American graduate schools -- strong in developing specific skills in talented students -- must do more to inform students about career options and prepare graduates for non-academic workplaces, a new Council of Graduate Schools study suggests.

There were also plenty of encouraging findings. Most people with an advanced degree (85 percent) said their education opened up more career possibilities and 90 percent of current and former grad school students said they’d enroll in a master’s or doctoral program again.

Though thousands more future careers will require advanced degrees, and employers say they want to hire grad students, newly minted degree-holders often have trouble adjusting to a professional environment. Some companies complained that new hires struggled to give presentations, contribute to team projects or work on deadlines. Ron Townsend, who sat on the commission that developed this study, said that’s a common problem in his work at Battelle Memorial Institute and the U.S. Department of Energy's national laboratories.

“What many graduate [school] graduates are missing is the ability to work to produce a specific outcome on a specific timeline under a specific budget,” he said. “That notion of working in a disciplined business environment, we typically have to teach graduates when they get to a laboratory.”