Career strategies chosen by postgraduate students of federal universities

Ambiguous indicators of development of highly qualified personnel training programs in the Russian Federation, difficulties and institutional barriers preventing postgraduate students’ access to the academic and non-academic labor markets, as well as new trends in the field of scientific and technological development caused the authors’ research interest in studying postgraduate students’ choice of future career strategies. According to the authors, the formation of human capital in the sphere of knowledge production and transfer depends on the postgraduate students’ orientation and content of their career strategies. Based on the results of an expert survey organized within the framework of the first stage of the research project “Choice of career strategies by graduate students”, supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant 18-010-00591), the authors test the hypothesis of the existence of four typical career strategies that can be chosen by postgraduate students in the academic and non-academic labor markets: “researcher’s” strategy (development mainly in the research field), the strategy of the “scientific and pedagogical freelancer” (focus on mobility, work in other universities in the field of research and teaching), “typical teacher’s” strategy (a typical progressive algorithm of postgraduate’s development: from assistant to associate Professor and Professor), as well as the strategy of the “undecided”. Conclusions about the postgraduates’ professional choice are formed on the basis of a survey of 1429 respondents from 5 Federal universities (Kazan (Volga) Federal University, Northern (Arctic) Federal University named after M.V. Lomonosov, North Caucasus Federal University, Siberian Federal University, Southern Federal University).