Achieving Academic Promotion

Moving up the career ladder has its rewards – more money, of course. However, in academia, it could also mean more time and autonomy to pursue your research interests and greater ability to influence the direction of your department and your field. However, getting a promotion takes time and effort, mixed in with a pinch of luck and willingness, while keeping your day job ticking over. Amidst all this, you also need to ensure you are across the process and criteria – slightly different at every university and different yet again in institutions overseas. This chapter will demystify the process by providing you with a useful overview across global contexts, tips, and tested techniques for making yourself promotion ready.

The pursuit of becoming a professor is intensely competitive and fraught with personal and academic complexities. This chapter reflects the author’s post-PhD experience of being “on the market.” The author explores some of the challenges and strategic considerations of gaining a fixed-term contract in hope of securing a coveted tenure track position. The author’s advice for promotion from “perilous to permanent” status is driven by two questions: “what do I want?” and “what’s the best use of my time?” This chapter will be of interest to an international audience including PhD candidates, early career researchers, and those going “back on the job market.”

In a world where some (predominantly male) colleagues gets undue credit and airtime in academia and some women struggle to juggle work and family responsibilities, this chapter provides some reflections about the author’s own personal journey as a female early career academic, as well as the author’s recent experience in applying for an academic promotion. Appended within this chapter are also some advice and tips from other female colleagues who have recently been successful in their applications for promotion. The author is only a drop in the ocean of academia but hopefully these reflections will help other female colleagues who are trying to navigate the academic world.

This chapter is presented in four distinct sections designed specifically to help early career scholars gain valuable insight into the complexities of preparing for and succeeding as a faculty member in the United States’ (US) system of higher education. The first section will explore the vast and multifaceted landscape of higher education across the US, anticipating that readers will be inspired to seek more regionally and institutionally specific perspectives as appropriate to their own interests. The second section offers a reflective narrative from the perspective of a doctoral candidate working strategically to help ensure a smooth transition to a faculty appointment in the US system. This section will provide perspectives on doctoral program aims and structures in the US along with the day-to-day work of a doctoral candidate working within the context of a college of education. In the following section of this chapter the authors offer guidance for engaging in impactful and innovative work to help ensure early career success. Such advice includes working across traditional academic boundaries and pursuing timely and influential research questions that deepen understandings across often distinct lines of inquiry. Finally, the authors present brief perspectives from several experienced faculty who remind us of the larger picture of what it means to truly thrive in the competitive environment of higher education.

Academic promotion brings rewards to individuals but is also a critical measure of institutional quality: it is a positive indicator if colleagues successfully engage with rigorous scrutiny of professional practice. The higher education sector is also rapidly changing in response to demands for metrics to measure excellence. This chapter explores the influence of these external drivers within the UK context on local promotion policy, such as academic pathways, domains of practice, and levels of responsibility. Insights from successful colleagues are also shared and guidance offered on how to prepare for promotion through thoughtful professional development and a purposeful evidence base for demonstrating impact.

Historically, academic careers in many European universities have been characterized by the civil servant status of academics (i.e., an open vacancy model) based on the German Lehrstuhl (professorial chair) tradition. The chair system has been abandoned in many countries, and the status of civil servants has been changed to private employment. At the same time, many European universities have introduced some variant of the tenure track model to increase the attractiveness of academic careers at their institutions; however, open vacancy models continue to dominate academic careers in Europe. This chapter describes recent changes in academic promotion systems using case examples from tenure track models in two European countries, Finland and Austria. In conclusion, this chapter offers examples based on the best practices and challenges identified in the analyzed tenure track models.

Latin America is a vast and diverse continent. Not only are there dozens of different nations, but each country is also marked by stark regional differences. Nevertheless, the academic profession in all countries shares some common features that are important for an emerging scholar to know. Here, maybe more than in other parts of the world, early career decisions have significant and long-lasting consequences. This chapter presents the Latin American academic context focusing on the academic career ladder, as it is organized both in the public and the private sectors, exploring the many sources of tension and challenges, as well as opportunities for early career scholars in the region.

In the concluding chapter of the book, Professor Graeme Aitken will reflect on key academic promotion themes and ideas presented by the contributing authors. Drawing on the author’s experience as a former Dean of Education, and involvement within the Universitas 21 collaborative project on the recognition of teaching as a critical aspect of academic promotion, Professor Aitken will offer observations about the complexities of current academic promotion processes within the academe. The author’s insights will address our overarching series intention of advancing our thinking about “surviving and thriving in academia” via the authors’ range of international promotion experiences.