DOI: 10.5061/dryad.cc2fqz6km
title: Leaving academia: Insights from evolutionary biologists on their career transitions and job satisfaction

description: Many who have obtained PhDs in evolutionary biology will ultimately pursue
 careers that fall outside a narrow definition of an academic career. At
 the same time, PhD students and supervisors of PhD students are often
 ill-informed about career options outside of academia. Here, we report on
 a survey of evolutionary biologists who have pursued non-academic careers
 to understand what careers they pursue, how they transitioned into those
 careers, how well prepared they were, and how satisfied they are with
 their current work. Overall, the message from this survey is positive–
 evolutionary biologists are readily employable outside of academia,
 generally well-prepared for those jobs, and report high levels of
 satisfaction in their non-academic careers. We also highlight areas where
 preparation for non-academic careers could be improved, which might be
 addressed by individual mentors or PhD training programmes.
description: # Leaving academia: Insights from evolutionary biologists on their career
 transitions and job satisfaction Dataset DOI:
 [10.5061/dryad.cc2fqz6km](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cc2fqz6km) ##
 Description of the data and file structure The Excel spreadsheets contain
 summarised answers to an anonymous survey asking questions of evolutionary
 biologists who have left the academic career track The questions are
 available in a separate PDF. The code used to analyse data and create
 figures was written by Andrea Betancourt and is given in R notebook
 format. ### Files and variables #### File:
 summarised_data_reformatted.xlsx **Description:** summarised answers to an
 anonymous survey asking questions of evolutionary biologists who have left
 the academic career track #### File: survey.pdf **Description:** Questions
 asked of respondents. #### File: 01_demographics.Rmd
 **Description:** Analysis of data on characteristics of surveyed
 populations, such as gender and country of origin. #### File:
 02_non_academic_LeavingAcademia_when.Rmd **Description:** Analysis of data
 on career stage and time since respondents left the academic career track;
 used to produce Figure 1 in the publication. #### File:
 04_non_academic_LeavingAcademia--how.Rmd **Description:** Analysis of data
 on non-academic job searches; used to produce Figure 2 in the publication.
 #### File: 03_non_academic_LeavingAcademia_why.nb.Rmd
 **Description:** Analysis of reasons for leaving the non-academic career
 track. #### File: 05_Skills_match.Rmd **Description:** Analysis of the
 match between skills acquired during training and those used in
 non-academic careers; used to produce Figures 4 and 5. #### File:
 07_career_now.Rmd **Description:** Analysis of key features of
 non-academic jobs held by respondents; used to produce Figure 3. ####
 File: 06_satisfaction.Rmd **Description:** Analysis of satisfaction in
 academic and non-academic careers; used to produce Figure 6A. #### File:
 08_liked.best.leastQs.Rmd **Description:** Analysis of factors affecting
 satisfaction in academic and non-academic careers; used to produce Figure
 6B. ## Code/software R notebooks were run in R v. 4.4 and used the
 following libraries: tidyverse\ ggh4x\ RColorBrewer\ forcats\ ghibli\
 grid\ gridExtra\ ggnewscale\ ggvenn\ ggpubr\ MASS\ tidyverse\
 RColorBrewer\ XLConnect ## Human subjects data Survey responses were
 anonymized, and are given here only in summarized form so that there is no
 possibility of identifying an individual respondent.