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Why, in an institutional context marked by increasingly fuzzy boundaries between academia and other organizations, with their ways of producing knowledge becoming more and more similar, do careers outside academia after doctoral studies struggle to emerge, with some PhD students preferring to stay “sad” in short-term contracts, waiting to gain access to a career in academia? This research interviews twenty PhD holders from the University of Lyon who currently work in private companies to understand their career trajectory. The research draws on a literature in career studies that puts an emphasis on contexts in order to understand career-making and changes, and on activity theory (AT) to show how the object of doctoral research activity changes throughout the career trajectory of PhD holders toward the private sector. With the help of a life interview technique and an analytical framework based on AT, I show the common dimensions of the object of work across career trajectories and how young PhD holders progressively reconceptualize the object of their work in their personal journey, with a strong emotional exigency. Communities, instruments, life history, and divisions of labor are at once resources and sources of tensions throughout the trajectory. This study shows that young researchers carry out evolving epistemic work on their careers alongside their knowledge production. It also demonstrates that the object of their work becomes stabilized when they join a private company. This research contributes to knowledge on the career trajectories of PhD holders outside of academia and to the conceptualization of context in career studies, with the help of AT. It also produces some practical recommendations for universities.