CGHE 2020 Annual Conference webinar: Academic work and careers online and offline

How do staff see their opportunities and shape their work in a difficult UK academic labour market? What kind of career do they imagine for themselves and can it be achieved? How do staff see their opportunities and shape their work in a difficult UK academic labour market? What kind of career do they imagine for themselves and can it be achieved? As part of CGHE’s inquiry into the future higher education workforce, the researchers collected data from the same set of academics in two sets of interviews (2017-18 and 2019-20), and surveyed all academic staff in five of the eight case study institutions in 2018/19. Half of the individuals had changed their dominant approach in the two-year period, moving between the three career types established from the first set of interviews, Mainstream, Portfolio and Niche. However, three quarters also showed evidence of holding on to two or more approaches at the same time. Previous studies in higher education have failed to account for this fluidity of approach within a career, the way that people may work to one model while holding on to the possibility of another. The ‘concertina’ career is characterised by an expansion and contraction of activity, as well as a stretching/and compression of timescales, according to circumstances. Career timelines and promotion criteria assume a unitary direction of travel, but individuals also explore, interpret and stretch the spaces along the given route, and discover new spaces in which they accumulate career credit. The survey component of the research sheds more comprehensive light on the origins and potential destinations of academic staff within and outside higher education institutions and focuses especially on how previous experience may influence current career tracks, and whether and why academic staff may leave higher education in future for other sectors