Building Your Academic Career

Rebecca Boden, Debbie Epstein, Jane Kenway

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781473946118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Forschung im Bildungswesen

Building Your Academic Career encourages you to take a proactive approach to getting what you want out of academic work whilst being a good colleague. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of such a career, the routes in and the various elements that shape current academic working lives. In the second half of the book we deal in considerable detail with how to write a really good CV (résumé) and how best to approach securing an academic job or promotion.

 

 

1	Who should Use this Book and How?

 

 

In our cumulative forty-five years of experience of working in higher education, the thing that strikes us above everything else is the rapid pace and direction of change in what constitutes an ‘academic career’. If we were writing this book twenty years ago, it would have been a much simpler task: there were standard entry routes into the profession; standard expectations of qualifications and achievements; and a readily identifiable and largely homogeneous career trajectory. Nothing could be further from the truth now.

Environment is a key determining factor here. When C.P. Snow, an Oxford don, wrote his novel, The Masters, and other books about life at Oxbridge (that is, Oxford and Cambridge) colleges, he described a world shaped by a very traditional notion of collegiality, hierarchy and politics. In his university world, the fellows of the college and the values that bound them together were the university. There was no notion here that an academic was an employee of an institution. Rather, the college facilitated the individual’s work. Similarly, David Lodge’s novels such as Changing Places and Small World and Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man described academic life as characterised by self-governance of an organisation, nevertheless riven by petty disputes, politicking, sexual entanglements and backstabbing of various kinds.

In contrast, when Andrew Davies wrote A Very Peculiar Practice some years later, his imagined university was a corporate entity with managed hierarchies supplanting professional ones. While similar politicking, jealousies and disputes were depicted, nevertheless the world was a very different place. In this context, academics were employees and universities were corporations in a globalised knowledge economy.

Obviously, such works of fiction present a stereotyped view of the worst of universities of their time. However, we feel that they reasonably accurately reflect the nature of universities and how they have changed over time. The university of Peculiar Practice is all too familiar.

The changing nature of universities has inevitably had an impact on academic careers and individual academic identities. The changing nature of university work environments, across the globe, means that academic careers are no longer the homogeneous, stable and entirely predictable creatures that they were twenty or thirty years ago. For an individual, negotiating this minefield can be fraught with difficulties – especially when, like in Alice in Wonderland, the lie of the land can change almost without warning.

This book is intended to help all academics negotiate this dynamic environment to their best advantage. If this is the first book in the Academic’s Support Kit that you are reading, then you might find it useful to read ‘Introducing the Academic’s Support Kit’ before you begin. If you are reading all the books in the kit, it is probably best to read this book either first or last. You may want to read it first in order to get an overview of what an academic career entails. On the other hand, you may find it useful to turn or return to this book after you have read the others in the Academic’s Support Kit as a way of pulling all the threads together and helping you develop a strategy for your future career.

This book will be especially useful for you if you are one of the following people:

 

• You may be about to begin or be at the beginning of your career in the academic world, perhaps as a postgraduate student or a newly appointed academic. You may have previously been in a different professional career such as school teaching, accountancy, the law or business.
• Because you work in a dynamic institutional environment, you may be subject to increasing pressure to develop a different academic profile and persona. For example, you may be a longstanding, senior contract researcher who wants the more secure employment that comes from having a teaching role as well as a research one. Equally, you might be someone who has done a lot of teaching but not much, if any, research. Alternatively, you might be someone who has been ‘treading water’ in your job and have decided to ‘retread’ yourself in order to get a new job at a different institution or a promotion. Finally, you may be quite dissatisfied with your lot in the world of work and have decided to take a proactive approach to making some changes.
• You might be the mentor, friend or colleague of someone in one of the above positions.

 

This book is about how you develop, represent and market your academic identity. Because academic work is very personalised, highly individualised and often atomised, you need to pay careful attention to how you develop and package yourself as an academic.

We’ve noticed that people often talk about ‘being an academic’ rather than being employed as one. Many people still see being an academic as a vocation and an identity rather than simply as a job. This means that work is not framed by a nine-to-five mentality and embodies a certain sense of purpose beyond earning a salary. The personal satisfaction from working in this way is often seen as compensating for the often poor material rewards that academics receive. In contradistinction, it’s all too easy to let work dominate or colonise every aspect of your life to the detriment of health, well-being, family, relationships and so on.

You may want to:

 

• Think about where you are going in your working life.
• Reassess your career.
• Find out the best ways of presenting yourself and your achievements in order to get a job or a promotion.
• Know what the secrets of getting those plum jobs are and how to make the system work for you.
• Understand what’s important in building an academic career and what isn’t, so that you can be proactive in developing the aspects of your work that matter most in the career context.

