The aspiring academic’s career path from PhD to professor

Let’s start with an oversimplification of a difficult part of any academic’s life: that a PhD degree only certifies that you are knowledgeable and have some understanding of how personal research should be conducted. To progress further in academia, you will need to show a few more skills – hard and soft – to get hired and promoted.

So, how do you become the jack-of-all-trades scholar, as represented by Vitae’s researcher development framework? How do you navigate a sector beset with ever shorter contracts, staffing cuts and rising expectations from early career researchers (ECRs)? 

The answer is planning and executing a few key steps. Here are practical tips, collected from supporting researchers like you, to set you on track to becoming a future leader with impactful research.

• Read more: Resources for every step of your academic career
• Advice for growing into an academic leadership role
• Three cornerstones of a successful research career

A career in academia is often perceived as a straightforward progression, even if it is not the easiest route to follow. 

1. Get a PhD. 
2. Drone away in two to three postdoc positions. 
3. Become a lecturer. 
4. Get promoted through increasingly senior roles up to a professorship.

By step two, and definitely to make it to step three, you will need a portfolio of evidence showing your diverse skill set. 

Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against you. When do you build your career if your university and your boss want you to spend 100 per cent of your time on the bottom end of producing research that increases their rankings? The answer is: know what you need and mould that into alignment with your university and your boss.

Find the pathway from goals to promotion

Let’s start with the cliché. Who are you? Who do you want to be? What is needed to connect those two? 

First, look at your short- and long-term goals. Consider whether you want a traditional route that balances teaching and research or if you want to focus on one or the other – or more on impact and enterprise. Many universities have different pathways. But be aware that non-teaching positions are often on fixed-term contracts and you may have to find your own funding. Also, be broader earlier in your career; you might want to adjust your focus later. 

Second, find the requirements to get promoted (or hired). Universities will have lists of requirements of hard and soft targets that you can check. A hard target would be having supervised at least one PhD student; a soft target would be a suggestion that you have done a public engagement or a knowledge exchange activity. 

Last, you can start matching what you have done with what you need. You can be creative about it, such as presenting your endless invitations for reviewing as a sign of your international reputation. Make a list of what you still need to do and then start ticking things off.

Find support

To make building an academic career easier for yourself, try to work in a supportive environment. Don’t choose your university, research group and boss based on science alone. You may find that your boss might not be helpful beyond your association with them.

Find people who are genuinely happy to actively support you and discuss your career with you. It’s also OK if they are forced to do this. At least in the UK, more and more grants require projects to support the career-building of involved researchers or promote female leadership. So, check the small print of your contract and your boss’ grants.

Another option is dedicated career development opportunities or projects. If you are in the UK, your university might be a signatory of the Research Concordat, which requires the university to give you time to develop your career. Moreover, UKRI and Research England support postdoctoral development and have funded research development frameworks such as C-DICE.

Grab any chance to demonstrate your skill set

Now that you have found a supportive environment, take up all opportunities that help you and which your time allows. Maybe your boss will give you tasks that align with your requirements (make sure they are not just administrative tasks your boss does not want to do). 

The best thing you can do is run small, somewhat independent projects; they do not have to be massive, especially if you have just finished your PhD. For example, if you want to show you can manage a project with a budget, organising a public engagement activity with £100 to £200 awarded to you would mean you have planned, managed and evaluated a project and used money effectively. Moreover, even if you are just an ECR on a fixed-term contract, there are more opportunities to run small-scale or pump-priming projects for upwards of £2,000. 

Another good option is to join professional societies, working groups or committees and actively participate. That often allows you to organise events, solve complex problems and network, which are all skills and expertise usually needed for promotions.

Forge your own opportunities

Maybe your environment is not that supportive. In that case, think how you can use what your boss wants to achieve. Their research vision or the vision of the grant that pays you might be bigger than to simply churn out research as demanded. Have that vision in mind and align it with your research vision. Start developing a vision now because you need one as a researcher, then use that to convince them that if you spend time on “your” work, you are doing “their” work.

Finally, if there are no readily available opportunities, including via committees, make your own. My research group had no conference for students, so I started one. This is not part of my job, but it allowed me to evidence leadership, support of the academic unit and team management.

So, what are the takeaways? Determine what you want and need. Find people and places that support you. Grab opportunities as they reveal themselves (do not overload yourself, though). Forge your destiny in your own way. And don’t forget to publish high-impact papers on the way.

Jan Buermann is research fellow in citizen-centric AI systems in the Agents, Interaction and Complexity Group at the University of Southampton.