During the PhD · Build your proof

Experience counts, even unpaid

Employers do not count PhD years as work experience. You can change that, and you do not need anyone’s permission to start.

3 min read · By Marc Sleiman

Here is the uncomfortable truth. Most hiring managers do not understand what a PhD trained you to do. By default, industry reads a PhD as an advanced master’s degree and nothing more. Meanwhile, someone who spent those same five years working has five years of delivered work to point to. If you do not show that your work has real value and that you can perform immediately, in ways even an experienced non-PhD cannot, you are competing with a handicap you gave yourself.

How employers actually think

Students often believe hiring rewards effort and intelligence. It does not, at least not directly. Employers are filtering risk. A hire who does not work out is expensive and painful, so every part of the process asks the same question: how sure can we be that this person will deliver? A degree answers part of that question. Delivered work answers much more of it.

This is also why online applications rarely work on their own. If you apply to many jobs and hear nothing back, that is normal. You are not only competing against other people; you are competing against signals, and “PhD candidate with no work experience” is a weak signal next to “analyst with two years of shipped projects.”

What counts as experience

Experience does not have to be a paid job with a title. To an employer, it counts if it involved a real problem, a real person who needed the answer, and a real deliverable you can show and explain. That opens up more options than most students realize.

Internships, part-time roles and co-ops

The most recognizable form, paid or unpaid. An internship at a firm in your target sector is the strongest signal you can send, because it shows both interest and ability.

Freelance and contract work

Small analysis projects for real clients count, whether you find them on Upwork or Fiverr or through direct outreach. A cleaned dataset and a short report for a small business is applied work with a client and a deadline.

Consulting for a nonprofit or small business

Many nonprofits and small businesses have data they never use. Offering to analyze it for free gives them something valuable and gives you a project with a real stakeholder. Your university may already have programs that connect students with community organizations.

A self-directed project with something to show

Pick a real question in your target industry, find public data, and produce a deliverable: a dashboard, a forecast, an analysis written as an executive memo. It counts if it is finished, polished and public.

A pitch companies say yes to

Many companies are not ready to spend money on a research project or a new hire. So make the ask small enough that saying yes costs them almost nothing.

Reach out to a company in your target industry and offer to produce an industry analysis report using their own data. Their side of the deal is data access: no money, little risk and little commitment. Your side is a real client, a real dataset and a real report with your name on it. If the report lands well, it can turn into paid work or a job offer. It can even become funding: a stipend, tuition support or a contract, where they get a discounted analyst and you get financing.

Keep the first message short. Say who you are, what question you could answer with their data, what they would receive and how little it would take from them. Offer to sign whatever confidentiality agreement they need. Most will say no or not reply. You only need one yes.

When to get it

Year 2 summer is excellent for exploring. Year 3 summer is probably the best window, because you have enough skill to be useful and enough time left to use what you learn. Year 4 summer is useful if it fits around your job-market paper. In Year 5 it is usually too late to build your profile this way.

One rule matters here. Do not trade away your job-market paper for an internship. But do not wait until the paper is finished to think about applied experience either, because the paper is never finished. Work backward from the fall of Year 5 and plan both.