 

The incentives to think proactively about academic careers are quite strong. Academics now work in a largely globalised labour market and this creates many more and varied opportunities than were available even a few years ago. It is also much easier to move between academia and jobs outside universities – and back again. Contemporary performance cultures mean that, for those who can demonstrate ‘performance’, there are plenty of opportunities available. Old disciplinary boundaries are breaking down, making it easier for individuals to transfer between disciplines as their interests and focus shifts. Moving to a new position or disciplinary area may give you better resources, treatment, promotion possibilities, access to a critical mass of people in your area and support for research. You may also be able to secure a place in a stronger research culture and intellectual environment in a university with more institutional prestige. Finally, you may acquire a nicer and better set of work colleagues. It is important to remember that a globalised academic labour market can give you as an individual a great deal of power and advantage as long as you can demonstrate that you have the right sorts of things to bring to the party.

There are also some more negative reasons why people may want a new or different job. Generally, academic positions the world over are less secure than they were and tenure (a job for life) is rapidly disappearing. This means that you as an individual must make sure that you are constantly marketable as an academic employee. Unfortunately, many universities and/or departments within them are marred by cultures of bullying and intimidation and constrained by poor resources, recognition and support. Such characteristics can generate quite strong desires to get out and go elsewhere.

Hopefully, you are quite happy with where you are, but nevertheless you will need to continue to develop your career in order to ensure that you stay happy.

First, we’d like to introduce some people who might be in the kind of position in which they would find this book particularly useful.

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Graínne became an academic after a successful career in advertising. She has been working at a university for about ten years and has just completed her PhD and is embarking on her publishing career. She is under pressure to become head of her department, but she is anxious to move to another university in her partner’s home country. He is also an academic. She is unsure about how to prioritise her work activities so as to maximise her chances of achieving what she wants.

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Salma was a nurse who started work at her current institution to teach in her area of professional expertise about ten years ago. Since then the university has made research activity a compulsory element in every academic’s contract. At the same time it is running down the teaching in her specialist area. Salma is happy at her university and doesn’t want to have to move. She also really likes teaching and thinks she might like research, but is unsure about how to make herself valuable to the institution.

Inderjit is a very well qualified individual with an excellent publication record. Unfortunately, his main disciplinary area, science policy studies, is in recession and there are no jobs available to him. Because he was without an academic job he took a post as a research assistant on a professor’s project in a related disciplinary area but in a business school. Whilst working in this post he used his staff privileges to study for a Masters in business strategy and was then successful in getting a permanent established post in strategic management studies.

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Lucy got a first-class degree and progressed immediately to do a PhD in the same subject area and university. Following her PhD she worked as a contract researcher at the same institution and for a large charitable organisation outside higher education. She then obtained a temporary teaching job back at her alma mater and has recently been made a permanent employee there. She is still very young and needs to think about how to shape her future career prospects.

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2	Why have an Academic Career?

In this chapter, we introduce the concept of the academic career as a professional one and discuss some of the pros and cons of this sort of work.

The professional academic

An academic career is generally regarded as being a professional one, and therefore traditionally associated with self-regulation, expert knowledges (often mystified), high barriers to entry associated with demonstrable competence and a widely espoused emphasis on service in contrast to profitability. Thus professional work is frequently still seen as having a substantial vocational element – it is work that individuals undertake as part of their life and is a core part of their identities. Typical professions are medicine, the law and accountancy. Of course, a critical and perhaps not altogether cynical perspective on professionalism is that it enables certain groups to become powerful, influential and profitable whilst firmly established on the moral high ground.

In the majority of economies globally, during the past twenty or thirty years, the traditional notions of professionalism have been steadily undermined. Two forces have been at work here. First, neoliberal governments and supranational organisations such as the World Bank have sought to expose professional groups to increased market pressures, creating a market for services of the same type as for cars or carrots. Expert knowledge has become a manageable commodity. This has benefited governments by cutting their own costs and stimulating the private sector. Second, market forces themselves have undermined professionalism by opening up previously restricted practices and by ‘packaging’ services as consumer goods. As such, professional services have become big business. These pressures have eroded the power and prestige of individual practitioners, and professional work now embodies explicit imperatives to be efficient, effective and economic – to either cost as little as possible or to maximise profitability. Simultaneously, self-regulation has been undermined and replaced with cultures of audit and performativity that are externally regulated.

For all kinds of professions, regulation has increased and autonomy and possibly work satisfaction have been reduced in recent years. Being an academic is no exception to this trend and some of what follows will reflect this.

The pros and cons of being an academic

Here are some of the reasons why people might or might not enjoy working as an academic in a contemporary university.

Academics are creative

Being involve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introducing the Academic’s Support Kit
• 1 Who should Use this Book and How?
• 2 Why have an Academic Career?
• 3 Shaping up: Academic Anatomies
• 4 Presenting Yourself: Vita Statistics
• 5 Getting a Job, Getting Promoted
• 6 Balancing Acts: between Work and Life
• Further Reading
• Index