Leveraging professional experience in an Ed.D. dissertation can prove useful in conducting qualitative research and yield insights into problems of practice. Students should lean into their experiences and expertise, not only help ease the dissertation process, but also to potentially yield better results. In this post, I will discuss how to leverage professional experience in the Ed.D. dissertation and the benefits this can bring to your work.

EdD students typically possess a wealth of experience to support their dissertation projects (Costley & Armsby, 2007). Qualitative research offers an avenue to leverage this experience by placing you, the researcher, at the center of data collection and analysis.

We discuss the role of the researcher in future chapters, but here, we emphasize the notion that the researcher plays a critical role in qualitative research: “It is the researcher who gathers and organizes data. It is the researcher who makes meaning from the data, who interprets the data, and ultimately who makes the world visible to others” (Lichtman, 2014, p. 12).

Each researcher brings a unique set of experiences, strengths, and abilities that inform engagement in the research process. For students, with significant professional experience, who undertake applied or practice-focused studies, this insight can help throughout the research process and improve the overall quality of the dissertation (Murphy & Vriesenga, 2005; Shulman et al., 2006).

Students with significant professional expertise and experience have a twofold advantage (Costley & Stephenson, 2009).

First, this experience and expertise aids in identifying important problems of practice. During the course of everyday practice, professionals see issues that might be improved with additional time, resources, and/or data. In fact, advances towards solving or mitigating these problems could be made if only practitioners could dedicate the time and energy to researching solutions.

Further, these problems, which may be highly salient for practitioners, are sometimes ignored or overlooked by academic researchers not embedded in the professional setting. When brainstorming dissertation topics, we encourage our advisees to mine their professional experiences—and especially frustrations—for potential ideas. These topics impact their daily professional lives and often provoke passionate responses. This passion generates useful enthusiasm for pursuing the dissertation and represents a real advantage of professional experience.

Second, students with professional experience often have the ability to collect and understand data differently, and from another perspective than a researcher without real-world engagement with the issue being studied (Fulton, Kuit, Sanders, & Smith, 2011). For instance, an EdD student who has worked as a principal for many years is probably better suited in creating questions and recognizing the core issues faced in the job than a researcher who studies school leadership but has never worked in a school.

In qualitative research, personal experience serves as a resource to improve the study. Our same principal/EdD student may better identify nuances and build connections with other participating principals during interviews, yielding richer and more informative data.

At the same time, professional experience can be incredibly useful during the data analysis phase. Rather than trying to ignore experience in favor of objectivity, this expertise may illuminate connections that other non-practitioner researchers may miss.

We fully suggest you embrace this experience as beneficial for the dissertation. This experience, of course, does not substitute for sound and trustworthy research methodology; practitioner researchers must always consider how their own experiences influence their approach to the study and data, and take special care to identify potential blind spots, biases, or other problematic issues.

Students too often worry that objectivity will prove impossible when studying something that they deal with at work. With a well-designed and conceptualized study, however, this issue need not be a concern.

Strategies in this and other qualitative research guides can help you develop a trustworthy research design.

Our students who have adopted this mindset over the years have created dissertations that allowed them to positively impact problems of practice. We highly recommend students consider how their professional experience and expertise can improve the dissertation process.

This post is an excerpt from my book with Karri Holley, The Qualitative Dissertation in Education: A Guide for Integrating Research and Practice