Within universities there is often an implicit assumption that a doctorate is preparation for a future academic career. Research has however shown that a substantial portion of all doctoral graduates at some point end up working within industry. Thus, as part of the development of doctoral education, considerations of industrial needs and requirement appears as a valid notion. As an initial input into the subject, the purpose of the current study was to investigate industry’s perception of doctoral education and the potential for employing doctoral graduates. This was done through semi-structured interviews with industrial representatives, thus allowing for comparable data while at the same time allowing for the participants to further expand on and add to the posed questions. Based on the performed interviews it was found that the industry representatives overall had a positive attitude towards hiring doctoral graduates. The respondents indicated added value in the doctoral graduates’ knowledge on advance problem solving, seeing the limits of their own knowledge and their ability to investigate new areas. However, they wished more training in knowledge development and team work. Previous work has shown that more students wanted to and believed that they could stay in academia than were likely to get an employment there. It was indicated that a possible solution was industry mentoring, where the doctoral students met with a potential employer in industry during their education.
