Managing your Research Career

It’s easy to lose sight of managing our career, especially when that career already keeps us so busy! It can be difficult, if not impossible, to find the time we need to review and reflect on where we are and where we want to be. We get so embroiled in our day-to-day activities that we forget we’re eventually going to run out of road if we don’t take a moment to plan ahead!

Effective career management involves self-reflection on both your career journey to date and on the direction in which you want it to go, and it may well require you to make some impactful and potentially life-changing decisions if you want to shift the status quo. But don’t worry, if you think about it, this is something you’ve already been doing! How did you arrive at where you are today, in this job, in this University, in this city? You made decisions. They may have been really challenging decisions that kept you awake at night, or they may have felt like they weren’t decisions at all, more like a natural progression. Either way, you are currently living the outcome of those decisions.

What works best for you?

There are a number of approaches to both short-term and longer-term career management and it’s important that you find the one(s) that work for you. Below are a couple of suggestions but this is by no means exhaustive; if these examples don’t click with you then I encourage you to use the internet to find something that does. But whatever approaches you find, be openminded and give them a chance!

Career Management Frameworks

These tend to be quite linear and are usually driven by your goals and aspirations. Frameworks provide guidance on how to organise your thoughts about your career and allow you to plan what you might need to do and when in order to follow them through. To be honest, even though most career management frameworks are based on scholarly outputs they’re not usually rocket science, but the structure they provide can help maintain your discipline and determination when it comes to career management and support you in getting to where you want to be.

The framework that resonates most with me is GROW, originally developed by Sir John Whitmore and colleagues as a framework for coaching conversations but I think it works equally as well here too (you could argue that career management is a form of self-coaching!). It stands for Goal, Reality, Options, and Way-forward and can be applied to both short-term and long-term planning.

• Goal is the action or outcome that you want to achieve, and these could be short-term (task-related goals, performance goals, progress goals) or longer-term (ultimate career goals). Questions you might consider at this stage include: What is it you want to achieve? What are your interests? What will give you job satisfaction and enjoyment? If anything was possible, what would that look like for you?
• Reality is when you come back down to Earth with a bump! Here, you assess your current situation in terms of actions taken so far…so where are you now and how did you get there? Questions you might consider are: Where are you in relation to you achieving your goal? What’s going well? What could be going better? What/where are the barriers? What needs to change?
• Options involves exploring how you can move from where you are (reality) to where you want to be (goal). To do this, you need to perform a gap analysis between the two states (sometimes called a Training Needs Analysis [TNA] or a Development Needs Analysis [DNA]). What knowledge, skills, and/or experience do you need to achieve your goal(s) and which of those are you currently lacking? How can you address that? Questions you might consider include: What can you start doing to put yourself in a better position? What would be the pros and cons of doing that? What would the implications be? What would happen if you did nothing? What inspiration can you take from others?
• Way-forward is basically the action plan derived from your gap analysis (but I guess GROA wasn’t as catchy as an acronym!). What are you actually going to do facilitate you achieving your goal and when? Activity with a purpose is key! Your plan should be bespoke to you and it should detail how you are going to plug any gaps you’ve identified, including how you plan to source and access necessary training and development opportunities. To keep you on track, your plan should include SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-focused, Timely) milestones. Review your plan regularly to ensure that it remains fit for purpose, and hold frequent meetings with your line manager/mentor to discuss your progress (not just at PDR!). Questions here include: What are you going to do? What’s your timeline? How will you maintain momentum? How much of a priority is this? What might get in the way? Do you have a contingency plan?

Planned Happenstance

This approach to career planning is centred on openness (and readiness) to opportunities that present themselves. Happenstance emphasises that the future is unpredictable and that most people (yes, MOST people) have careers that have taken unexpected turns where unforeseen events and opportunities have arisen.

The fact of the matter is that the future is unpredictable. Unexpected things will happen, such as not getting a job you really wanted or being asked to join a project that will broaden your research area. But this unpredictability doesn’t mean that you can’t be prepared! Every situation could be seen as a potential opportunity if the individual is in a position to recognise that opportunity and to then take the necessary action needed to capitalise on it.

To embrace the planned happenstance approach, you need to be fully aware of what is important to you and what you want from your career, and to understand the strengths and skills you already possess and how employable they make you. Networking is an important skill/activity for those taking a planned happenstance approach as you never know where your next opportunity will come from…spread your net far and wide! Approach any chance events with an open mind and try to see change as a positive challenge, not an obstacle!

When adopting this approach, it’s often useful to look back on your career to date to see where both progress and setbacks happened and to reflect on what was part of a plan and what was not. Take a look at these resources developed by the University of Derby (funded by Research England and the Office for Students) which builds on the original work on ‘Planned Happenstance’ by Mitchell, Levin and Krumboltz. You may also find this webinar by Sarah Williams particularly helpful.

