Should You Do a PhD While Working Full-Time?

I spent ten years finishing mine alongside a consulting career. Here’s what worked, what didn’t, and what I would do differently

Oct 09, 2026

Every now and then, someone working in consulting or another expert role asks me whether doing a PhD alongside a full-time job is a good idea.

I understand the attraction. A doctorate gives you a chance to study something properly, develop research skills, deepen your expertise, and hopefully discover something new. There is also the degree itself. Having “PhD” after your name still carries some status, even in a world where LinkedIn gives us plenty of other opportunities to decorate our names.

But there is a more practical question: does it make sense to spend several years doing a doctorate if you are already building a professional career outside academia?

I did exactly that. I completed my PhD while building a career in consulting. The whole project took about ten years. So at least I have some empirical material on the topic.

There is an obvious caveat here. Doctoral education works differently across countries, especially when it comes to tuition and funding. My experience comes from Finland, where doctoral programs do not charge tuition fees. Elsewhere, the financial equation can be quite different, although funded PhD positions and scholarships are also common in many countries.

For that reason, I will not spend much time here discussing tuition fees or comparing different national funding systems. In my case, the financial cost was relatively limited: I received two grants before my study leave, so I may even have come out ahead financially during those periods. The much bigger cost was time—the many evenings, weekends, and holidays that could have been spent doing something else.

So this is less a guide to doctoral education in Finland and more a story about combining a doctorate with an expert career: how I ended up doing it, why it took ten years, what I got out of it, and what I would recommend to someone considering the same slightly questionable use of their spare time.

How I Did My PhD Alongside a Consulting Career

My doctoral project started when I worked as a researcher at a Finnish university between 2006 and 2008. I was involved in an industry collaboration project on enterprise architecture, and starting a PhD was a fairly natural thing to do in that environment. Many people around me were doing the same.

My motivation was not based on some carefully designed twenty-year career plan. I started because it seemed interesting and because, frankly, that was what people in my workplace did and what the management expected. The expectation was quite real: I later learned that one colleague was even asked to leave after deciding not to start a PhD project.

During those first years, things progressed surprisingly well. I completed the coursework required for the degree, apart from the dissertation itself, and produced two research papers that were later accepted as part of my article-based dissertation. In Finland, a dissertation can typically be written either as a monograph—basically one long research book—or as a collection of research articles combined with a summary section. I chose the latter.

Then I changed careers. In 2008, I left the university and joined Accenture as an enterprise architecture consultant. I even turned down a paid doctoral student position to do it. But looking back, choosing consulting was one of the best career decisions I have made.

For the PhD project, however, it was less useful. The dissertation more or less stopped moving for a couple of years, which was hardly surprising. Starting in consulting meant learning a completely new profession, working with clients, producing deliverables, and trying to become useful enough that someone would continue paying for my time. Academic writing had to compete with actual client deadlines, and actual client deadlines usually won.

Still, I never officially abandoned the PhD. I kept looking for an organization where I could collect empirical data for new research papers. Eventually, in 2011, I found a suitable case through one of my clients.

I conducted interviews alongside my normal work and gradually got the material transcribed and ready for analysis. I even applied for funding that would have allowed me to continue the research in collaboration with my employer, but the company was less enthusiastic about the idea than I was.

At that point, I reached a rather obvious conclusion: the dissertation was not going to finish by squeezing research into occasional evenings and weekends.

So, in early 2012, I applied for study leave. That, fortunately, was approved.

The difference was immediate. I spent a couple of months away from consulting and also used part of my summer vacation for research. During that period, I managed to get two papers published or close to publication, made progress with two more, and produced the first proper version of the dissertation itself. It was probably the most productive period of the entire project.

Then things slowed down again. It took another four years to get the final two papers published. One of them went through several journals and multiple revision rounds before finally being accepted. Academic publishing has its own sense of time, and unfortunately it is not always the same as yours.

Meanwhile, my normal career continued. I changed employers and joined a smaller consultancy. Client projects came and went, while the dissertation stayed mostly in the background. I would return to it whenever the publication process produced something that required action—reviewer comments, revisions, or another submission.

Eventually, the final paper was published. After that, things moved remarkably quickly. My supervisor and I agreed on a plan to finish the dissertation, and my employer allowed me to spend a couple of weeks of working time on it.

Then came the defence preparations. I read through the dissertation again, thought about possible questions from the opponent, and participated in a useful practice session where other doctoral students grilled me about the research.

There were also some more practical matters. I had to write the introductory lecture, practice delivering it, arrange the post-defence dinner, and find suitable formal wear. After years of thinking about research methods and journal reviewers, the final stages suddenly involved catering and a tailcoat.

I defended my dissertation in November 2016. The project was finally finished, ten years after starting.

Practical Advice for Doing a PhD Alongside Your Career

Looking back, I think doing a PhD while working can make sense for an experienced professional. But I would treat it as a serious multi-year project rather than an educational hobby that somehow fits neatly around everything else.

There are a few questions I would consider before starting.

Be Clear About Why You Want a PhD

Motivation matters because the project is long enough to outlive the initial excitement.

Different people have different reasons for doing a doctorate. You may genuinely enjoy research, want to study a question that keeps appearing in your professional work, move toward teaching or academia, strengthen your specialist profile, or simply learn how research actually works. All of these can be good reasons.

The concrete career benefits are harder to predict. Even outside academia, a doctorate can strengthen your credibility and broaden your theoretical understanding, but it does not automatically produce promotions, higher salaries, or better assignments. In many professional roles, work experience will remain more directly useful than academic credentials.

