Transferable skills from a PhD: the complete inventory
Transferable skills from a PhD, domain by domain, built on the Vitae Researcher Development Framework, with the industry name for each one and how to evidence it.
"A doctorate gives you a lot of transferable skills." You have heard it from your graduate school, from a careers workshop, perhaps from your supervisor. It is true, and it is unusable.
Unusable because none of those phrases survives contact with a resume or an interview. Rigour, autonomy, analytical thinking, an ability to synthesise: an R&D recruiter reads those words on every application, doctoral or not. They separate nobody from anybody. What you need is not a list of adjectives. It is an inventory: which specific competences 3 to 6 years of research actually produce, what industry calls each of them, and how you evidence them.
This article is that inventory. It is built on a framework you can read for yourself: the Researcher Development Framework published by Vitae (2010). That is a deliberate choice over an improvised list. You are a scientist, and a framework you cannot check commits you to nothing.
No hiring promise here, and no keyword-stuffing technique. Only the translation.
1. Why "transferable skills" means nothing as it stands
The phrase creates 3 concrete problems.
It confuses an activity with a competence. "I supervised a master's student" is an activity. The competence sits elsewhere: breaking a research problem into tasks a less experienced person can complete, defining a quality criterion, correcting a course without demotivating anyone. That is a different sentence, and a different level of credibility.
It is asymmetric. You know what you did. Your reader does not. When you write "project management", you are thinking of 3 years of trade-offs under uncertainty with consumables counted to the millilitre. The recruiter reads a phrase they have already seen 40 times this week. Often it was written by people who coordinated a group assignment for a single semester.
It pushes you towards intensity instead of precision. Lacking vocabulary, many PhDs compensate with volume: "excellent ability", "strong aptitude". On a technical reader the effect is the opposite of the one intended.
The way out of all 3 traps is the same. Move from an adjective to a named, dated object. Not "autonomous", but "ran a 14-month experimental protocol without daily supervision, including 2 documented changes of method". The second version cannot be inflated. It is checkable, which is exactly what makes it credible.
Before you inventory your skills, know which ones you actually have. The free LabShift assessment takes ~10 min and rests on 4 published instruments. Big Five via IPIP-20, RIASEC Holland, the Schwartz Values Survey, and a skills module mapped onto the Vitae RDF. It returns your profile, your top 3 values and 5 recommended roles.
No account and no email required to see the results.
2. The framework that stops you inventing skills: the Vitae RDF
The Researcher Development Framework (Vitae, 2010) is a British framework built to describe the competences of a researcher, not those of a manager in general. That is what makes it usable in your case. A generic career-assessment framework, designed for a mid-career employee, describes neither publication, nor funding, nor scientific supervision.
It organises competences into 4 domains.
| Domain | What it covers |
|---|---|
| A — Knowledge and intellectual abilities | Subject knowledge, method, analysis, critical thinking, scientific creativity |
| B — Personal effectiveness | Autonomy, perseverance, self-management, continuing professional development |
| C — Research governance and organisation | Ethics, legal frameworks, funding, project management, resource management |
| D — Engagement, influence and impact | Working with others, supervision, teaching, communication, exploitation of results |
2 notes on use. First, the 4 domains are not boxes to tick. Their value is that they force you to look outside domain A, where PhDs almost always stay. A profile that only speaks in domain A terms reads as a researcher applying for a research post. That is the exact wrong signal when the target is industrial.
Second, the RDF describes competences, not jobs. It will never tell you whether to aim for process engineer, regulatory project manager or analyst. It is a map of vocabulary, not a compass for direction. The compass is the intersection with your interests (RIASEC) and your values (Schwartz), which is the job of the assessment rather than of this article.
3. The inventory, domain by domain
Each table has 2 columns. On the left, what you did during the PhD or the postdoc. On the right, the name the same thing carries in an industry job description. Write from the right-hand column, never from the left.
Domain A — Knowledge and intellectual abilities
| What you did | What a company calls it |
|---|---|
| Built a state of the art on a topic new to you | Technical and scientific horizon scanning, framing an unfamiliar subject |
| Chose a method among several candidates, and justified it | Methodological selection, reasoned technical trade-off |
| Handled and interpreted noisy, incomplete data | Data analysis, interpretation under uncertainty |
| Spotted an error inside an expected result | Quality control, critical review of deliverables |
| Framed a testable hypothesis, then designed the experiment | Design of experiments, structured test approach |
| Wrote a paper submitted to peer review | Technical writing intended for adversarial review |
The most saleable competence in this domain is not your subject expertise, which is often too narrow for the role. It is your ability to enter a topic you do not know and produce a reliable reading of it within weeks. PhDs do that better than most profiles, and it is almost always missing from the resume.
Domain B — Personal effectiveness
| What you did | What a company calls it |
|---|---|
| Worked 3 years towards a single objective without daily supervision | Autonomy on a long objective, ability to structure your own work |
| Carried on after a run of failed experiments | Perseverance on a resistant problem, tolerance of technical failure |
| Redirected a project after a negative result | Documented ability to pivot, deciding on unfavourable data |
| Learned a technique, a language or an instrument alone | Self-directed upskilling, continuing learning |
| Held several fronts at once (bench, writing, teaching) | Managing competing workloads, prioritisation |
Watch the wording in this domain. It is where career-industry vocabulary creeps in fastest, with words like resilience or drive. Stay on facts. A single dated change of research direction is worth more than 3 adjectives.
