Effective planning

We discovered that many academics are not undertaking effective planning, do not have a career plan, and are happy just to pick up on opportunities if and when they arise. Others discovered that it can be helpful to have a plan that takes into consideration, for example: longer term career aspirations and how to develop academic identity, disciplinary identity, a management track, and how long to focus on each. A number of participants who were later in their career expressed a wish that they had thought of this much earlier.

In this section we provide some prompts for academic career conversations that help you to look a few years ahead, to consider who or what you could put in place to facilitate your career journey, and how you can easily check in and keep yourself on track.

The data showed us that often career development happens by accident, or is the result of circumstances, and less often the result of a proactive approach to planning a career.

Within this complex context individual academics are striving to develop their academic identity and careers, and yet find they have little time to reflect on, or to plan, their career journey. Similarly, the skills of line managers and staff developers are limited in supporting proactively the careers of other academics or careers.

There are several reasons for this. Reasons include lack of time or attention; when people have not been fully supported in their own careers and have not been socialised into effective ways of doing so, they sometimes find it difficult to support others.

Additionally, we heard many stories of how academic careers progress by accident rather than design; and support often depends on the good fortune of being surrounded by another, or others, who have the skills and capability and inclination to give time to nurture the careers of others.

Even professional staff developers are sometimes challenged by the idea of supporting academic careers. Although many staff developers are skilled and experienced in developing leaders and professional and support staff, they often lack confidence or opportunities to engage with academic staff development, or deem it is out of scope for their role. For some it is because academics seem more focused on developing professionalism within their discipline and, as they lack experience in this area, staff developers also lack confidence to become involved. In some institutions academic staff development is only focused on learning and teaching quality, and sometimes research support and is located in a separate department. Our research has demonstrated that there is a need for academic career support beyond discipline, or learning and teaching, or research, development. Even leadership development is not consistently offered across the sector, and even then it is often supported by external providers.

Participants said:

“Academics think that as they progress up the ladder that they need less and less continuing professional development (CPD) and actually the reverse is true. The more the academic processes up, the more CPD they need. That is true because they then start managing teams, they manage budgets, they manage difficult people….I wasn’t born with the ability to manage difficult conversations, so all of those are skills that become necessary as you progress up the career ladder.”

“Particularly when you get to professor you’ve got to be able to ask yourself, well what now? I think it is something around that ongoing engagement of how you can make what you do bigger than just yourself potentially.”

In this study we are not looking at the development of academic skills, but at developing the skills and practice for thinking about and planning for the evolution of a career – whether it is one’s own career, or for line managers, peers, coaches, mentors, and staff developers supporting the careers of others.