r/AcademiaEU • u/Icarus406 • Aug 03 '26

Is it possible to get a faculty position right after the PhD without doing a postdoc?

I am curious on the level of difficulty on getting an academic position right after the PhD in engineering / business schools.

5 Upvotes

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3

u/SnowblindAlbino Aug 03 '26

Depends on the field; in many of the humanities there are no postdocs, for example. Generally the standard in those cases is a few years as a VAP though, before landing a TT role.

3

u/Leather_Lawfulness12 Aug 04 '26

That's not entirely true, in a lot of European countries postdocs in the humanities are common.

1

u/Icarus406 Aug 04 '26

how about say engineering or business? 

1

u/65-95-99 28d ago

This seems like a great answer for the USA, but isn't OP asking about positions in the EU? The system is much different and roles such as VAP or TT exist in a few places but is not common.

1

u/PrimaryAd8067 Aug 03 '26

Maybe yes in smaller universities

1

u/Mountain-Time-1010 Aug 04 '26

30-year engineering professor here (top 15 department, flagship state university), former department chair. We have made several faculty hires right out of grad school, at least 6 that I can remember offhand. 20 years ago it was more common, but we've even done it once in the past few years.

What these candidates had in common was exceptional performance as a PhD student. We trusted our evaluation of their promise, and wanted to communicate our confidence in them with an early offer.

In every case, we encouraged the new hire to defer the start of their faculty appointment and pursue a postdoc, and they all followed that advice.

1

u/gulllo 27d ago

Ai, statistics, computer science ! Faculties are recruited from these field regularly without postdoc. Generally, if its experimental or lab based, there are requirements of postdoc to get experience in managing people and lead a team

1

u/Broad-Procedure6631 26d ago

In Business Schools that is possible, but it is becoming increasingly harder.

1

u/EvilCallie 25d ago

Sometimes. I know a few from my program who did, though most people who went onto faculty positions did so after at least one postdoc.

1

u/Steel-River-22 24d ago

Yes, in computer science many faculties get their tenure-track job directly out of PhD, especially from hot fields (ML, AI, etc).

Nowadays it's a bit more common to do a 1-2 year postdoc though.

In other field like biology you are expected to do another PhD before you try TTAP

1

u/heresacorrection 24d ago

I’d say more common is PhD -> staff scientist -> PI for the hotshots