Many career paths are undergoing a startling transformation. Instead of locking themselves into one discipline for an entire career, professionals now switch jobs often and jump disciplines and industries routinely. Such dynamism increases productivity, creativity and entrepreneurship; interdisciplinary mobility promotes exchange of ideas and business models.

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And yet the training of scientific professionals through the PhD has remained essentially unchanged since the nineteenth century. Promising students are apprenticed in academic laboratories. They learn how to conduct research, but are not prepared for success outside academia. Despite decades of policy papers, earnest admonitions and hand-wringing in the United States and Europe, actual reforms have been marginal.

The 'fossilization' of science PhD training is detrimental to young researchers — and to science as a whole. Poorly equipped to compete for jobs outside academia, many PhD holders leave university lacking confidence in their prospects. Some feel that they have bought a ticket to nowhere.

Academia might do well to look to the private sector for a model that broadens the soft skills of PhD holders and expands their prospects. Many businesses offer their executives short, intensive training programmes that stimulate their professional development in key areas such as leadership, innovation and management. Some companies develop internal schemes; others hire consultants or send their executives on week-long programmes at business schools (sometimes referred to as 'charm schools'). The goal is simple: to develop the capabilities of junior managers without costing a lot in terms of time, money or disruption to their jobs. These programmes also reflect an acknowledgement that a supervisor should not be the sole source of professional advice and mentoring.

Some research universities in the United States and Europe provide professional-development offerings for graduate students, often led by a campus career centre — a few of which have specialists dedicated to PhD students. But support is meagre: a university may have only one person to support professional development for hundreds or even thousands of PhD students. Science departments (and funding agencies) rarely provide financial support for such activities.

Where such programmes exist at all, they are more tolerated than encouraged by the faculty. Academic culture enshrines the adviser–advisee relationship as the core of the PhD. But although the adviser is ideally suited to guiding students through the rigorous training necessary to become an independent researcher, he or she may be ill-equipped to help them to develop the skills to succeed in other fields. Not only do few faculty members have experience in industry, but most already have enormous demands on their time. Urging them to provide all manner of professional development is unfair to both adviser and advisee.

Formal professional-development programmes for science PhD holders should be expanded. But how to finance them? Those who benefit should pay. That includes not only funding agencies, but also students. They might pay through general student fees. Even better — to ensure that they are fully invested — they might devote credits to an actual course on career planning (see Nature 489, 593; 2012).

The students themselves will benefit from realizing broader career options. Universities benefit both through greater demand for their graduates and by ending up with more-satisfied (and better-paid) alumni.

But the largest benefit may be to national economies, when scientifically educated individuals enter every professional discipline — no longer because they couldn't find a job in academia, but because they chose to apply their training to important problems in a wide range of fields. With the combination of the right professional coaching and the right experience, a science PhD could turn out to be a ticket to everywhere.