Industrial PhD students’ research communication practices in academia and the industry

Other conference contribution, 2023

Collaborations between academia and industry are becoming increasingly common, especially in STEM. In an industrial or hybrid academic/industrial setting, research must be communicated both to researchers and other audiences, a presumably complex communication reality that has received comparatively little attention in research. One example is industrial PhD students, who are funded by industry and thus have both academia and industry as main stakeholders for their research communication. This project examines research communication practices of researchers who transition between academia and industry, aiming to pinpoint how universities can support such transitions. This specific study explores industrial PhD students’ experiences of communicating research for different audiences, and how they learn to do so. The findings show that industrial PhD students indeed do communicate to both researchers and industry, and that there are several challenges in doing so, including writing scientific articles, and adapting to varying levels of knowledge. Moreover, the strategies students use to face these challenges corroborate conclusions from previous research that genre awareness and self-regulation are important in transitions across different contexts, and in learning to communicate research to different audiences. However, few students had participated in formal training that they had found useful in communicating to industry, and many wanted more support. The insights from this study can be used to better meet industrial PhD students’ needs in this regard, for example in the design of communication courses in HE, and specifically in STEM.