Preparing brilliant minds for rewarding academic careers
The majority of our doctoral students go on to pursue careers in academia or research and our programme offers the teaching experience, skills training and guidance to help you achieve your career goals. Combined with the essential skills and experience, the people that you meet during your doctoral experience will be key to helping you secure your future academic placement.
Our Doctoral graduates have joined leading universities, research centres and institutions, others have sought top positions in industry or founded successful start-ups. Visit our graduate placements page for a list of placements from previous years.
In order to prepare you for an academic career, our Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) programme gives you the opportunity to develop your teaching skills, whilst making a positive contribute to the Business School’s taught programmes. After successfully completing the in-house training programme, Graduate Teaching Assistants perform a wide range of teaching duties to support the School’s Master’s programmes. These roles include leading tutorials and holding office hours for core modules, acting as tutors for online modules and module leaders for short courses such as Matlab and VBA, marking coursework and second marking exams.
The Graduate School at Imperial College London provides a comprehensive Professional Skills Development programme for doctoral students. The programme ensures you acquire basic research skills at the start of your doctoral studies and continue to develop as a well-rounded researcher, gaining the skills and experience to successfully complete your research degree and move on to an academic career. You can select from courses covering a range of areas such as literature reviews, thesis management, information management, presenting, project management, statistics, career planning and grant writing.
You will have unrivalled opportunity to make long-lasting connections that will prove invaluable in your future career. You’ll mix with fellow students, alumni, adjunct professors and visiting faculty, from across Imperial College.
Research seminars
Our research departments run seminars where internal and external academics discuss their latest work. As well as providing insights into yet-to-be-published research by top academics from around the world, the seminars offer networking opportunities and speakers often lead special topic workshops for research students.
Conference participation
The opportunity to present and share your work is an extremely important aspect of doctoral studies in order to gain valuable feedback on your research and where you can form important connections with fellow academics who specialise in your field. You will have the opportunity to present your work in research department seminars and are encouraged to submit your research for presentation at conferences. The Business School has funding available to help cover expenses associated with presenting at conferences.
"Having decided that I will engage in the pursuit of a career in research, I am fully aware of the kind of dedication, resilience and resolve that it calls for. Imperial College Business School Doctoral programme helped me meet the criteria for my future plans."
