Support from others

Participants shared many rich stories of how they had received support from others through their career, the type of support that made a difference and the types of people who had made a difference. In this section the activities help you to explore:

your networks and who can help you in developing your career
experiences of those who have worked with mentors, along with some of the pitfalls of mentoring so that you can take these into consideration when setting up your own mentoring relationships so that they have the best chance of success
prompts to consider to build your readiness for coaching, so that you can create the most value from the investment of time and money

Evidence suggested that there is an inconsistent ethos of talent spotting, talent development and succession planning across universities. Where it is lacking it also depends on the competence and willingness of the line manager and others to spot and to nurture talent. Important too are the aspirations of individuals and their confidence and competence for putting themselves in the frame for consideration; along with their motivation and opportunity to benchmark themselves against other existing, and potential, internal and external talent.

Regardless of whether there is a culture of talent and succession planning, participants described multiple opportunities and examples of support and development, proactively providing people time, space and support to grow their career potential; whether or not academics avail themselves of this opportunity is also variable. As Harding (2012) identified, some academics are more focused on developing expertise or professionalism within their discipline than in developing their career journey or seeing development opportunities as a resource for career development.

Some of the most influential support that academics spoke about included can be categorised into support from networks, mentoring and coaching and the Academic Career Conversation prompts in this section are focused on these three areas. Other types of support included: qualifications and accreditations; sabbaticals; and specific programmes and workshops to support education, research, enterprise, professional practice and leadership. Some also spoke of the lack of support, or support that had ‘gone wrong’.

The opportunities for gaining support from a wider network internal and external to the university, academic and non-academic are vast and the prompts below highlight where academics accessed support from these.

Many academics spoke about mentoring and coaching as key to supporting their career development. Some were unsure of the difference between the two and it was noticeable that it was only when academics had experienced both that they could more usefully determine the difference; and experienced coaches and mentors are usually confident to flex across the boundaries. One definition of coaching and mentoring that appeared to resonate with much of the data is from Grant (2001:6-7) and for the purpose of this Academic Career Conversation tool we concur:

‘Coaching is a process in which the coach facilitates learning in the coachee. The coach need not be an expert in the coachee’s area of learning. The coach need only have expertise in facilitating learning and performance enhancement.’

‘Mentoring traditionally involves an individual with expert knowledge in a specific domain passing on this knowledge to an individual with less expertise.’

In the support section of these resources, you will discover more about what academics told us about the successes and pitfalls of mentoring and how best to prepare for mentoring to enhance career development; where coaching is used, how it can help, and how to get ready for coaching.