Ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, and you will hear; doctor, engineer, teacher, pilot. You will almost never hear researcher. Not because children lack curiosity, but because “researcher” is rarely presented to them as a profession.

There is no career-day booth for it. No uniform. No clear ladder from primary school to a recognisable profession. And if that is true of research in general, it is truer still of qualitative research, which usually does not even get named as its own path once you are inside a university.

There is no clear pipeline from school to university to a recognisable research career. Neither obvious ladder nor career-day booth saying, “You could become a researcher.”

And if that is true of research generally, it is even more true of qualitative research.

A profession most people fall into

Medicine, engineering, and teaching share something research mostly lacks: a visible pipeline. A student can point at the path years in advance; the subjects to take, the exams to pass, the title waiting at the end.

Research rarely works that way. It tends to live inside something else: you study public health, or environmental science, or sociology, take a research methods course, write a dissertation.  until, if you are fortunate, someone inside that program points out that research is the actual profession you have been training for all along.

I felt this directly. I had spent two years inside a research degree without having fully named “researcher” as the profession I was walking toward; and even then, I defaulted to the version of research I assumed was “serious” (quantitative), rather than the version I was actually good at.

If that gap can open up inside a degree explicitly built around research, it is easy to see how much wider it is for anyone whose program only touches research in passing; a dissertation chapter, one methods course, a single supervised project.

My Own Exception, and Why It is an Exception

My own MSc was named explicitly, Public Health Research: a rare case where “research” sits in the degree title itself, not folded into a subject area. That framing mattered: it meant research was positioned as the outcome of the program, not a skill picked up on the way to something else.

Most degree programs aren't built this way, and if the gap can open up inside a degree explicitly built around research, it is wider still for anyone whose program only touches research in passing: a dissertation chapter, one methods course, a single supervised project.

A student can complete an entire undergraduate degree in environmental science, agriculture, or social work (as I did before my MSc) and encounter research only as a single unit, a final-year project, or a supervisor's passing suggestion, rather than as a named professional destination.

The result is that research, and qualitative research in particular, tends to be discovered rather than chosen.

People do not choose it the way they choose medicine at seventeen. They stumble into it in their twenties, often through a mentor who happens to notice something in them, which is exactly the pattern I described in an article I wrote about becoming a qualitative researcher “by accident.”

See: https://sheilamsangi.com/we-all-became-qualitative-researchers-by-accident/. That piece was a personal story. This is the structural problem sitting underneath it.

What Fills the Gap and What That Tells Us

Where formal pathways are missing; informal ones fill in, unevenly. Structured mentorship programs exist precisely because the university pipeline does not reliably produce researchers on its own.

The CREMES Research Mentorship Program (the mentorship program I have written about elsewhere) is one example: a deliberate effort to deepen research capability that a standard degree programme does not guarantee on its own.

Individual supervision does the same work at a smaller scale. That is the honest limitation of both mechanisms: individual supervision and formal programs alike are real, valuable interventions, but they are also evidence of a gap being patched informally rather than closed systemically.

A mentorship program reaches the people who apply to it. A supervisor's attention reaches the students assigned to them. What about the student who encounters neither?

Why This Matters Beyond Individual Careers

This is not simply a career-guidance problem. If research, and qualitative research specifically, is only ever discovered by accident, then the people who end up doing it will skew toward whoever happened to have the right mentor, the right program, the right conversation at the right moment; not necessarily whoever would have been best suited to the work.

That is a quiet but real cost to the field: talented people are lost to it not because they lacked aptitude, but because nobody with standing ever said the sentence that would have redirected them. You cannot choose a specialisation you were never told you could have.

It also affects how research is perceived publicly. A profession without a visible pathway struggles to be understood, funded, or valued in the way professions with recognisable pipelines are.

Part of why qualitative research in particular still gets dismissed in some circles as "soft" is that so few people arrive there through a deliberate, respected pipeline; it is easier to undervalue a profession that mostly seems to happen to people, rather than one people are trained toward on purpose.

What Would Actually Change This

A few concrete shifts would move research, and qualitative research specifically, from an accident to a visible pathway:

1. Name research as a destination inside more degree programmes, not only in programmes explicitly branded around it. A single required course does not do this; a programme has to describe research as one of the professions a graduate could become, not only a skill they will use elsewhere.

2. Introduce students to qualitative and quantitative methods as equally legitimate specialisations early, rather than presenting quantitative work as the default and qualitative work as an elective discovered later, if at all.

3. Formalise what mentorship programs like CREMES already do, at the institutional level: build structured, resourced mentorship into degree programmes themselves, rather than relying on external programs or individual supervisors to fill the gap after the fact.

4. Make researchers visible outside the university: in career guidance materials, in secondary schools, in public communication about what researchers actually do, so that the profession has a face and a pathway before someone is already two degrees deep into another field.

None of this requires waiting for a national policy overhaul. It starts with the same small, specific act that shaped my own path: someone with standing naming research (and where relevant, qualitative research) as a real, chosen destination, out loud, before a student has already drifted somewhere else.

Institutions can build the larger pathway over time. In the meantime, every mentor, supervisor, and lecturer already has the power to do the one thing that changed my direction: say the sentence.