Careers in Academia

What is the rationale for doing this?

How does it fit with institutional strategy?

What are the main features of the provision?

What are the aims and expected outcomes?

The College is committed to supporting the personal, professional and career development of early career researchers.  As part of this provision, the Careers in Academia event was run to give researchers an informed insight into the variety of careers in UK higher education institutions and also the different routes into an academic career.  

The event was a full day and attracted 40 participants from a variety of disciplines.  A number of academics and professional services staff from within King's spoke about their experiences and also things they wished they known or done differently in their careers.  In the afternoon, participants had the opportunity to discuss their CVs with a careers adviser and underwent interview practice so there was a practical element to the event as well.

The aim of this event was to provide researchers with more information about careers in academia than they might otherwise get through the course of their normal interactions with peers and supervisors.  The expected outcomes are that they will now be able to make more informed decisions about their own career paths.  The practice at interviewing and being interviewed will help them to perform better when they do apply for jobs, and attendees had the opportunity to meet and talk with our specialist careers adviser so that they know who he is and may be more prepared to approach him for advice and guidance in the future.

Are there any pre-requisites for engagement, e.g. levels of skill, years of experience, essential pre-activities?

How many participate in each 'activity'?

This event was aimed at postgraduate research students and postdoctoral research staff.

How do you monitor effectiveness?

Who do you seek feedback from?

Do you have benchmarks?

The benefits for this type of activity are long-term and not easy to measure as they consist of researchers using the information given to them to form their career decisions.  The stakeholders concerned felt that it was a worthwhile event and that researchers need this kind of information to be more readily available to them that it currently is via supervisors and traditional careers service facilities.  We have evaluated the feedback from the event and are considering running it as a revised, half-day event later this year as it was felt that the full-day format was too time-consuming for many participants.

The main challenge was one of time, as noted above.  The event ran over a full-day but many participants commented that they felt it could have been condensed into a half-day format.  We appreciate that researchers are very busy and asking them to give up a full day requires a significant commitment on their part.  In order to make it more accessible we would like to run a shortened, half-day version which we feel would be more attractive.

In the longer term it is envisioned that the half-day version of this would form part of our regular, core programme of provision for researchers to enable them to make more informed decisions about their career direction and professional development.