The main conclusions from the discussions were that the employment outcomes of doctoral degree holders are consistently better than those of people with a lower level of education, and that not all doctoral degree holders were employed in positions where their PhD was relevant to their job: only 6 out of 10 had jobs in which their doctoral degree was relevant.