| Plenty of people went straight from PhD to running their own groups, including my thesis advisor and his first grad student. It varied a lot from discipline to discipline. I would have observed at the time when I got my PhD, that the population of post-docs created the "need" for post-doctoral experience. There were fields where post-doc experience was rare: 1. Engineering and computer science, where people had good employment prospects outside of academia 2. The humanities and social sciences, where there was no money to hire post-docs Fields where post-doc experience was a requirement: 1. The sciences, with an abundance of money for hiring post-docs, and hit-or-miss employment prospects in industry, depending on your specialty and ancillary skills. The other thing I've observed is that multiple post doc appointments don't really improve your chances. The superstars have identified themselves as such while still in grad school, or during their first post-doc appointment. I concluded while still in grad school, that the arc of my career would not intersect with a professorship, so I finished my PhD and bailed out of academia. |