Finishing your PhD still feels like a mountain to climb and you are already thinking about what’s next. Pursuing an academic career can feel daunting. But equally troublesome might be the idea of finding a path outside academia. What are your skills and ambitions? How do you find and formulate your career goals? And how do you deal with the feeling of uncertainty? 

Navigating the transition after the PhD is rarely straightforward. The academic system offers opportunities and uncertainties in equal measure, and what worked for others may not align with your strengths, values, or aspirations. For many researchers, the challenge is not a lack of options but a lack of clarity about which direction genuinely fits. This workshop provides a space to explore what drives your decision-making, helps you to gain clarity, and to choose a path that truly fits you so you can move forward with confidence. Instead of offering generic advice, the workshop provides a practical decision-making framework that helps you to evaluate
your options in a grounded and personalised way.

To ensure that insights become actionable, you receive a 90-minute individual systemic coaching session after the workshop. The individual coaching helps to apply the decision-making framework to your own situation, and helps you in developing concrete next steps. The workshop combines structured input, guided reflection, and systemic coaching to support meaningful decision-making.
Participants examine their personal motivations, values, and working patterns while also considering the broader academic and non-academic contexts in which their decisions unfold. Interactive exercises and small group-discussions help translate
insight into clarity, while the individual coaching session ensures that each participant’s next steps are realistic, aligned, and tailored to their unique circumstances.
By the end of the workshop and individual coaching session, you will:
• Understand the key factors that shape post-Doc career decisions, including personal motivations, values, needs, and systemic conditions.
• Gain insight into your individual decision-making patterns, especially how you navigate uncertainty, evaluate options, and respond to internal and external expectations.
• Develop a personalised set of decision criteria that helps you identify which career directions - academic, beyond academia, or hybrid - are genuinely viable and aligned.
• Map out a realistic range of possible next steps and assess them in relation to your own strengths, constraints, and preferred ways of working.
• Learn a structured framework for meaningfully comparing and choosing between options, rather than relying on generic career advice or external pressure.
• Identify concrete next steps to explore, test, or pursue selected career directions after the PhD, which will leave you with more confidence and agency to make a grounded and personally aligned career decision.

Duration: 

2 hours online (group workshop) + 90 minutes individual systemic coaching

This Workshop is led by Dr. Deniz Seebacher. She holds a PhD in anthropology and is an organizational consultant who has been working internationally with managers
from various organizations for over 15 years. She supports individuals and organizations in navigating transitions, uncovering implicit competencies. Within academia, she supports scholars to translate academic strengths into applied professional contexts (within and beyond academia).