About us

Through 2021, the DoctorateHub community and service portfolio grew steadily and consistently. We grew from 400 to well over 1000 community members in 2021 alone, with members hailing from an absolutely staggering 115 countries.

And, as we continue to learn, there is a lot of variation in how doctoral journeys work around the world. Fortunately, there appear to be many similarities, particularly in terms of what the expected learning outcomes are.

We are grateful to our users for their help in further developing us by providing feedback and proactively working through journey options with us. This has enabled us to figure out the journeys that allow us to progress and succeed through the doctorate, which has prompted us to seek to optimize those journeys.

We now guide you through your doctoral journey in three different ways, each with 25 important steps: the club journey, the taught journey, and the mentored journey.

You can choose and flip through the journey that best suits you. The goal for 2022 is to advance our support and expand our local footprint through our clubs, joint training events with local partners, and expanding the range of learning resources and subjects available through the DoctorateHub community marketplace and learning spaces.

We invite you to join us in making the doctorate a fantastic and truly transformative journey.

With the beta launch of the DoctorateHub community marketplace and learning spaces, we were able to offer many of our advanced training services in three support formats: free self-study with peer support, fully supported by our coaches and mentors, or flexible on-demand support as needed.

Our community members were able to choose the option that best suited their learning needs. Since our beginning in 2017, the DoctorateHub has operated on a freemium business model.

This means that we make every effort to keep our basic service offer free. We want to serve as a hub, connecting all those in need of support, those who want to connect with others, and those who can provide assistance.

We also introduced the Clubs at the end of 2021, based on ongoing feedback and demand from our students. With this, we can now assist our professionals who are pursuing a doctorate through various routes, journeys, and themes.

We can see a clustering around local regions, such as Nigeria, thematic focused clubs, such as on the development of the doctoral research proposal, or subject focused clubs, such as on staying motivated, fit, and mentally healthy, from the initial club themes.

These are some exciting developments for the end of 2021.

2020 was going to be a blast. We began with two workshops, one in Dubai and one in Dallas, and have received additional requests from Nigeria and back to the UK only for the first half of the year.

Students at the workshop asked us to run an In-Residency week in Porto with less than two weeks' notice, which we did and which was very well received.

With the Dubai workshop we also introduced our Learning Cafés, which later evolved into our group session as an open session format for students and academics to connect.

Fortunately, all of these events occurred within the first ten weeks of 2020, and thus prior to the worldwide pandemic lockdowns.

With the increasing lock downs and uncertainty about what to expect in the months ahead, it was clear that we would prioritize development efforts of our DoctorateHub educational community marketplace, including expanding our already existing virtual service portfolio by converting analogue services to virtual ones.

We released our first beta version of the platform at the end of 2020, with a roll out plan in place for 2021.

We saw the emergence of our workshop training program and advanced training courses, which grew from one course subject at the start of 2019 to six course subjects delivered by the end of the same year.

The first workshop we held in Liverpool, UK, was also well received, so the next workshop sessions were planned for some time after our September residency.

What began in 2019, but would remain largely unnoticed until late 2020, was the development of our DoctorateHub educational community marketplace – a technology platform that we decided to build from scratch.

The continued expansion of service offerings, the need to better mediate between students, mentors and coaches, the desire to keep learning and achievements connected, and the establishment of clear communication and collaboration structures all called for the establishment of a central platform.

As our students progressed on their journey, we saw an increase in student support requests in 2018, and we continued to develop education services in response to such requests.

In 2018, we added mock-viva, review, and proof-reading services to our portfolio, in addition to the residencies and webinars that we began the previous year.

Students also began to request more continuous support, which inspired us to develop our mentoring and coaching services as a complement to the students' university supervision.

We launched the DoctorateHub in 2017 as a result of what can best be described as a 'demand-side pull.' We began as a group of doctoral tutors working with students in a large-scale global doctoral program offered by a UK university.

Our initial student population was made up of practitioner doctorate students ranging in age from 35 to 70, who had to balance their research and thesis development activities with full-time work and family life.

We tutors, like our students, were spread across the globe, but we would meet up on occasion for face-to-face residencies, allowing us to connect with both students and tutors. With this connection came an increase in the number of support requests from students.

We began by offering training on an ad hoc basis, and the most structured training format that we offered at the time was probably the 2017 residency event, which evolved into our annual flagship event. At least, until the Pandemic suddenly hit in 2020, and with it, our 2020 residency...

Our regular webinars began at the end of 2017. This gave students a way to connect and stay in touch.