Why would someone looking to build a career in academia turn to the world of athletics? Both sportspeople and scholars need to be internationally competitive and both operate in fields that have seen huge developments in the professionalism and preparation required to succeed.
When Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954 – and achieved sporting immortality – he was a medical student who trained for less than an hour a day around his shifts. He was on the wards the morning of his record-breaking run. Aspiring world champions today will, in all likelihood, be training full-time with the support of nutritionists, sports scientists, psychologists and medics. The days of the plucky amateur athlete are long gone.
I would argue that the same is true in academia.
When I began my career in academia, colleagues combined teaching, research, pedagogy, working with industry and leadership roles largely free from external influence. A career developed organically and opportunistically. Today, if a newly minted scholar aims to reach professorial status, they can no longer afford the luxury of doing a bit of everything. Distinct career paths relate to research, learning and teaching or practice, and each calls for specific types of achievement, recognition and excellence.
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Having a highly cited paper, a research grant, your name attached to a national curriculum or playing a role in a skills alliance that spans sectors and geographies would be obvious markers of excellence. Ambitious ECRs should work backwards to address a less obvious, more strategic and more actionable question: “What would I have to do three or five years earlier in order to achieve such outcomes?”
The path to career progress in research
The research pathway is the longest established and therefore the best understood way to establish an academic career. Get yourself a global reputation for excellence in your field of expertise and most universities will consider you to be professorial material. Promotion panels look for evidence of high-quality publications that have shaped thinking in your area. Of course, authoring patterns, citation data and volumes of publication will vary by discipline, but external funding will demonstrate that other people want to invest in your ideas. Awards, medals and keynotes show that your research community rate your thinking and each of these CV markers takes time to develop.
But how to get there?
Find a discipline, a theory, a method and an angle that interest you, then stick with them. Dream big, and think both different and long term. Developing well-established traditions may be safer but will likely result in incremental contributions to knowledge and burnish the reputations of others rather than yours. Build your profile and your network in tandem since both will support your future professorial application. If you are tempted to switch to a new area, consider that this risks resetting your scorecards to zero. It may ultimately be the right thing to do if you are approaching a dead end, but the days of the polymath, much like the days of the amateur athlete, are long gone. It is easier to offer value by translating your expertise to a new area after you have gained recognition for that expertise in the first place.
Why being a good teacher is not enough for an education career pathway
World-class research isn’t in everyone’s gift and a professorial-level appointment on an education-focused pathway isn’t a consolation prize. The pathway may be newer, but the expectations remain high. Being good at teaching isn’t enough. As with a research career, you’ll have to demonstrate that your educational expertise has moved the dial beyond your immediate sphere of influence.
One model is to show how your pedagogy has been adopted in other disciplines in your own institution. Another is to show how your personal leadership has shaped curricula, assessment or outcomes in your discipline regionally, nationally or internationally. Doing both is even better but rare. Typical markers might include contributing to national guidelines such as subject benchmark statements, writing a widely adopted textbook, or initiating teaching frameworks or assessment regimes. In the UK, National Teaching Fellow awards or Principal Fellowship of the HEA help evidence your influence and there are international equivalents. Being an external examiner is a start but isn’t enough, which is why you need to focus and specialise early.
Building a career based on impact
Finally, a growing number of universities recognise impact, industry engagement, knowledge exchange or practice as a distinct skill set that bridges academia and the wider economy. If your specialty is working at that interface, you’ll need to provide evidence that you are making a difference at scale; perhaps it is about technology transfer, spin-outs or patents. Or maybe it is strategic partnerships with employers, big or small, public or private. Regardless, the indicators of scale, money, durability and reach will help show that you have standing in communities that matter beyond the university and which equate to that of a research leader in their discipline.
Impact has fewer obvious CV markers, so evidence may default to money and to the seniority of the stakeholders you work with. Governments, regulators and larger businesses, for example, all offer opportunities to translate ideas into impact, while the impact dimension of research is itself a helpful starting point.
Building your career based on impact brings the same expectations over standards, and planning and persistence remain key.
Academic promotion is not a heptathlon
The competitive environments for academics and athletes have just enough commonalities to generate insights. But there are key differences. Academia increasingly focuses on multidisciplinary work, but academic promotion has no equivalent of the triathlon, heptathlon or decathlon. LinkedIn provides invaluable access when investigating the claims to excellence that professorial peers on each pathway have made, but be aware that four minutes is no longer the world record for a mile because standards drift upwards over time.
Pick one pathway, stick to it and think about the less obvious intermediary steps on your way to the top. Perhaps most importantly, be realistic about the timescales involved. The allure of the latest shiny idea means that we are all tempted to switch tack but long-term thinking and self-discipline are prevalent in most success stories for a reason.
Robert MacIntosh is pro vice-chancellor of research and innovation and interim deputy vice-chancellor of the University of the West of Scotland.
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