Where does a DBA candidate belong on an academic resume? A DBA candidate belongs at doctoral level, on a line of its own rather than filed as a PhD. Axe Builder, our resume builder for researchers, turns an ORCID iD into an academic resume with citations, h-index, journal quartiles and Crossref data already in place. Since 24 August, it records a DBA, or any other professional doctorate, as a supervision level of its own, and prints beside each student the name of the degree that student actually receives.
The distinction matters most in business schools, where a supervisor’s DBA candidates are a core part of the doctoral record and a hiring panel wants to see them counted accurately. On the resume, professional doctorates sit in the doctoral block, below PhDs and above master’s degrees, and each carries its own badge, so the panel reads the record exactly as it stands.
Does supervising a DBA count towards a professorship?
That depends on the university’s job requirements, and a correctly labelled resume lets the hiring panel apply them. Most professorial bars count PhD students supervised to completion as main supervisor, while some business schools count professional doctorates alongside them. A resume that labels each student correctly can be read against either rubric, and when Axe Talent presents a business-school candidate to a university, the degree on each supervision line is the first thing we check.