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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 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.

The current book chapter seeks to respond to the existing literature on early career researchers, using an autoethnographic approach to further unravel the crossroads of identity formation, research politics, and successful promotion through the eyes of early career researchers. Combining autobiography and ethnography, we systematically analyze our own experiences to make sense of wider social and political practices. Ellis, Adams, and Bochner (2010) remind us that autoethnography is not to be dismissed as a form of self-therapy but is to be presented in a rigorous manner as other research forms by carefully justifying the data sources and techniques, analyzing the data and crafting the findings. Our sources were both found texts (e.g., university policies) and created texts (our journal entries and personal communications). Using analytic techniques such as highlighting critical incidents or epiphanies, we structured coherent narratives to illuminate the complexity and uncertainty of the lives of early career academics. This chapter’s focus on early career researcher experiences makes poignant commentary on neoliberalism’s impact on and within higher education. The chapter concludes with the authors’ reflections on the dilemmas of academic and research choices made within the limitations of institutional structures, processes, and systems that shape career trajectories.

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 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.