On 21 May there will be a webinar on the MSCA Innovative Training Network and How to find PhD Positions in Europe. Register today to the webinar, it's for free.
One of the focus of the webinar will be on how you can use the EURAXESS jobs portal to find positions in Europe, including PhD positions. To start...
...go to https://jobs.euraxess.org
The EURAXESS Jobs portal lists thousands of vacancies and fellowships from more than 40 European countries. It is one of the biggest online portal with opportunitites for researchers in the world and it's totally for free.
After entering the portal you will be automatically directed to the job offers section.
There are other noteworthy sections as well. The Funding and Hosting Offers is a database for funding opportunities in Europe and also includes a database of institutions that are looking to host researchers for special projects and fellowships. The latter one is especially of interest to people interested in the MSCA Individual Fellowships and want to find an institution to apply with. Besides that, there are also sections on Working Environment that includes a lot of content and initatives from the European Commission with the purpose of improving researchers' working environment, next to that there is also the section on Career Development which includes a lot of content and tools made to help researchers to develope their career.
To look for PhD positions we stay in the Jobs Offers Section and scroll a little bit down.
You will be greeted by this database. It has a wide array of job opportunities for researchers, normally between 5000-10000 at any given time. To make it easier for you to find the opportunitites taylored for you the Jobs Portal offers a lot of different ways to filter the results.
To make sure that you will filter by PhD Positions you start by selecting Researcher Profile and choosing First Stage Researcher (R1). The definition of this reseacher profile is:
First Stage Researcher (R1) (Up to the point of PhD)
This profile includesindividuals doing research under supervision in industry, research institutes or universities. It includes doctoral candidates.
Researchers with this profile will:
- Carry out research under supervision;
- Have the ambition to develop knowledge of research methodologies and discipline;
- Have demonstrated a good understanding of a field of study;
- Have demonstrated the ability to produce data under supervision;
- Be capable of critical analysis, evaluation and synthesis of new and complex ideas;
So you can see that all job opportunitites categorized here should be positions for people that haven't received a PhD degree yet - vast majority of which are PhD Positions. There can of course be some mistakes - some institutions post job opportunitites for researchers at a different career stage under R1, but these are exceptions.
As you can see - at the point of writing this, the number of job positions under R1 are 5233 - way too many to casually browse through.
A further filtering is needed.
The next logical filtering is to click the field of research you want to work in.
Jobs are listed in more than 40 research fields – from agricultural sciences to physics and engineering to sociology. To increase the number of positions on offer, EURAXESS Jobs also exchanges information about vacancies with national and international research job platforms.
Lets say that you are looking for an opportunity in biology. Then you select Biological Sciences resulting in at the time of this writing in 750 opportunitites for R1 researchers.
You might already have an idea where in Europe you want to go, so to filter the opportunitites down even further the next step would be to filter by country.
Please note that you always make one selection in each category - or you can make more than one selection. Do you want to search in more than one research field for example? That is no problem.
In this case lets imagine you are interested to go to Germany or Austria. We can select both of them resulting in 179 opportunitites.
At this point you could take advantage of all the opportunitites the database has brought to you, scrolling through to find something of interest to you.
There are further ways to filter the results. Notably you can choose to filter by sector if you are interested to restrict your search only to opportunities in either universities, laboratories or companies, for example.
Then there is also the option to filter by European Research Programme.
How to find a PhD Position in a MSCA Innovative Training Network?
All research job positions funded by the European Union can be found on the EURAXESS Jobs Portal, and it's possible to filter your results to only show opportunities related to specific programme.
To find these opportunitites in particular you have to make sure to filter your Researcher Profile to R1 so you only get PhD Positions, and then in European Research Programme select H2020 / Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. This way you can find all PhD positions in MSCA-ITN in every country, sector and research field.
If you want to learn more, join us on 21 May for our webinar on the MSCA Innovative Training Network and How to find PhD Positions in Europe. Register today to the webinar, it's for free.