Plenty of people went straight from PhD to running their own groups, including my thesis advisor and his first grad student. It varied a lot from discipline to discipline. I would have observed at the time when I got my PhD, that the population of post-docs created the &quot;need&quot; for post-doctoral experience.<p>There were fields where post-doc experience was rare:<p>1. Engineering and computer science, where people had good employment prospects outside of academia<p>2. The humanities and social sciences, where there was no money to hire post-docs<p>Fields where post-doc experience was a requirement:<p>1. The sciences, with an abundance of money for hiring post-docs, and hit-or-miss employment prospects in industry, depending on your specialty and ancillary skills.<p>The other thing I&#x27;ve observed is that <i>multiple</i> post doc appointments don&#x27;t really improve your chances. The superstars have identified themselves as such while still in grad school, or during their first post-doc appointment.<p>I concluded while still in grad school, that the arc of my career would not intersect with a professorship, so I finished my PhD and bailed out of academia.