PhD Training Teaches Research, Not the Rules of an Academic Career
Giovanni Straffelini, coordinator of a doctoral school at the University of Trento, argues that structured workshops on the hidden curriculum could close the gap between individual mentoring and the international reality of academic work.
By Brainova
Training for the Lab, Not the Profession
Giovanni Straffelini, a full professor of metallurgy and coordinator of the Doctoral School in Materials, Mechatronics and Systems Engineering at the University of Trento, sees a disconnect every time a new cohort of PhDs arrives. Most doctoral students set out intending to stay in academia, yet only a minority will ever land a permanent faculty post. The training they receive is exceptional at research itself: formulating questions, designing experiments, analysing data, publishing papers. What it neglects is the profession they hope to join. Straffelini says young researchers are never explicitly taught how the academic profession operates — how to build an independent research profile, choose conferences, secure funding, or establish a scientific reputation. Those skills were once absorbed informally inside a single national system. Today, with research internationalised, the missing piece is far larger.
Careers Now Unfold Across Borders
A generation ago, a researcher could reasonably expect to spend most of a career within one national academic system. Straffelini notes that now this is the exception. The typical trajectory he describes involves studying in one country, completing a PhD in another, doing postdoctoral research elsewhere, and eventually building a career in yet another context. This makes international mobility less about picking up a stamp in a passport and more about learning to operate effectively in different academic cultures. Each system has its own recruitment procedures, evaluation criteria, funding mechanisms, and career structures. Moving between them is part of the job itself. Straffelini argues that understanding these differences is now a baseline requirement for any serious academic career — not an optional add-on to research training, but something that belongs on the doctoral curriculum itself.
The Hidden Curriculum Nobody Teaches
The unspoken rules of academic life form a hidden curriculum, Straffelini says. Early-career researchers gradually discover they need to understand how research groups develop, how collaborations are built, how conferences create professional networks, how funding opportunities shape career trajectories, and how an independent scientific identity emerges. None of this appears in the formal syllabus. Instead, it is picked up through conversations with supervisors, by watching peers, or from painful trial and error. Straffelini does not object to learning by experience — that is how most science works. But he points out that a body of knowledge that has become essential for navigating an international research environment is still left largely to chance. A student who happens to land in a research group with a well-connected mentor learns the rules; someone who lands elsewhere may never see them until it is too late.
Mentoring Is Strong — and Not Enough
Individual supervision remains the backbone of doctoral education, and Straffelini is quick to credit it. A good supervisor introduces candidates to conferences, recommends journals, opens professional networks, suggests collaborations, and helps them understand how academic careers develop over time. That apprenticeship model transmits what makes research a living profession. But Straffelini sees a structural weakness: no matter how committed a supervisor is, the guidance they offer inevitably reflects their own career path, scientific community, and professional experience. A supervisor who never moved countries cannot fully prepare a student for a global job market. A supervisor who stayed in one subfield cannot map the funding landscape across systems. The problem is not the dedication of supervisors — many invest enormous energy in their students. It is that universities treat this individual mentoring as a standalone strategy, when the careers they are preparing students for have become more complex than any single mentor's experience can cover.
A Handful of Sessions to Level the Field
Straffelini's proposal is deliberately modest. He is not calling for a redesign of doctoral education or for replacing scientific training with generic employability workshops. Instead, doctoral schools could add a small number of structured, practical discussions led by experienced academics on topics every researcher will face: building an independent scientific profile, decoding publication strategies, developing international collaborations, applying for competitive funding, and understanding how different academic systems work. A handful of such sessions, supported by shared readings and open peer discussion, would give every doctoral student a common baseline of institutional literacy. Straffelini argues this would not replace mentoring — it would make it more effective by enabling students to ask better questions and make more informed decisions. If universities genuinely believe in meritocracy, he says, scientific potential should never depend on having happened to join the right research group or meet the right mentor. The rules of the game should be visible to everyone.
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