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The purpose of this paper is to focus on doctoral students in Germany and the drivers behind their intention to enter an academic career. The aspirations of young researchers after graduating from doctoral training have become an important issue to policymakers in light of the changing nature of doctoral training.

Borrowing from Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior, we investigate how attitudes towards a career in academia, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control determine graduates’ intentions to pursue an academic career. We extend the model of Ajzen by measurements of research and training conditions in order to estimate the impact of organizational settings. We analyze a sample of 5,770 doctoral candidates from eight universities and three funding organizations.

We find that apart from attitudes towards careers, academic career intentions are related to research and training conditions at the organizational level. Further, we find that large differences within the field of study and affiliation to a university or funding organization provide substantial explanations.

This paper explores doctoral candidates’ academic career intentions which are an important precondition for the propagation of academic staff. For developers and practitioners in the field of doctoral training, our results yield a good understanding of the relationship between organizational settings at the level of doctoral training and career intentions.

Although more than half of the PhD graduates do not take up traditional academic positions, the little we know of how they navigate into the non-academic workforce is somewhat conflicting. This study aims to contribute to our knowledge by examining over time the experiences of post-PhD social scientists who went into non-academic careers. It examines how post-PhD social scientists in non-academic careers characterize their experience of the PhD; how they imagine their post-PhD careers during the degree and how this influenced their doctoral activity; and to what extent their intentions changed over time and how agentive they were in managing challenges or disappointments.

The study uses a longitudinal qualitative narrative approach to examine the experience of eight post-PhD social scientists beginning during their degrees through their initial years after graduation outside academia.

The analysis highlights variation in clarity of career vision, strategic career thinking and action, knowledge of career opportunity structures and changes in career intentions over time. Still, for all individuals, the PhD was considered a powerful learning experience which continued to influence their lives.

Overall, the results make clear that post-PhD trajectories are best built from the beginning of the PhD, a conclusion that has curriculum implications.

This study incorporates the career question into the development of junior researchers highlighting the need to attend not only to objective measures of career success but also subjective intentions, investments, choices and assessments. Further, the constructs developed within an academic work context to understand career trajectories proved robust in analyzing non-academic work experience.

An increasing number of doctoral graduates are seeking non-academic employment. While statistics have revealed multiple aspects regarding the non-academic employment they hold, there is insufficient documentation of what has led them to leave academia and to what extent they are prepared for non-academic positions. This paper aims to address this gap and reports on five Chinese doctoral graduates’ reflections on their change in career choices.

This study is exploratory and follows the approach of qualitative multi-case studies. The data includes in-depth interviews with five Chinese doctoral graduates and their responses to a survey. The paper applies a theoretical perspective drawing from protean career and boundaryless career theories, focusing on the participants’ agency in managing career choices and their meaning making of career decision-making.

The study has found that, besides the factors mentioned in the literature, such as lack of academic positions, pressure related to academic work and lack of career planning, some participants were directed by their intrinsic values, and agency plays an important role in their career preparation.

The study makes recommendations on university career guidance for doctoral students.

This paper documents why and how doctoral students change their career choices, which have not been sufficiently documented in the literature. As well, the theoretical perspective used provides an innovative way to interpret doctoral students' career decision-making.

The objective of this research is to have an up-to-date and comprehensive assessment of the current knowledge regarding the variables that encourage the individuals, within the academic community, to get involved in knowledge exploitation activities. It is influenced by the observation that there is a need for more systematic scrutiny of micro-level processes to deepen our understanding of academic entrepreneurship (Balven et al., 2018; Wright and Phan, 2018). The study proposes to answer to ‘What are the drivers of academic entrepreneurial intentions?’ and ‘What are the emerging topics for future research?’

The paper follows a Systematic Literature Review process (Tranfield et al., 2003) and adopts a four-step process format from previous literature reviews within the entrepreneurship context (Miller et al., 2018). From the results within Scopus and Web of Science databases, this research selected, evaluated, summarised and synthesised 66 relevant papers.

This study provides a factor-listed representation of the individual, organisational and institutional variables that should be considered in the strategies defined by the university. Moreover, the study concludes that the push factors behind the intentions are multiple, context-dependent, hierarchy-dependent, heterogeneous and, at the same time, dependent on each other and against each other. Lastly, the study contributes to academic entrepreneurship literature, especially entrepreneurial intention literature, which has recently received more researchers' attention.

The study corroborates that the individual factors, directly and indirectly via Theory of Planned Behaviour, strongly impact the academics' intentions. While the focus of the papers under review was an in-depth analysis of a selected group of factors, this SLR sought to compile the factors that were identified and provide a broader picture of all those factors to be considered by the university management. It contributes to the identification and clustering of the drivers that encourage academics to engage in knowledge valorisation activities, differentiating them by activity. For the practitioners, this list can be used by university managers, TTOs and department managers, and policymakers to guide questionnaires or interviews to analyse their academics' intentions and adequately support its academic engagement strategy. Lastly, this study also suggests worthwhile avenues for future research.

