The Essay
Aligning Academic Roles to Evolving Priorities
What does it mean to build a career as an academic today, or to be an academic in general?
Mark Sterling and Lia Blaj-Ward
"Career framework redevelopment is a substantial undertaking, which leads to a reshaping of professional identities and has potential to unsettle academic colleagues’ relationship to an institution, implicitly impacting students and other stakeholders."
Policies which map academic roles, career progression and professional growth are being revised across the world. Staffing costs account for two thirds of higher education expenditure and, in the current climate, in order to stay agile and meet both the known and the yet unknown needs of the future, it is essential to ensure that institutions have effective ways to channel their resources in line with their mission.
OECD’s 2024 evidence review of academic careers in its member countries offers a useful reminder that regulatory arrangements in different national higher education systems give institutions greater or lesser freedom to shape their academic career frameworks. This partly explains the wide variations in the pace and scope of academic career framework revision across the world. Partly, however, unevenness has likely arisen because good redesign practice (and lessons learnt from less successful initiatives) have not been shared sufficiently.
The 2024 OECD report caught our attention because its publication was book-ended by two projects we have worked on. The first, Redeveloping Academic Career Frameworks for Twenty-First Century Higher Education, explored two new(er) career pathways, with a substantive focus on education, professional practice, enterprise, public engagement and knowledge exchange. These pathways help higher education fulfil more equitably and fully the promise it has made to society to ‘deliver knowledge and understanding and […] the ethical compass we need to navigate the future’.
The second book project, Re-envisioning Academic Citizenship was an opportunity to look more closely at a particular aspect of academic work which cuts across all academic pathways and roles.
Discussion in our 2023 Redeveloping Academic Career Frameworks weaves together two complementary perspectives: individual and institutional. Career framework redevelopment is a substantial undertaking, which leads to a reshaping of professional identities and has potential to unsettle academic colleagues’ relationship to an institution, implicitly impacting students and other stakeholders.
We offer five scenarios of individual academics experiencing new pathways at different stages in their professional lives, then look closely at the substance of two new(er) pathways, drawing on an analysis of UK-based career framework documents and on published evidence from a variety of national contexts. We also look at ways to facilitate academics’ (re)alignment to new pathways and their subsequent professional growth.
While new pathways have clear benefits, as we reflect in our book, the redesign process also carries risk. To support risk mitigation in framework redevelopment initiatives, the book puts forward twelve redesign principles in Chapter 6, bringing together the complementary perspective of the four authors: an academic who led career redesign in an institution, an academic who experienced promotion on a new pathway, a human resource expert overseeing framework redesign and implementation, and an academic developer.
From an institutional angle, we look at equity, diversity and inclusion, and at processes to implement new pathways (senior sponsorship, decision-making panels for promotions, and the role of HR professionals). We emphasise that academic career frameworks are ongoing projects. An external perception of higher education institutions is that they are averse to change. However, this perception is far from the truth, as universities are continually evolving and responding to external pressures.
Recent circumstances, particularly in the UK, have created a need to improve efficiency, which in some institutions has unfortunately led to higher turnover among academic staff. While projects aimed at redesigning academic career frameworks primarily focus on roles with academic responsibilities, their effects often extend across the entire university and, in some cases, influence the wider higher education sector. Given the scope of such projects, formal and carefully thought-out evaluation is required to ensure that their intended positive impact is what is actually experienced. Our closing chapter offers a set of evaluation questions and their underpinning assumptions.
Both in the UK and in Australia, changes to frameworks are being made by individual institutions. In other contexts, however, such as the Nordic countries in Europe and the Netherlands, change projects are steered at a national level (we spotlighted these initiatives in an earlier blog).
In the two years since the publication of Redeveloping Academic Career Frameworks, we have witnessed the debate about education-focused pathways intensify in the UK as well as in Australia. Some of the UK-based career frameworks in particular (ones we analysed in our book) have been refined to recognise a broader range of expertise that education-focused colleagues bring to their academic work. Discussion of pathways centred on practice, enterprise, public engagement and knowledge exchange, however, has lagged behind, despite the high relevance of experience from outside higher education both to student learning and to cross-sector collaborations. Pathway specialisation is less visible in other countries, where the traditional teaching and research academic roles prevail.
Some of the academic career frameworks we analysed for our first book project recognised more fully than others the value of academic citizenship, collegiality and service. In a follow-on book project, Re-envisioning Academic Citizenship, we explored the nuances of these overlapping concepts.
Using ‘academic citizenship’ as the overarching label for an array of activities fundamental to the effective functioning of higher education institutions, we draw attention to the societally-oriented dimension of academic citizenship, and to the way it goes well beyond ‘academic housekeeping’. We map the various ways in which citizenship is represented in a selection of UK-based academic career frameworks; the varied category and subcategory labels assigned to citizenship criteria. We discuss barriers to enacting academic citizenship equitably, and we reflect on ways in which generative artificial intelligence could transform collegial work. We ask how academic citizenship can be sustained in higher education to 2030 and beyond.
Academic citizenship, collegiality and service are a central source of energy for higher education’s triple mission (research, education and societal engagement, occasionally simply stated as transforming lives through the power of education and research), as further illustrated in the reflection pieces from eight established leaders in the sector we invited to contribute to our book.
To help institutions pre-empt energy depletion, our book offers five scenarios of how academic citizenship which meets and exceeds threshold criteria is enacted and can be supported to thrive – at various stages in an academic career, and with the benefit of the community in mind.
One of the risks of insufficiently thought-out academic career progression policies is that they may incentivise individual achievement and competition rather than galvanise collaborative commitment. The five scenarios, enriched with insights from purposively sampled interviewees, are intended to help readers design and interpret evaluative criteria and expectations associated with academic roles. Following in the footsteps of Redeveloping Academic Career Frameworks, Re-envisioning Academic Citizenship also closes with reflective questions for individuals and institutions.
Revision of academic career frameworks is happening in an ever-changing higher education system and an ever-changing broader societal context. There is no off-the-shelf solution, and the redesign process itself is resource-intensive and far from straightforward, yet the benefits are likely to be substantial. Benefits will be experienced longer term, through what the framework will achieve.
Benefits will also be experienced more immediately, throughout the redesign process itself. The insights we share in Redeveloping Academic Career Frameworks and in Re-envisioning Academic Citizenship are intended to facilitate rich, meaningful conversations about frameworks that are a best fit for individual institutions’ direction of travel, while achieving the needed level of comparability and transferability across the sector.