Young researchers are not always offered a four-year full-time contract for a PhD position. In some cases, they must finish their research in less time (8.2 percent) or work on it part-time (1.9 percent). This was revealed in PNN‘s analysis of 1,451 vacancies on the job site AcademicTransfer. In more than 145 cases, the contract on offer was deemed ‘questionable’.
PNN states they were receiving many messages from PhD candidates who were offered excessively short or part-time contracts against their will, and that they were increasingly being asked to work on their PhD research in their own time. But the interest group says a four-year contract is vital in ensuring the quality of PhD research and theses.
The majority of the vacancies also fail to mention educational tasks (91.8 percent). In some cases, the duration of the appointment is not included in the description (7.4 percent).
Contracts
‘The fact that ten percent of all the offered jobs already fail to meet these standards worries us’, the organisation writes in a press release. PNN fears there will be problems, because there are plans in place to increase the number of PhD candidates in the Netherlands over the next few years.
According to PNN president Rolf van Wegberg, the analysis also looked at 75 vacancies at the RUG and 30 vacancies at the UMCG. He refused to comment on whether these include any ‘questionable’ contracts. ‘We specifically decided to not break it down to individual institutes in our report. It’s not our intention to bully anyone.’