An Empirical Exploration on the Supervision of PhD Students Closely Collaborating with Industry
This addresses supervision challenges for PhD students in industry-academia collaborations, but it is incremental as it focuses on a specific domain without broad new insights.
The paper explored challenges and effective approaches for supervising PhD students collaborating with industry, based on interviews with six students and supervisors in Sweden's embedded software sector, finding numerous issues and opportunities for improvement.
With an increase of PhD students working in industry, there is a need to understand what factors are influencing supervision for industrial students. This paper aims at exploring the challenges and good approaches to supervision of industrial PhD students. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews of six PhD students and supervisors with experience in PhD studies at several organizations in the embedded software industry in Sweden. The data was anonymized and it was analyzed by means of thematic analysis. The results indicate that there are many challenges and opportunities to improve the supervision of industrial PhD students.