The nonprofit Association Bernard Gregory has been working on this issue for more than 10 years, and, with the help of the doctoral schools (see sidebar), Ph.D. students should learn how better to explain to employers the value of their training and their specific qualities.
Despite the career-development aspect, being a doctorant-conseil is not a training phase, writes François Forest, director of the Information, Structure, and Systems doctoral school at the Montpellier 2 University, in an e-mail.
And the institute features a doctoral school, which, in addition to a focus on research, delivers courses in collaboration with the Max-Planck Institute for Advanced Materials in Stuttgart, and soon with the Brinell Centre in Stockholm.
With his friend and colleague Paul O'Higgins he set up what was in effect a doctoral school for labour law research in Cambridge with an interdisciplinary approach, combining legal analysis with sociological and empirical research, which continues today.
Ph.D. France's 66,000 Ph.D. students are each affiliated with a doctoral school.
Almost every DEA program is now part of a doctoral school, and some of these schools belong to several universities (although this is not common).
In most countries, doing a PhD gives you the status of a student affiliated to a research entity and possibly also an affiliation with a doctoral school or programme.
According to the EUA report, today about one-half of Europe's universities have doctoral schools, compared with 29% in 2007.
The New Chapter of the Thesis is ABG's most recent project, in collaboration with a number of doctoral schools.
