Abstract
Carefully redesigned academic career frameworks benefit academic staff with a diverse range of professional profiles, life circumstances, and scholarly interests. This chapter lays out benefits for individual academics, as well as for students and other internal and external stakeholders. Discussion of job crafting as a means to achieve pathway fit and career progression is included here to highlight the importance of individual agency and to signpost potential barriers that well-designed frameworks should work to remove. The chapter introduces five vignettes of fictional individual academics to illustrate various possible journeys into academic roles and to explore suggestions about development and next steps in academic careers. Broader themes arising from the vignettes are discussed to inform the redesign of career frameworks, and a number of challenges are given due consideration. The chapter closes by highlighting academic citizenship and collegiality as core threads to embed in redesigned frameworks. Career progression may reward individuals but is in fact the outcome of collaborative efforts, involving stakeholders within as well as outside a university. Redesigned frameworks, the volume argues, should catalyse and reward collegial activities and the kind of collaborative, purposeful work that generates good outcomes for all.
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Sterling, M., Blaj-Ward, L., Simpson, R., Crawford, K. (2023). Career Frameworks and Development: The Individual Perspective. In: Redeveloping Academic Career Frameworks for Twenty-First Century Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41126-7_3
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