The Postdoctoral Career Ladder Is Broken. How Can Postdocs Make the Climb?

When Alma Valencia Camargo left her native Mexico City, she envisioned a straightforward path: a PhD at a top European institution, then establishing her research career somewhere in the world. However, after earning a PhD in immunology at ETH Zurich, that path looked far less certain.

What began as a pursuit of excellence and international experience had evolved into a feeling of entrapment within an ambiguous career. Staying in academia was hard, but transitioning into industry was even harder, she explained. “I was looking for a job in industry for around six or seven months, and I couldn't really find anything,” Camargo said. Like many early-career researchers, she kept encountering the same response: “My skills were not translational enough.”

Camargo’s experience reflects a growing unease across the research workforce. For decades, after completing a PhD, it was common to remain in academia for a few more years to deepen expertise and develop independence through a postdoctoral position, but that path has become increasingly unstable due to systemic issues, including increasing numbers of postdoctoral researchers, variability in mentorship and institutional support, and difficulty translating their experience into opportunities beyond academia. Funding pressures, including recent grant pauses across the UK Research and Innovation councils (UKRI) and prolonged budget constraints affecting US agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), have intensified concerns about the increasing precarity of the postdoctoral research stage of the scientific career ladder.

How to Define a Successful Postdoctoral Career

According to the latest data released by the NSF in 2023, in the United States alone, an estimated 60,000 to 65,000 researchers hold postdoctoral positions. Most of them are on temporary contracts.¹ These numbers represent a four-fold increase in the number of postdoctoral researchers since 1979, and similar patterns are evident across Europe and other regions. This increase has led to a number of systemic issues, as noted in a recent survey of the Max Planck Society’s postdoctoral researchers.² These range from an oversupply in the academic labor market to entrenched evaluation systems that prioritize narrow metrics of success.² A rare attempt to quantify what constitutes a ‘successful’ postdoctoral journey emerged in a recent study.³ Using a data-driven approach, Duan Yueran, a researcher at China University of Geosciences, and her colleagues sought to identify patterns associated with career progression. A successful postdoctoral path, they found, is shaped by a combination of many unevenly distributed factors: mentorship quality, institutional environment, funding stability, and individual drive.

In an accompanying commentary, Wu Youyou, a psychology researcher at University College London, emphasized that the data revealed a system filled with structural challenges.⁴ Meaningful postdoctoral experiences, she noted, are often the exception rather than the rule. “There should be better support for postdocs and young PI[s],” she said, talking about what needs to change for the postdoctoral system to remain valuable.

Youyou’s own trajectory illustrates both the potential and the fragility of the postdoctoral experience. According to her, the years she spent at Northwestern University as a postdoctoral researcher in psychology served as a powerful springboard for long-term success, despite the uncertainty and challenges of that stage. But, she noted, that’s not always the case. “I think the right mentor can make the difference between success and not success,” she said.

Indeed, mentorship is the most cited point as critical for navigating the overwhelming pressures of postdoctoral life, balancing expectations with the need for self-care.^5-7 However, as Youyou explained, mentors themselves, especially those at the beginning of their leadership careers, are often subject to the same pressures.

The Need for New Policies on Postdoctoral Positions

Inge van der Weijden, a social sciences researcher and PhD coordinator at Leiden University, has thoroughly analyzed the postdoctoral workforce in her studies.^8-11 She explained how her work on researcher careers, mental health in academia, recognition, and reward strategies, revealed that the mental health situation for postdoctoral researchers “was not that good, not only in the Netherlands, but this is really something international...that's also quite alarming.” By analyzing thousands of interviews with academics at different stages of their careers, she found that the main drivers of a feeling of failure were intense competition, precarious contracts, and insufficient institutional support. “There are a lot of factors that lead people outside academia,” she said. “This is a problem for the whole research ecosystem, not only for the single person.”

Van der Weijden's research has played a role in shaping policy reforms in the Netherlands, where efforts are underway to rethink how to structure and evaluate academic careers both within and outside of academia.¹² As van der Weijden explained, a key component of these reforms is a shift away from traditional success metrics to a more holistic assessment of researchers’ contributions to society and the skills they gain. By recognizing the diverse competencies that a postdoctoral researcher develops—from project management to interdisciplinary collaboration, communication, and problem solving—these policies aim to broaden career pathways and reduce the bottleneck at the level of faculty positions.

This holistic approach will also benefit researchers who no longer aspire to become principal investigators but want to remain deeply committed to academic work. The Netherlands’ model offers these individuals career progression options based on individual strengths rather than just independent research output.

This kind of system would benefit people like Selma Tuzlak, a biomedical researcher at the University of Zurich. After years of trying to climb the academic ladder, she came to terms with the likelihood that she would not lead her own lab, yet her motivation to contribute to academic research remains strong. She said that she wishes to find a stable position to continue working as a researcher without having to rely on someone else’s funding situation.

Sector experts and postdoctoral researchers themselves agree that a more sustainable future will depend on reimagining this career stage on a global scale. Many advocate for coordinated action across multiple levels, from universities and funding bodies to governments, to ensure the long-term sustainability of the system.

A Culture Shifting Movement Balancing Global Strains

Several initiatives suggest there is indeed a shift in how institutions approach early-career researchers. Increasingly, institutions and funding bodies are recognizing that addressing the postdoctoral crisis requires more than incremental adjustments. Like the Netherlands government’s ongoing restructuring efforts, there is a growing movement within academic institutions and funders to shift the focus from output-driven models to people-centered approaches, emphasizing the importance of career development, well-being, and flexibility in postdoctoral research programs.

One example is Prosper, a UK-based career development project led by the University of Liverpool, funded in its development phase by Research England and now by UK Research and Innovation. The project is designed to support the rollout of resources across UK higher education institutions (HEIs), helping postdocs across disciplines explore and prepare for a wide range of career paths. Over 70 UK HEIs now promote or utilize Prosper to enhance career development. According to Kerry McElroy, a stakeholder development manager at Prosper, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Other institutions across Europe are adopting similar approaches. For example, at Ghent University dedicated postdoctoral programs and support roles have been established to provide tailored guidance for early-career researchers. Van der Weijden praised Ghent University’s Postdoc Career Hub as a positive example of structured guidance, training, and a grassroots network helping postdoctoral researchers navigate the academic job market and beyond.

As pressures from decreased funding for research intensify, the need for structural changes to postdoctoral program funding grows. “We did a strategic review last year of the career portfolio, from PhD to leadership, and there are systemic problems...definitely for early career research,” said Annalisa Montesanti, a program manager at the Health Research Board, an Irish research funding agency. Indeed, their Collaborative Postdoctoral Fellowships Program supports the development of postdoctoral researchers as individuals in addition to investing in their research. “In terms of the funder perspective...it's very much about individuals, about their training plan, so we provide funding for training,” she said. “This is good for us too,” she added. “The knowledge they can gain with us, the novelty they bring to the field, their success, for us, is anyway a return of investment.”

Drawing on her research on early-career researchers, van der Weijden described these initiatives as a good example of postdoctoral career management. She emphasized that “within or outside academia, it shouldn’t matter, researchers are a key part of society.”

The postdoctoral career stage has become the flag of a system at a crossroads. While the challenges are significant, positive examples demonstrate that restructuring is feasible. Camargo is almost at the end of her postdoctoral contract and is still looking for a move to industry. However, her future, like that of many postdoctoral researchers, is still uncertain.