What types of industrial jobs do physics PhDs tend to land?

[StatGuy2000]

This thread started out with the question, "What industries tend to hire physics PhDs?":This post below then asked whether physics PhDs employed in industry are "actually doing physics".
Which then led to further posts discussing what "actually doing physics" means.

My follow-up questions: Who cares, and why does it matter? The key point is that a physics PhD can prepare you for a wide variety of careers outside of academia; and there are a wide variety of companies that do hire physics PhDs. The issue of "Are you actually doing physics?" often arises in the context of "But if you are not working in academia, you are settling for a second-tier career." This is indeed a sentiment expressed by some (not all) professors. And a sentiment that organizations such as FIAP (Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics), a forum within the American Physical Society (APS), constantly struggle against.

It is worth pointing out that I did not originally ask the question of "actually doing physics", mainly because I agree with you that this question is problematic, in the same way that a math PhD graduate working in industry is "actually doing math" in whatever industry they are employed in.

My original question was prompted by my own curiosity of what particular industries or industrial sectors do physics PhDs tend to end up being hired, which in turn could prove to be educational for current students who are planning on studying physics.

 

[mpresic3]

When I applied for a position in 1984, I interviewed for several > 10 companies and got recieved rejections from all of them. I did get a call-back from Eastman Kodak, but I already committed to defense related work. Many of my colleagues were interviewing with the same companies with an engineering degree and all recieved multiple acceptances. None of my friends in physics got hired in companies. All of the physicists were hired at govt labs or defense contractors. Star Wars was also big back then.

At least in those days, it was clear that companies much preferred engineers to physicists. When looking for a position in 2002, career placement told me the same thing.

 

[CrysPhys]

When I applied for a position in 1984, I interviewed for several > 10 companies and got recieved rejections from all of them. I did get a call-back from Eastman Kodak, but I already committed to defense related work. Many of my colleagues were interviewing with the same companies with an engineering degree and all recieved multiple acceptances. None of my friends in physics got hired in companies. All of the physicists were hired at govt labs or defense contractors. Star Wars was also big back then.

At least in those days, it was clear that companies much preferred engineers to physicists. When looking for a position in 2002, career placement told me the same thing.

* A physics PhD student reading your post could easily come away with the conclusion that companies don't hire PhD physicists at all. That conclusion would be incorrect. The market has its ups and downs.

* I'll rewind to a few years before you originally applied, to roughly the 1980 - 1982 time frame. As I was wrapping up my physics PhD, I first sent out two job applications, one to Bell Labs (ETA: industrial R&D) and one to MIT Lincoln Lab (ETA: military-funded R&D). I interviewed at both and was given an offer at both. I accepted the offer from Bell Labs and didn't send out any further applications. If I recall correctly after all these decades, among the physics PhD grad students I hung out with at my school, three others joined Bell Labs during this time; others went to work for IBM, Kodak, Xerox, 3M, Raytheon, RCA, GE, and Hughes. We all did our research in experimental solid-state physics. ETA: There was strong demand, in particular, for PhD physicists in the fields of electronic and optical devices.

* For various reasons, the market started to decline around 1984 and more sharply in 1990. With a strong resurgence at the end of the 1990's (InterNet Bubble Maximum Expansion), followed by a drastic collapse just two years later in 2001 (InterNet Bubble Burst).

* The heyday of great corporate R&D labs involved in a wide umbrella of fields is past, and business models have changed (in particular, many major corporations decided that services are a lot more profitable than hardware and that R&D in electronic and optical devices is waaay too expensive). But I'll refer back to the AIP chart cited by kuruman in Reply #2 (https://www.aip.org/statistics/whos-hiring-physics-phds) for more recent data. This chart shows the employment fields for newly-minted physics PhDs, 2016 -2020. The fields, such as "physics", "engineering", "computer hardware", and "computer software", are enclosed in grey rectangular boxes. If you hover your cursor over each box, a drop-down menu appears. One of the menu selections is "Employers". If you click on this selection, you will get a listing of employers, which does indeed include companies (industrial and non-industrial).

 

[vanhees71]

Nowadays the job market seems to have completely changed, at least here in Germany. I can say only something about, where our MSc/PhD students and postdocs end up. Our field of study is theoretical heavy-ion physics. The subjects are mostly relatlivistic many-body quantum-field theory in and off equilibrium, relativistic kinetic theory, relativistic hydrodynamics, lattice QCD at finite temperature (and density). Then there are many colleagues also working in nuclear/particle astrophysics and GR (simulation of blackhole and neutron-star mergers). Most of the work deals with simulations, and that seems to be very attractive for employers outside of academia, and our absolvents find jobs in a broad spectrum of enterprises. There are many going into IT-consulting at banks, insurances, and consulting but also into more technical/engineering businesses. E.g., one of our PhD students went to a big optics company, developing lithography for chip manifacturing, another went to a company leading to R&D in autonomously driving cars. AFAIK all are very satisfied and happy with their work. I don't know any of our alumni who couldn't find a job.

 

[swampwiz]

At work, most of our PhD folk are chemists, but a few are physics, including my boss. We do R&D of printed, flexible carbon electronics (mostly sensors).We also dabble with some nanoparticles and polymers.
My boss was hired due to his direct experience in carbon nanotubes that he worked on during his PhD.

He also told me not to get a PhD, and he wouldn't if he could go back. He would have only gotten a masters degree. He said it never helped him or anyone he knew not trying to get into academics.

I had a programmer-contracting colleague that got a PhD in Mechanical Engineering and had gone to work in the defense industry ... up until the end of the Cold War. He said that he had to leave the PhD off his resume to get programming work.

 

[DaveE]

Lasers. Damn near everyone in the engineering departments at Laser manufacturers has a PhD. Same for the more high tech users; microscopy, semiconductors, etc.