The impact of professional doctorates: professional development, practice and the workplace

Professional doctorate programmes provide learners with an alternative to the traditional PhD. These programmes offer doctorate-level study that both informs and is informed by professional practice. Despite many definitions of professional doctorates emphasising their grounding in professional practice, there is little tangible evidence of their impact on professional knowledge, practice, or the workplace. This paper presents the findings of a mixed-method case study, which explores the impact of one Doctor of Education programme in Ireland. Acknowledging the limited research in this area, this exploratory study is purposively broad, illustrating a diverse array of impacts on professional knowledge, practice and the workplace while highlighting some of the challenges in identifying and describing these. The findings indicate that professional doctorates foster significant personal and professional growth, particularly in criticality, confidence and professional identity. Evidence of workplace impact was more varied, revealing both indirect forms of influence and, in some cases, concrete organisational change, underscoring the complexity of defining and evidencing ‘impact’ in professional doctorate contexts.