Joining More Research Projects Makes PhD Students Feel More Skilled, Study Finds

Doctoral education has long been framed around the dissertation, the coursework, and the guidance of a supervisor. But a large new study from mainland China suggests that one of the most powerful engines of a PhD student’s development may be something far less formal: participation in the research projects led by their supervisors and colleagues. Drawing on survey responses from more than 10,000 doctoral students across 70 Chinese universities, researchers found that students who took part in research projects consistently reported stronger gains in both research skills and so-called generic skills, such as communication, teamwork, and project management, than those who did not.

The study, published in the journal Higher Education by Li Yang and Chuanyi Wang of Tsinghua University and Hugo Horta of the University of Hong Kong, analyzed data from the 2024 China Graduate Student Satisfaction Survey. Of the 10,819 academic PhD students included in the final sample, a striking 92 percent reported participating in at least one research project during their doctoral studies. This near-universal engagement reflects how doctoral training is structured in China, where students typically join a supervisor’s research team and work alongside other PhD and master’s students on funded projects. In 2023 alone, Chinese higher education institutions ran 942,241 science and technology research projects involving 1,235,029 graduate students.

The researchers distinguished between two broad categories of skills. Research skills cover the ability to produce new knowledge, design rigorous experiments, collect and analyze data, write and publish results, and critically evaluate the work of others. Generic skills, sometimes called transferable or soft skills, include communication, leadership, time management, teamwork, networking, and the ability to present, negotiate, and compromise. Both are increasingly seen as essential as growing numbers of PhD graduates move into careers outside academia, where skill mismatches have been documented as a common adjustment problem.

To measure skill development, students rated themselves on a five-point scale for fourteen separate items, seven for research skills and seven for generic skills, comparing their current abilities with where they stood when they began their PhD. The two scales proved highly reliable, and a confirmatory factor analysis supported the two-factor structure. On average, students reported a research skills enhancement score of 2.07 and a generic skills score of 1.83 on a scale where 3 represented great improvement, indicating substantial perceived growth in both domains since starting their programs.

The headline result is that participation matters. After controlling for a wide range of individual, institutional, and behavioral factors, students who participated in research projects rated their research skills enhancement 0.389 units higher, and their generic skills enhancement 0.461 units higher, than comparable students who did not participate. More intriguingly, the benefits accumulated: relative to non-participants, students who joined one, two, three, or four or more projects reported progressively higher gains, rising from 0.282 units for a single project to 0.539 units for four or more in research skills, with a similar pattern for generic skills.

Yet the study adds an important nuance. A single project appeared insufficient to produce a practically meaningful difference, and when the researchers accounted for how satisfied students were with their project participation, much of the apparent benefit of joining many projects faded. Satisfaction with project involvement emerged as the single most powerful factor: a one-unit increase on the five-point satisfaction scale was associated with a 0.519-unit increase in perceived research skills and a 0.560-unit increase in generic skills, effects large enough to account for roughly a third of the unexplained variance. The authors conclude that the subjective experience of participation, feeling challenged, valued, and socially engaged, matters more than the raw number of projects on a CV.

The type of task students performed also played a role, though a smaller one than expected. Among the many tasks tracked, from conducting literature reviews, which 88 percent of participants did, to supportive chores like formatting and reimbursement paperwork, only involvement in research design and data collection showed a statistically significant association with both kinds of skill enhancement. Most other tasks appeared largely irrelevant to perceived skill growth, suggesting that simply being busy within a project is no substitute for meaningful intellectual involvement.

The study also probed whether the apparent benefits might simply reflect student ability. Using the selectivity of the student’s undergraduate university and their number of first-author or corresponding-author publications as proxies, the researchers found mixed and generally weak effects. Each additional publication added only 0.036 and 0.039 units to perceived research and generic skills respectively, accounting for roughly one percent of variance, below the threshold for practical significance. Notably, the benefits of project participation appeared consistent regardless of a student’s academic pedigree, the reputation of their doctoral institution, or whether they had switched disciplines, hinting that research projects may serve as a relatively egalitarian training ground.

Several control variables yielded noteworthy patterns. Female PhD students consistently reported lower perceived skill enhancement than their male peers, echoing earlier findings and the broader literature on self-assessment biases such as the imposter phenomenon. Motivation mattered too, with most students in the sample, 65 percent, citing academic careers as a goal. Students in their fourth year or beyond reported greater gains, an expected pattern given their accumulated experience approaching graduation. Discipline, mode of study, and the extent of disciplinary change between degrees, by contrast, showed little or no association with perceived skill growth.

The authors are careful about the limits of their evidence. The data are cross-sectional, so the associations are correlational rather than causal, and the measures of skill enhancement are self-reported perceptions rather than objective assessments, which may be vulnerable to socially desirable responses. The survey design also prevented the researchers from testing whether a project’s topic aligned with a student’s dissertation. Still, the implications are clear. For doctoral programs searching for ways to broaden graduate skillsets through workshops and internships, the humble research project, done well and done with satisfaction, may already be doing much of that work. The authors recommend that students take part in at least two projects during their PhD, and that supervisors ensure the experience is challenging, collaborative, and genuinely valued, because the feeling of growing may depend as much on how participation feels as on how much of it there is.

Subject of Research: The association between research project participation and perceived research and generic skill enhancement among PhD students in mainland China.

Article Title: The role of research project participation on PhD students perceived skill enhancement

Article References: Yang, L., Wang, C., & Horta, H. (2026). The role of research project participation on PhD students perceived skill enhancement. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01749-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01749-4

Keywords: PhD students, doctoral education, research projects, skill enhancement, generic skills, research skills, satisfaction, higher education, China, graduate training, employability, role