Where do you want to be?

An important consideration when managing your career in the longer-term is deciding where you want that career to unfold. You’re currently working in academia but is that definitely where you want to be? Is it the environment that suits you the best? There are no wrong answers so don’t be afraid to ask yourself these questions (and others) from time to time.

An academic career

In academia, career management starts with establishing what kind of an academic you’d like to be. Do you want to work only on your research, or would like to be involved in teaching? Do you want to head up a large team? Are you at home in a research-intensive Russell Group University, or would you thrive more in a specialist research institute? How would you feel about becoming a strategic leader within the University, representing the academic community on committees and the like, or maybe even a role in senior management? The questions seem endless…

An academic career at Cardiff offers 3 career pathways, namely Research (R), Teaching & Research (T&R), and Teaching & Scholarship (T&S), and it is possible to move between those pathways. The Cardiff Academic details the expectations which cover all our academic pathways and shows those skills and areas of activity which you should focus on developing, as do the benchmarks against which academic staff are assessed as part of our academic promotions scheme. To succeed within any of the pathways it is good practice to look ahead 1/5/10-years into your career and to make sure you are clear about where you need to be and what you need to be doing at those time points relative to those University expectations. Having those longer-term goals will help you to take appropriate actions at the right time to make sure you can hit those marks when it matters.

Keeping up to date with broader sector developments and higher education policy, and understanding the way the work of universities is measured and assessed, including the Research Excellence Framework and key surveys like National Student Survey will also help you with your planning, as well as giving you important contextual information for your current role. Maintaining this broader knowledge is as important for developing your academic career as maintaining knowledge of developments within your discipline.

Find out more about the options we offer for career progression for research staff and the ways in which we support can you in managing your academic career.

Wider Career Options

This will be a topic for a future blog so I’m only going to touch upon it briefly here, but you may decide that an academic career isn’t for you. There can be many reasons why you reach this conclusion: it may be that you never wanted an academic career in the first place but were funnelled down this pathway, or it may be that you’ve become disenchanted with what it means to hold an academic position, or it might be that things haven’t gone the way you’ve wanted and you haven’t been able to build up that all-important track record. Whatever the reason or reasons, know that they are all valid and that there’s nothing wrong with making that choice! Indeed, following a career across sectors (and back again) is becoming increasingly common, you only have to look at academic chatter on ‘X’ to see that.

One of the challenges in making this decision, I think, stems from the fact that for an academic career, almost everything revolves around the PhD qualification. You, as an individual and a community, are referred to as ‘postdocs’. Your job is referred to as a ‘postdoc’. Outside academia, the emphasis seems to be placed more on the transferable skills you develop during a PhD rather than on the qualification itself. It’s not often you see ‘Postdoctoral’ in a job title outside academia, even if a PhD is an essential criterion! This almost subliminal messaging that an academic career is what you’re supposed to do after a PhD can be quite powerful, and so when we decide to go against that flow we can feel like we’ve failed or that we’ve wasted our time, when neither are true. If you are considering a career outside academia, whether in research or not, don’t feel afraid to explore those thoughts. The Cardiff University Career Directions for Researchers and the new Prosper Portal resources can help you get started with this.

As I said, this will be a topic for a future blog, but in the meantime you can read something similar on this from our excellent colleagues in the University of Glasgow.

Final Word

To have a career for life means there needs to be continuous change (after all, change is one of the few universal constants in life!). Going back to basics to look at your career choices and those of others is an approach that will be of use at any stage of your career. Considering how people make career choices in general and reflecting on your own natural approach to change and choice can help you to develop an understanding of what matters to you and of what, if anything, may be holding you back.

Resources for Career Management

Career Directions for Researchers – This resource has been created to provide a range of interactive and engaging career learning resources for Cardiff University’s Early Career Researchers, both students and staff.

Vitae Researcher Development Framework (RDF) – Vitae uses the RDF as the reference point for all their career support and they have in place a range of resources to help you understand and reflect upon your values, motivations, learning styles, and skills. There are many different lenses to help you get the most out of the RDF (the Employability lens is a good starting point). Vitae offer additional support to help you in planning and managing your career, with a whole section of resources and exercises which can be used as you see fit and done at your own pace, along with reports on ‘What do Researchers do?’ and ‘Researcher career stories’, both of which were last updated in 2022.

Prosper – Based in the Academy, Prosper is a new approach to career development that unlocks postdocs’ potential to thrive in multiple career pathways. Their ultimate goal is to open up the huge talent pool that exists within the postdoctoral research community, to the benefit of postdocs themselves, managers of researchers and principal investigators, employers, and the wider UK economy.

Prospects – This may be helpful to researchers at the start of their careers and the resources available may reassure you that career planning is a continuous process and that it is natural to review and revisit your aims and objectives regularly!