Renaming postdocs and PhD students would boost respect, pay, progression

What is a “postdoc”? How is one different from a PhD student? And do they really have any marketable skills? 

The answers to these questions might be obvious to those of us within academia, but I can assure you from personal experience that the same is not true elsewhere – including, sometimes, in the very industries that would benefit from early-career researchers’ services.  

If they don’t have academic research backgrounds themselves, even high-tech employers are often unaware that PhD students and postdoctoral researchers carry out the bulk of day-to-day scientific enquiries – often working extremely long hours, including over weekends and holidays.

Within academic science, we typically regard even postdocs as mere trainees and, accordingly, pay them poorly. This is absurd. Imagine any other employer that treated anyone who was not a senior administrator as a mere trainee even after a decade of study (the average age of PhD recipients in the US hovers just above 31) and many years of work experience. Yes, good science requires time and expertise, which is why collaborations and mentorship are so important. However, acknowledging the full professional stature of young researchers is equally important. 

A big part of that should involve a re-evaluation of job titles. The terminology used to describe early-career researchers is more than a mere label; it shapes perceptions and realities. Within academia, the titles “PhD student” and “postdoc” obscure the professional nature and expertise of these roles and perpetuate a hierarchy that unacceptably extends the period of “training” and justifies lower compensation and precarious contracts.  

For individual early-career researchers, this endless sense of “not being prepared” or “not being good enough” for tenure-track positions sustains a cycle of insecurity and devaluation, characterised by low self-confidence and doubts about one’s “real-world” value, all of which damages our mental health. 

Moreover, existing early-career titles make it hard for people outside academia to know what young researchers actually do. Most seriously, this complicates the transition to a job outside academia because companies judge PhD holders and postdocs as simultaneously over-qualified and apparently lacking any real work experience. Yes, the competition for principal investigator (PI) positions is pushing more and more people to make that transition, but that doesn’t mean academic nomenclature is not a barrier to doing so successfully. I and most of my colleagues have found ourselves having to explain to potential employers that we are, in fact, experienced, independent researchers and not just unthinking apprentices to our all-knowing masters. 

A very low-cost way to alleviate such misunderstandings would be to refer to a PhD student as a “junior researcher” and a postdoc as, simply, a “researcher” – instead of a “postdoctoral researcher”, which is all too commonly abbreviated to the much more opaque “postdoc”. Varying degrees of experience could easily be incorporated into this basic nomenclature, such as “independent researcher” or “senior researcher”: titles that could be bestowed by departments as people progress.  

As well as offering immediate clarity about the roles and aiding in the transition to industry, such clarified titles would lay the groundwork for fair compensation – including for PhD students – and the establishment of clear career pathways within academia, including the creation of more long-term, senior research positions below the group leader level. 

An objection might be that calling PhD students junior researchers would be similar to calling medical students “junior doctors” or law students “junior lawyers”, which would be genuinely misleading about their level of experience and expertise. That’s a fair observation, but there is a fundamental difference. For a PhD student, the period of taking lectures and exams, if it exists at all, is limited to the very beginning of the doctoral period, beyond which they become semi-autonomous researchers and the workhorses of their bosses’ labs.  

Redefining early-career researchers’ job titles is a simple and low-cost step towards enhancing young researchers’ self-perception and improving public understanding of their work. Let this be a call to action for academic institutions across the globe to reconsider outdated titles and embrace a nomenclature that truly reflects the contributions and status of their researchers. 

Michele Nardin is a Janelia Theory Fellow (independent researcher) at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus, Virginia.