Postdoc Career Management – or not

This is a very good summary by Denise Dear of Cambridge University staff development of the career management problem for postdocs. What oft as thought but ne’er so well expressed

 

Promotion procedures and pathways are limited for research staff who wish to stay in Cambridge and this is now the focus of considerable interest.  As you know, traditional academic roles have a defined promotion procedure  - lecturer/senior lecturer/reader/professor.  However, this is not a research route and I have found from a number of focus groups I have recently held with experienced research staff here, that there is widespread frustration at this fact.  Research staff are employed as research associates and may be promoted to senior research associates according to certain criteria ( available on our HR web-site).  After that, unless they continue to acquire competititve funding or manage to be taken on as a lecturer, they come to a sudden stop. Most senior researchers will have been doing research, managing and advising group members and will therefore have very little teaching experience.  They are therefore at a disadvantage in applying for lectureships.  In short, they end up in a career cul-de-sac.  We are currently working with this cohort to begin to work out possible future pathways for them, as they present an enormous resource that is in danger of being lost or wasted.  Many are the products of the short term funding procedures used in higher education, in particular.