00 — Context
Start here: the only two details asked
Free · ~10 min · no account, no email required to see the results.
They shape the recommended roles. The rest of the assessment is 48 items across four published instruments — Big Five (IPIP-20), RIASEC, Schwartz values, Vitae RDF.
Domain C — Research governance and organisation
This is the domain doctoral candidates under-use most. It is often the one a recruiter cares about most, because it looks most like a job.
| What you did | What a company calls it |
|---|---|
| Managed a consumables budget, ordered, made trade-offs | Operational budget management, supplier relations |
| Wrote or co-wrote a funding application | Funding case writing, responding to calls for proposals |
| Kept a compliant lab notebook | Traceability, documentation, quality culture |
| Worked within ethics, GDPR, safety or animal-facility rules | Regulatory compliance, risk management |
| Planned 3 years of work in milestones | Planning, long-horizon project management |
| Shared a major instrument with other teams | Managing constrained resources, cross-team coordination |
| Owned the maintenance or running of an instrument | Responsibility for a technical asset |
If you are aiming at regulatory affairs, quality, R&D project management or innovation funding, this domain is your main argument. Not your thesis topic.
Domain D — Engagement, influence and impact
| What you did | What a company calls it |
|---|---|
| Co-supervised an intern, a master's student, a junior PhD | Supervision, skills transfer, bringing a colleague to autonomy |
| Taught tutorials or lab classes to groups | Training, delivering teaching sessions |
| Presented at a conference in front of specialists | Technical communication, speaking in a demanding setting |
| Explained your topic to a lay audience | Communication to non-specialists, plain explanation |
| Answered hostile reviewers | Adversarial argument, defending a deliverable |
| Collaborated with another lab or another country | Remote and cross-cultural collaboration |
| Co-authored with 10 authors and negotiated the order | Multidisciplinary teamwork, negotiation |
The most poorly used competence in the whole inventory is the response to reviewers. It is a structured defence of your work in front of anonymous, competent opponents, under a deadline. Very few non-doctoral profiles have practised that for years.
4. How you evidence a transferable skill
An inventory is not enough. A competence named without evidence is an adjective in disguise. The structure that works on a technical reader has 4 elements.
- The situation, in a single line, understandable without your discipline.
- The decision you took, and why it was not obvious.
- The constraint — time, budget, missing data, dependence on others.
- The effect that can be checked: what changed, and how fast.
3 examples, drawn from the inventory above.
Supervision (domain D) — "Co-supervised a master's student over 6 months: split the topic into 3 deliverables, set acceptance criteria, ran a weekly review. The student was running the protocol unaided by the end." No adjectives, and a sized responsibility.
Methodological pivot (domains A and B) — "After 8 months with no usable signal, dropped method X for method Y on the basis of 3 feasibility tests of 2 weeks each. Decision documented and agreed with the research director." That is a decision-under-uncertainty competence, stated as one.
Budget and suppliers (domain C) — "Ran the team consumables line, roughly €15,000 a year: supplier selection, trade-offs between reagents, order tracking." A line a manager reads without effort.
Notice what these 3 examples do not do. They do not claim the outcome was spectacular, they quote no figure you cannot verify, and they do not compare the candidate with anyone. A technical reader trusts what they can cross-check.
5. 3 mistakes that void the inventory
Translating everything. A resume that reformulates 40 competences is no longer a resume. Pick the 6 to 8 competences the advert genuinely asks for, and leave the rest in a private working document. The inventory exists to help you choose, not to say everything.
Translating into the language of the wrong role. "Project management" means milestones that are contractual in regulatory affairs. In a deeptech startup it means priorities re-argued weekly. Take the exact vocabulary of 2 or 3 real adverts in your target area before you write.
Erasing the doctorate. The goal is to translate, not to disguise yourself as a non-doctoral profile. The doctorate is what explains how you ran a 3-year project autonomously. Remove it and your competences lose their origin, which makes the whole document look suspect.
6. What this inventory does not do
For honesty about the limits. The Vitae RDF describes competences, it does not measure your level in any of them. It predicts no hire, and it says nothing about your interests or your values. 2 PhDs with an identical skills inventory can suit opposite environments. One in a structured R&D team with milestones, the other in a startup where nothing is written down.
That is why the LabShift assessment crosses the skills module with 3 other instruments. Big Five via IPIP-20 (Goldberg, 1992) covers your working preferences. RIASEC Holland (Holland, 1973) covers your occupational interests. The Schwartz Values Survey (Schwartz, 1992) covers what will make you stay or leave. Skills say what you can do. The other 3 say where it will hold.
Further reading
To turn this inventory into a document you can send, the guide on the PhD CV for industry walks through the translation line by line. To choose the target before you translate, read industry jobs after a PhD and, if you are starting from nothing, career change after a PhD. On how this assessment differs from a conventional career assessment, see the PhD career assessment.
This article also exists in French: Compétences transférables du doctorat : l'inventaire complet.
Conclusion
You do not have a competence deficit. You have a vocabulary deficit, and vocabulary is something you can fix in an afternoon with a framework in front of you. Take the 4 domains, fill the left column with what you actually did, then write nothing but the right column.
Take the free LabShift assessment to start from a measured baseline rather than a blank page: 4 published instruments, ~10 min, results on screen immediately, and no email required to read them.
After reading
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