In an uncertain and competitive higher educational landscape, expedient management of professional capital could increase knowledge capital by ensuring the recruitment and retention of experienced and highly qualified academic staff. In this paper, a case study of a private university aims to evaluate the talent management of academic staff.

Primary datum amongst academic staff was collected using an online survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis of interviews and descriptive analysis of three forms of survey were triangulated for richer data.

Most of the academic staff in this private university were intrinsically motivated and there was a low expectation to be active in research and publication. However, bibliometrics was a priority amongst senior academics interviewed. The lack of talent management in bibliometric profiles expressed by senior academics hamper academic progression and could contribute to high turnover intentions as push factors. Overall, there were no explicit talent management strategies by management identified.

This is a small-scale research project.

Management should explore various options for structuring career paths within the organisational structure to secure career commitment of the employees. Within private universities, this could take the form of secondments to industry as part of work-based learning projects which could then also result in research and publication.

Private universities widen the access to higher education and as such are an important research focus for improvements in quality and the retention of staff.

Research of staff talent management in a UK private university.

This investigates the interrelationships between job and career satisfaction and career change intention through the extension of the theory of planned behavior (TPB).

The data for the study is collected from 219 top and middle-level managers and analyzed through partial least squares path structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

Findings indicate that job and career satisfaction have a significant and negative impact on personal attitude toward career change and subjective norms, whereas all three constructs of the TPB influence the intention to change career. In addition, the mediation of personal attitude and subjective norm pathways were found to be significant for both job and career satisfaction and career change intention relationships, while no mediation effect was identified for the perceived behavior control construct of the TPB.

The results suggest important theoretical and practical implications. First, a novel model of mediation between job and career satisfaction and the intention to turn away from an existing career is introduced between job and career satisfaction and career change intention associations for testing the full TPB framework.

The findings imply that the impact of cognitive factors, including having a positive opinion about the potential outcomes of switching to a new career, the level of pressure exerted by significant third parties about making a career change, and the self-belief about making this change happen should be closely investigated when examining the determinants of career change intention.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical research study that tests the impact of the determinants of TPB on career change intention within a sample of professional managers from an emerging economy context.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a boundary-focused analysis of career patterns in Greek public education.

A descriptive, interpretive design from the naturalistic paradigm was chosen for the study, based on narratives of 27 public education employees who used decision-making models for outlining their career plans.

This study depicted career-related boundaries and intentions of employees to develop their career within their domain or crossing particular boundaries, namely, the public-private boundary, the public education to higher education boundary, the occupational and other less salient boundaries.

The delimitation of the study on public education employees studying for a postgraduate diploma might limit the scope of inter-occupational mobility.

This study highlights the subject of the first degree as the most critical determinant of career development, and identifies the role of structural constraints, especially of promotion systems, in “bounding” graduate careers.

This study developed a typology of career paths of public education employees and associated them with the identification of two main employee profiles, related to the subject of their first degree.

The purpose of this paper is to draw from an adapted model of the Theory of Planned Behaviour and from existing models of entrepreneurial intention (EI) to analyse the role of gender on academics’ perceptions concerning the commercialisation of their research results. In particular, the authors explore differences in perceptions arising from diverse cognitions, such as attitudes towards entrepreneurial activities, the influence of close social groups and opportunity recognition self-efficacy.

A questionnaire was addressed to 500 Spanish academics who have headed research projects with public funding in technology-related areas, and the results were subjected to multigroup structural equation analysis (LISREL) to determine the extent and nature of the differences within this group.

The results obtained show that the influence of close social groups is perceived differently by men and women, particularly as regards the support received for academics’ attitudes and perceptions of control over the development of EI.

The aim is to better understand the world facing academics and the influences on their intention to commercialise research outcomes. An understanding of these issues offers the opportunity to design appropriate government interventions to assist academic entrepreneurs undertaking a business venture.

This paper considers an under-researched area that of female entrepreneurship in academia, traditionally considered a male-dominated activity. Helpful information is provided on gender differences in the academic context.

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.”

Building leadership skills among faculty in academic medicine is essential, yet professional development programs focused on leadership are not always attentive to the needs of faculty on diverse career pathways or at differing career stages—nor are they often rigorously assessed. Evaluations commonly focus on participant satisfaction and short-term learning but not behavior change and institutional impact, which are difficult to assess but arguably more meaningful. Given the substantial time and money invested in these programs, more rigorous evaluation is critical.

The authors evaluated an intensive, shared leadership-focused training program for early-career and mid-career faculty, offered by the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine over the course of a year. They administered a pre/post-program assessment of confidence in key skill areas, and conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 participants between 1–4 years after program completion.

Participants in both programs showed statistically significant improvement (p < 0.001) on every item measured in the pre/post-test. Analysis of the interviews revealed indications of substantial behavior change as well as institutional impact. The evaluation also suggested particular benefits for female professionals.

The authors conducted a long-term assessment of leadership training focused on career pathway and career stage and found that it (a) prompted both positive behavioral change and institutional impact and (b) suggested benefits for female faculty in particular, which could potentially help to eliminate gender-based disparities in leadership in academic medical centers.