Swedish PhD Education is in general heavily structured. PhD students write their dissertation with supervision guidance, take compulsory and elective courses and often have some kind of departmental duties such as teaching. However, there are differences depending on PhD programs, disciplines and faculties. Moreover, PhD students get highly skilled during their PhD education, getting prepared to do research and, often, also to teach. This is also, by nature, trained in real-life situations, since their education at the same time is their work. But does this mean that they come fully prepared for the working life that awaits them?

In this paper, we focus on how to prepare for and learn how to navigate, on the one hand in a diversified working situation in a concrete everyday sense, and on the other hand, a global academic landscape dominated by academic capitalism. PhD programs cannot remain static. That will risk leaving the PhD graduate overwhelmed when transitioning from PhD student to early career researcher. This transition is a crucial moment for making a change for PhDs' future careers.

The culture around and within PhD education needs to be changed, which demands courage, as the traditional structures are strongly established. Like all cultures, academic culture is also in a state of change, but it changes slowly. To improve the situation, we propose active engagement with cultural structures in academia and PhD education. This approach aims at challenging a slow organic adjustment that may take a long time and risk leaving many young researchers behind. 

In this paper, we exemplify with several measures, defined as work-integrated learning (WIL) within the PhD education, implemented at our university.  In this instance, by WIL we mean an explicit ambition and practical attempt to create a strong and reciprocal relation between working life and learning, bringing in real academic working life components (beyond those already present) as integrated parts of the PhD education. Examples range from courses focusing on co-creative project application work with external partners, practicing academic leadership by leading research assistants, to taking part in real-life research interdisciplinary projects outside the dissertation work. Additionally, strategic career planning, abilities to translate skills to diverse contexts, feedforward practices to promote joy at work, and pedagogical layers of learning when being both a student and a teacher are addressed. Moreover, the research environment has arranged special events for PhD students to network and collaborate with senior researchers through authentic interdisciplinary collaborative academic writing and research beyond the dissertation project.

Recognizing the need for cultural change in PhD education requires the courage to face a shifting reality where the future workplace of PhD graduates is already evolving and will continue to do so. Thus, universities, research schools and supervisors need to be courageous and open to explore innovative approaches to WIL in PhD education.