That is especially important if the doctorate would require giving up several years of professional development. Academic qualifications without much practical experience can even be a strange combination in some parts of the job market.

For an experienced professional, the equation is somewhat different. The doctorate becomes an addition to an existing career rather than a substitute for one.

Find Out Where the Time Will Come From

This is probably the most important practical question.

A PhD takes an enormous amount of time. There is writing the dissertation itself, but also coursework, data collection, analysis, meetings with supervisors, revisions, administration, and possibly long article publication processes.

Those hours have to come from somewhere. In practice, you either take the time from work or from your free time—and taking it from work may also mean accepting some loss of income.

It is easy to imagine doing the work during evenings and weekends. That can work for individual tasks and perhaps for limited periods. I mainly used that time for things like transcribing interviews and making relatively contained revisions to articles. I would be much more cautious about building the entire PhD plan around evenings and weekends. And if you have small children, I would certainly not assume that several hours of quiet research time will somehow appear after the normal workday.

Serious research and writing benefit from longer periods of uninterrupted concentration. My own project moved fastest when I had study leave and could actually focus on it.

If I were starting again, I would probably arrange several clearly defined periods of full-time research instead of trying to keep the dissertation constantly alive in the background of a full-time consulting career.

The same basic lesson later came up again when I started writing books alongside consulting: substantial work requires substantial blocks of time. Free time rarely appears by itself. You have to create it.

Connect the Research to Your Professional Work

My dissertation was about enterprise architecture, which was also the field where I have built my consulting career. That helped.

Professional experience gave me a practical understanding of the research topic, and research gave me concepts and perspectives that I could bring back into professional work. The two worlds were different, but they were close enough to support each other.

I would therefore think carefully about the research topic if the intention is to continue working alongside the PhD. A subject connected to your professional expertise makes the entire investment easier to justify.

It can also make data collection easier and increase the chances that your employer sees some value in the project.

There are limits, of course. Research still has to be research rather than a consulting assignment with references attached. But a strong connection between the two makes the years of work considerably more useful.

Try to Get Your Employer Involved

Support from an employer can make a huge difference.

This could mean unpaid or paid study leave, reduced working hours, permission to use working time for parts of the research, access to relevant data, or simply enough flexibility that the project remains realistic.

My employers supported the project in different ways at different stages. In the final phase, being able to spend working time finishing the dissertation helped me get the whole thing over the line quickly.

The ideal arrangement would probably have been to organize more of these focused periods earlier.

From the employer’s perspective, support is naturally easier to justify when the research topic has some connection to the business or professional field. That does not mean the company or a client should control the research. It means there is a reasonable answer when someone asks why the organization should help you do it.

Even a small amount of flexibility can be valuable when multiplied across several years.

Choose a Supervisor Who Understands Your Situation

A good supervisor is important for any doctoral student. For someone completing a PhD alongside another career, I think practical understanding becomes especially important.

My supervisor understood that I was working outside academia and helped me find realistic ways of getting the project finished. In practice, I managed most of the work remotely and only had to visit the university a few times during the later stages of the project, including for the defence itself.

That matters because the theoretically perfect research project and the practically finishable research project are not always the same thing.

A supervisor can help narrow the scope, identify which work really matters, navigate publication problems, help with university bureaucracy, and keep the project moving when motivation inevitably drops.

For a part-time researcher, there is considerable value in somebody occasionally saying: this is good enough, now move on.

Expect It to Take Longer Than Planned

Article-based dissertations come with one particular complication: publishing schedules are partly outside your control.

You can work efficiently and still spend months waiting for reviews. A paper may be rejected and has to be sent somewhere else. Reviewers may request major changes. Then you revise it and wait again.

Work and personal life also have an inconvenient tendency to continue while all this is happening. Projects change. Jobs change. Family situations change. Motivation varies. Sometimes the dissertation advances rapidly, and sometimes very little happens for months.

My project took ten years. That does not mean yours has to, and preferably it does not. But I would make the plan with some margin rather than assuming everything will progress exactly according to schedule.

There will probably be enough coffee involved even without unnecessary optimism.

Was It Worth It?

For me, yes. I enjoyed research, learned a great deal from it, and developed a deeper theoretical understanding of a field where I have spent much of my professional career. Research also teaches useful habits: looking for evidence, questioning assumptions, structuring complicated problems, and accepting that the answer is sometimes less clear than you hoped. Just as importantly, you have to expose your thinking to supervisors, reviewers, and other researchers and get used to having it challenged.

The degree itself has become one part of my professional identity alongside consulting, enterprise architecture, and writing.

There was some direct financial benefit as well: after graduating, I received a salary increase of a few hundred euros per month. Still, it is difficult to argue that the doctorate transformed my earning potential or career trajectory. I cannot point to a particular promotion or consulting project and say that the PhD made it happen. Clients tend to care more about whether you can solve their problems than about the letters after your name.

If my only objective had been to maximize career progression or income as a consultant, spending thousands of hours on a doctorate would have been a rather bad strategy.

Fortunately, that was never the whole point. I was genuinely interested in the subject and wanted to understand it more deeply. Over the years, the project also became something I simply wanted to see through to the end.

So would I recommend doing a PhD alongside a professional career?

Yes, in the right circumstances. I would first make sure that you are genuinely interested in the research, that the topic connects reasonably well with what you want to do professionally, and that you have a credible plan for finding the time.

A PhD can be a very good side project for an experienced professional. The slight problem is that it is much too large to remain a side project for very long.