Formal Onboarding of doctoral candidates - Lessons Learned from Non-academic Partners

Onboarding is a process of integrating new employees into the organisation, thereby enhancing both professional, social, cultural and organisational integration. As a result, employees feel welcomed as part of the organisation and better prepared for the tasks awaiting them. The sooner the new employee feels welcome and fully informed, the better and quicker they will be able to contribute to the organisation successfully. Onboarding procedures are common in the private sector but often absent in academic institutions. In particular for newly hired Early Career Researchers (ESR), namely PhD candidates, such procedures will strongly impact both their integration into the organisation and clarification of roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders involved in their programme. In order to maximize their impact, it is therefore important that onboarding procedures are approved and supported by supervisors and Postgraduate offices. While it has been shown that successful onboarding contributes to increased well-being and motivation, many ESRs often feel somewhat lost and poorly supported when entering academia, leading to doubt, insecurity and sometimes even an early abandonment of their research project. There are a very well-developed onboarding processes for the general and administrative staff at a number of European and American universities , or it is at least they are starting to be established. The checklists and toolboxes that can be found online (e.g. Harvard), show that these processes can be compared to the private sector. The knowledge of successful onboarding processes is therefore already established in these universities. However, for Postdocs and PhD candidates, who are in temporary employment, such a process is only provided for in exceptional cases and often does not go beyond an orientation day. The fact that this can impact not only on the performance and motivation, but also on the mental health of PhD candidates, seems obvious but has not yet been studied in depth.
Lessons learnt from the academic partners involved with our project correspond with the current needs in academia to establish a structural procedure consisting of regular meetings of a PhD candidate and their supervisor helping to clarify the expectations, obtaining feedback from both sides and improving the atmosphere the PhD candidate works and studies in.