In Italy, the economic crisis has decreased job opportunities of young people, even for highly skilled ones, such as recent PhD graduates, i.e those who have graduated within the last one to three years. Our research questions aim at evaluating to what extent people with a PhD level of education, are employed in jobs that involve them into R&D activities and how strong the effects of economic crisis are on the adequacy of their job. Using the PhD graduates vocational integration survey data (Istat, 2010 and 2014) we compare the employment situation of two different PhD cohorts, before the crisis (2007) and at the latest available year (2011) and focus on their transition from education to work. Particularly, we apply a logistic regression analysis to shed light on the probability of being involved in R&D activities. Preliminary results show strong effect of gender and field of study.