The organisation of research is a powerful factor structuring the labour market for recent doctorate recipients. The queue for permanent research positions in the academic sector has created a specific labour market for young doctorates, characterised by a proliferation of postdoctoral
programmes and fixed-term contracts. In that specific context, our paper deals with the way the young PhD graduates enter the labour market, the way they get a job as researcher in the private or public sector and how much the return of the job mobility from the public academic sector to the private sector is. Using a longitudinal survey provided by the Cereq, our results suggest that even if nearly the half of the cohort has a direct access to jobs in the research sector (private or public), 20% remain in trajectories dominated by under-qualified
jobs or recurrent unemployment. Our empirical investigation show a negative or non significant returns of the job mobility from the public academic sector to the private sector.