PhD Career Connect
Student guide
Are you a Concordia PhD candidate who has completed their comprehensive exams, a postdoc, or recent graduate open to exploring diverse career options and eager to demonstrate your skills to employers and mentors? Then PhD Career Connect is the program for you!
Registration will open in Spring 2025. In the meantime, please fill out the interest form if you wish to be contacted for PhD Career Connect 2025. If you have any questions about the program, please contact us or book an appointment.
What to expect
This isn’t your average career development workshop. You can expect to grow, be inspired and be surprised. After completing PhD Career Connect, you will know yourself better, have been exposed to new career possibilities and have made new professional connections, beyond your academic discipline.
We do this in three stages:
- Career preparation: Through interactive workshops we’ll help you define your skills and prepare a compelling non-academic CV, LinkedIn profile and elevator pitch to demonstrate your career preparedness skills. We also help you align your interests to the job market and explore strategies for uncovering hidden opportunities. Last, we prepare you for a skills demonstration exercise with employers. You will be put in an interdisciplinary team to flex your analysis, teamwork and communication skills through case studies. Our goal throughout this career development initiative is to ensure you are ready to shine in front of the employers and mentors who you will meet in phase two of the program.
- Immersive event with employers and mentors: During the networking event in June 2025, we invite diverse employers and mentors on campus to meet you. The event includes PhD alumni sharing their stories, panel discussions about industry, government and higher education careers and lots of networking. To help showcase your doctoral skills, your inter-disciplinary team will give a presentation about a case study your team has analysed.
- Personal action plan: PhD Career Connect concludes with a final workshop to debrief your PhD Career Connect experience and create your personal career action plan.
Participating mentors
In previous editions, PhD Career Connect strives to ensure a diverse lineup of mentors and employers that are reflective of the various programs and interests of our students. We have welcomed employers and mentors from the government, not-for-profit, research, industry and Higher Education sectors, such as: McGill, Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Brain Canada, Scotiabank, Polystyvert, Deloitte, Elevate Psychotherapy & Wellness Clinic, TandemLaunch and many more!
We invite you to refer to this page in late Spring to get acquainted with invited mentors and employers for PhD Career Connect 2025.
Eligibility
Candidates must be:
- Currently enrolled as a PhD candidate at Concordia University and in good academic standing, or a postdoctoral fellow or recent Concordia graduate of a PhD program as of fall 2024.
