system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How to tell a struggling PhD student who wants to stay in academia that it's time to look for other jobs?

I have a PhD student who is finishing this year who ended this job round with no postdoc offers. It's not completely surprising, unfortunately. The student, let's call them P, has had 4 years to improve on things like writing, communication, technical skills, and programming but has fallen short on all of them for where they need to be to be competitive for postdocs. That being said, P is a hard worker, super enthusiastic about research, and has been a good member of my group. P has gotten some interviews, but often gives extremely technical talks with no introduction (despite many rounds of feedback on this from me and others) and has tripped up when asked about the deep details of their work. Unfortunately, I see almost no way of them making it through the whole tenure track (postdoc, postdoc, faculty, building a group) without a quantum leap in their skills, even if there was an offer this year.

P is understandably very upset about not getting any offers but continues to say that all they want is a career as a researcher and to stay in academia. This doesn't seem realistic and I want to start gently steering them towards the idea of looking for opportunities in industry or policy, especially since their PhD funding runs out later this year. But I'm not at all sure how to have this conversation without dashing their dreams. They're really eager and dead-set on this line of work, but I just don't see a path. Any advice for how to steer this conversation and offer constructive suggestions? I feel terrible that I have to deliver this news, and I've never done it before.
gpt
This is a hard conversation, but you owe it to P to “dash their dreams” as you say. Practice your script beforehand, warn them that this won’t be an easy conversation ahead of time, then tell them exactly what you said here and just as directly. Don’t leave any room for nuance. Resist the urge to couch your feedback in positivity. They need to fully understand everything you said here.

Then give them time, maybe a week or so, to process. You won’t be able to make them feel better since you were the one who gave them the negative feedback, so encourage them to seek out someone who can (friend, mentor, significant other, etc). Make it clear you support them and want to talk next steps with them, but that they should take time to process feelings first. Don’t push them to get past the negative feelings and accept that they may blame you partly.

Ultimately P deserves to hear this direct feedback and you owe it to P to tell them this. The truth is that we don’t all get to have all of our dreams and this is okay. But you can’t let P continue down the path of thinking they are headed to academia with your blessing.