Best questions for college doctoral student survey about career preparation

Here are some of the best questions for a college doctoral student survey about career preparation—plus tips on how to craft them for the most insight. If you want a shortcut, you can build a rich, conversational survey in just seconds using Specific.

Open-ended questions for deeper insights

Open-ended questions pull out the details, experiences, and context that structured answers often miss. They’re invaluable for exploring how doctoral students truly feel about their career preparation—giving space for individual stories, challenges, and goals. Use them when you want qualitative feedback, nuance, or to uncover themes not already on your radar. Here are 10 of the best open-ended questions for a college doctoral student survey about career preparation:

1. What are your primary career goals after completing your doctoral program?

2. How well do you feel your program has prepared you for your desired career path?

3. Can you describe any specific experiences in your program that helped with your career preparation?

4. What resources or support have been most valuable in preparing for your career?

5. What do you wish had been offered during your program to better support your career preparation?

6. Have you considered career options outside academia? Why or why not?

7. Describe any barriers you’ve faced in preparing for your post-graduation career.

8. How has mentorship (or lack thereof) influenced your readiness for your next career step?

9. What advice would you give to incoming doctoral students about preparing for diverse career paths?

10. In what ways could your department or institution improve support for non-academic career exploration?

It’s clear from recent studies that many doctoral students feel underprepared for non-academic careers—especially when their programs focus heavily on research at the expense of broader professional skills. Over half of doctoral graduates in a recent European study found themselves moving outside academia within a few years, showing just how critical it is to ask these kinds of open questions. [1][3]

Single-select multiple-choice questions

Single-select multiple-choice questions are perfect when you need to quickly quantify responses, compare trends, or nudge hesitant respondents to share their views. These work well at the start of a survey to get the conversation flowing, before using open questions and follow-ups to go deeper.

Question: What sector are you most interested in pursuing after your doctoral studies?

• Academia (faculty or research)

• Industry (corporate/private sector)

• Government/Public sector

• Non-profit/NGO

• Entrepreneurship/startups

• Other

Question: How confident do you feel about your readiness to transition into your desired career?

• Very confident

• Somewhat confident

• Not so confident

• Not at all confident

Question: Which type of support has been most helpful during your doctoral program?

• Career counseling services

• Mentorship from faculty

• Workshops or training sessions

• Internships or hands-on experiences

• Peer support

• None

• Other

When to follow up with "why?" After a respondent selects an answer, following up with “why?” is a great way to uncover the reasons behind their choices. For example, if a student selects “Industry” as their preferred sector, asking “Why do you prefer to go into industry rather than academia?” can reveal motivations, perceived barriers, or experiences that could shape your future support programs.

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Always offer “Other” for questions with imperfectly defined options. It gives every doctoral student a voice—especially if their career plans, backgrounds, or resources aren’t captured by the main choices. Follow-up questions here often surface actionable insights that get missed in rigid surveys.

For perspective, less than 20% of Canadian PhD graduates secure full-time university professor positions—a sign that many students’ paths won’t fit within the most obvious categories. [2]

NPS-type question for career preparation surveys

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a well-known metric that measures how likely respondents are to recommend a specific program, experience, or service to others. It’s simple but powerful—not just for commercial products, but for understanding sentiment in academic programs. For college doctoral student surveys about career preparation, an NPS question lets you measure how many students would actually recommend your program’s career preparation resources to peers or incoming students. This is a fast way to spot gaps in satisfaction that can hide behind surface-level metrics.

If you’re curious how this looks in practice, try the NPS survey generator for doctoral students—it pre-loads this question and guides you through follow-up logic.

The power of follow-up questions

Follow-up questions are a game-changer for gathering nuanced feedback from doctoral students about career preparation. Instead of bland, one-and-done answers, smart follow-ups (like those powered by Specific) help clarify, probe, and dig up unexpected insights. They make surveys feel more like a real conversation.

Specific’s AI automatically generates tailored follow-up questions based on previous answers, on the fly, so you can gather the full context in one seamless session. No more wasting days on email or missing out on valuable details.

• Doctoral Student: “I’m interested in government jobs.”

• AI follow-up: “Is there a specific government role or agency you’re aiming for, and what draws you to that path?”

• Doctoral Student: “I didn’t find the workshops helpful.”

• AI follow-up: “What about the workshops didn’t meet your needs? Was it the content, the format, or something else?”

How many follow-ups to ask? Generally, two to three thoughtful follow-ups will get you the richest insights without overwhelming participants. The key is to enable skipping to the next topic once you’ve got what you need—Specific lets you define this easily.

This makes it a conversational survey: Smooth, adaptive, and as human as it gets—follow-ups keep respondents engaged and let your survey “flow” like an interview, not a checklist.

AI analysis, themes, rapid insights: Don’t worry about being buried in messy text. With tools like automated AI survey response analysis, you can quickly surface themes, pain points, and verbatim highlights, even in a sea of open-ended data.

Automated follow-ups are a whole new survey experience—try generating your own survey and see how rich, real-time dialogue leads to better insights in less time.

Better prompts for AI survey question generation

Prompting ChatGPT or another LLM to suggest great questions is straightforward, but the magic happens when you add context. Start simple—then layer on details about your goals to get much better results. Here’s how:

Ask: (broad)

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for College Doctoral Student survey about Career Preparation.

Add context for your audience, field, or objectives:

Our doctoral program has low engagement with career counseling services. We want to help students feel more prepared for both academic and non-academic jobs. Suggest 10 open-ended survey questions for a College Doctoral Student survey about Career Preparation.

Get help categorizing your questions (so you can explore new angles):

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

Want to dive deep on one category? Try:

Generate 10 questions for categories like “mentorship and support” and “non-academic career paths.”

Iterate this process, and you’ll discover question sets with depth, relevance, and resonance—much like the ones you get instantly through AI survey generators such as Specific.

What is a conversational survey?

A conversational survey is designed to mimic a live interview, adapting in real time to respondents’ answers. Instead of feeling like a questionnaire, it feels like a thoughtful chat—asking clarifying questions, listening for context, and following threads as they emerge. This is the approach used in AI-driven surveys on platforms like Specific. Instead of scripting or manually editing each question, you build (and improve) everything in minutes through tools like the AI survey editor.

Why use AI for College Doctoral Student surveys? The right feedback can mean the difference between an engaged, well-prepared grad cohort—and a group feeling lost or under-supported. Since nearly half of doctoral graduates move beyond academia (even when they started out aiming for it), you need to capture a full picture of student needs, aspirations, and barriers. AI-generated conversational surveys make this easy, natural, and much faster for both sides.

If you want to dive deeper into how to create a college doctoral student survey about career preparation, see our step-by-step guide with best practices.

We designed Specific with best-in-class user experience, so both the survey creator and student respondents stay engaged and the feedback loop actually delivers value.

See this career preparation survey example now

Your insights can shape real change—see this career preparation survey example in action and turn your feedback process into a true conversation. Unlock deeper, more actionable insights with less effort than ever before.