A market under pressure, but still unreadable for doctoral candidates

To understand the scope of the paradox, we must look at how the market is evolving much faster than doctoral trajectories. When we examine the figures, the demand is clear: AI, cybersecurity, biotechnology, robotics, clean technologies, and Industry 4.0 are recruiting at full speed. SMEs, which form the majority of the European economic fabric, report that 80% of them cannot find the scientific skills necessary to innovate, structure R&D teams, or meet their own digital and environmental transition obligations.

On paper, PhDs should be the main beneficiaries of this dynamic. Their level of expertise, their ability to solve complex problems, manage projects, analyze data, or conceptualize technological systems places them exactly where the demand is. Yet a gap persists: the market dynamic is not visible from the laboratories. Hence the central question: why do we see so many leaving the scientific circuit?

The real functioning of the doctorate: a highly selective, highly demanding, and poorly legible system

To understand this disconnect, we must face the structural reality of the academic system. The doctoral pipeline is demanding, but above all, it is narrow. Very few permanent positions are available, trajectories are unpredictable, competition is constant, and entry-level precarity is no longer an acceptable model for a generation that aspires to stability as much as meaning.

Added to this is a persistent gap between two worlds — academia and business — that continue to regard each other from a distance. Doctoral candidates still learn mainly to see themselves as researchers... while the market asks them to be experts capable of leaving the laboratory. This gap, ABG has observed for 40 years: it's not talent that is lacking, it's information, translation, and visibility.

Bridges exist, but remain too abstract for many

We often talk about "innovation hubs". The expression is appealing, but it remains vague for a doctoral candidate who doesn't know concretely what they can do there. Yet these ecosystems are today among the most dynamic places for STEM PhDs. And it's precisely because these mechanisms remain perceived as distant that they don't yet fully play their role.

Let's take some concrete examples:

Deep tech incubators funded by the EIT don't just "train a million people": they offer integrated training pathways, mentors from industry, acceleration programs, and funding tickets that allow a PhD to launch a technological start-up without expatriating.
Horizon Europe programs fund collaborative projects, equipment, researcher positions shared between university and business, and international consortia where PhDs move freely from one sector to another.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions are doctoral networks, supervised intersectoral mobilities, and mandatory professional training, designed precisely to prepare researchers for hybrid careers.
The STEM Alliance connects laboratories, large companies, engineers, investors, and finances technological platforms where mixed teams test, validate, and industrialize innovations from research.

In other words, the bridges already exist — they are operational, funded, and sometimes very attractive. But they remain poorly known, poorly explained, poorly integrated into doctoral pathways.

Industry wants versatile profiles and PhDs are the perfect illustration

For five years, surveys have converged: companies are no longer looking solely for "technical experts". They want profiles capable of reasoning, explaining, convincing, structuring, managing a complex project, or navigating between several disciplines. In other words: they want exactly what a doctorate produces.

This cultural change was anticipated in France by a tool that has become central: the DocPro framework. Co-designed by ABG, France Universités, and MEDEF, this framework was conceived as a translation tool between how a PhD describes their skills and how a company formulates them.

DocPro has a simple objective: to enable PhDs to speak a language that employers understand, without denying their scientific identity. It helps identify the fine skills developed during the thesis (project management, analysis, writing, coordination...), transform them into professional skills recognized by recruiters, and better construct CVs, pitches, letters, LinkedIn profiles, or interviews. Every time ABG supports a PhD or doctoral school, DocPro is present to facilitate this dialogue.

The blockage persists however: where does it really come from?

We would like to be able to point to a single culprit: the university, companies, scientific culture, funding... The truth is more complex, and it relates to three levels.

1. A gap between funded themes and real market needs

Funding programs prioritize certain strategic themes (AI, energy, health), but laboratories also need to fund exploratory projects, opportunistic theses, fundamental research. Result: doctoral candidates become niche experts on fascinating subjects, but whose translation into professional opportunities is difficult.

For the STEM shortage to be resolved, we must accept a simple idea: doctoral training must better integrate market reality. This requires more monitoring, co-piloting, anticipation of industrial needs, and a funding policy better articulated with technological dynamics.

2. Decompartmentalization is progressing, but it is still young

The last five years have been marked by massive decompartmentalization work: Young Doctors programs, simplified access to integration mechanisms, strengthened partnerships between universities, industrial clusters and regional clusters, common communication actions. These efforts work... but they are not yet enough to change a professional culture established for decades.

3. Doctoral training does not yet sufficiently prepare for professional transition

Yes, there is a training offer that meets these needs. Yes, some institutions have modernized their transversal training. But reality remains heterogeneous, and many doctoral candidates enter their thesis without having received solid training in professional communication, appropriation of their skills portfolio, market analysis, career management, design of a non-academic professional project.

What role for ABG today? A role of translator, connector, revealer

Rather than listing all its actions, it is enough to recall three things:

More than half of the job offers published on ABG's employment site concern STEM.
The training provided by ABG — valorization of the doctorate, professional pitch, transversal skills, career strategy — have become spaces where doctoral candidates concretely learn to name, translate, and present their skills for non-academic interlocutors.
Events organized with companies, industrial clusters, or members allow the market and researchers to see each other, talk to each other, recognize each other.

ABG's role is not to solve the STEM shortage alone. Its role is to help PhDs connect to a market that awaits them, and to help companies understand that they already have the talents they lack.

Going further: how to better connect PhDs and European needs?

The most promising avenues:

Better anticipate industrial needs in thesis funding.
Structure transversal training as a mandatory and professionalizing component.
Deploy DocPro as a standard for translating academic skills ⇄ professional skills.
Further support mechanisms promoting the hiring of young PhDs.
Strengthen doctoral schools × companies co-productions.
Communicate more strongly about already existing bridges.

Conclusion

The STEM shortage is not inevitable. The talent exists, the training exists, the bridges exist. What is still missing is a sustainable alignment between how we train, how the market evolves, and how PhDs are supported.

Today, STEM PhDs are not "out of market": they are waiting for a more readable, more open, more explicit market. And ABG, alongside its academic and industrial partners, plays a decisive role in this coherence. Europe needs them — perhaps more than ever. The challenge now is to allow them not only to see it, but to envision themselves there and build careers worthy of their skills.

STEM in Europe: why are PhDs leaving research when the market has never needed them more?