Why a PhD? For me, it's a real opportunity to delve deeper into a technical subject and make it my own for 3 years.
Marine FLEURY, doctoral student
Employing a doctor
Backed by solid professional experience and endowed with rigor, as well as a significant ability to manage complex problems, PhDs are able to demonstrate real creativity and a significant capacity for innovation. Generally destined in the past to pursue a career in higher education, research and innovation, today's PhD engineers often choose to join the socio-economic world in an R&D position, thus putting their knowledge and skills at the service of their employer and their company's development.
A company that hires a doctor on a permanent contract for their first job can benefit from significant financial assistance for 24 months through the Research Tax Credit (CIR). In fact, when calculating the CIR, the salaries of young doctors are taken into account for double their amount for 2 years after their first CDI hire.
A CIFRE (Convention Industrielle de Formation par la Recherche) agreement enables a company to recruit a PhD student with the help of an annual grant from the French National Association for Research and Technology (ANRT). The employee-doctoral student is then entrusted with the research work that will form the subject of the thesis. This work is supervised by the academic research laboratory, and the doctoral student is enrolled in the laboratory's doctoral school.
A collaboration contract drawn up between the company and the laboratory specifies the various conditions for carrying out the research and the intellectual property clauses for the results obtained by the doctoral student. The doctoral student is hired by the company on a fixed-term or permanent contract for 3 years with a minimum salary of €1,957 per month (€23,484 per year). The company receives an annual grant from the ANRT: €14,000 in 2021. The salary cost of a PhD student hired under a CIFRE is eligible for the Research Tax Credit (CIR). A CIFRE is also a way for the company to meet its quota for contracts promoting professional integration, so as not to be subject to a penalty when calculating their apprenticeship tax.
During their thesis, doctoral students benefit from a dual culture, as they will evolve in an academic environment and within the company. This will enable them to choose whether to start their career in academia or in the corporate world after their thesis. The company, for its part, will have trained a doctor in a field of interest to it, a doctor it can recruit if it so wishes, with attractive financial conditions.
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Companies can also take advantage of the national Doctorant-Conseil scheme, which enables them to benefit from the skills of a young researcher holding a Master's degree on a short-term, one-off project, by entrusting him/her with an expert mission contracted with his/her higher education establishment. The assignment need not be directly related to the subject of the researcher's thesis. It lasts a maximum of 32 days (268 hours), consecutively or not, over the course of a year. This scheme may be eligible for the Research Tax Credit (CIR) depending on the nature of the assignment.
