Managing Your Academic Career

A Guide to Re-Envision Mid-Career

Vicki L. Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000583984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business General

The definitive resource for mid-career professionals in the academy, this book provides a step-by-step guide to re-imagining the mid-career stage, regardless of career goals, whether aiming for full professorship or an administrative path, drawing on higher education, organizational studies, and human resource fields.

Essential guidance for scholars of faculty work, faculty developers, mid-career faculty members, and institutional leaders to build a strong foundation to design a diversified portfolio of mid-career stage programming is assured. The stories, examples, literature, and resources shared throughout this comprehensive work will provide inspiration, and reality checks, to mid-career faculty and the individuals charged with better supporting them. Readers will be able to:

• Identify their career (or departmental/institutional) goals and next steps
• Determine the gaps in needed skills, tools, and experiences to support goal achievement as next steps are pursued
• Manage the process of taking newfound skills, tools, strategies, and resources to arrive at the intended destination.

Higher education faculty, administrators, and other academic leaders will be empowered to take control of the mid-career stage by using the resources, strategies, and tools offered throughout the book to build, implement, and assess a robust mid-career faculty development program.

Part 1 The Individual Faculty Perspective

Chapter 1 Reimagining the Next Phase of Your Career

DOI: 10.4324/9781003201311-3

Sam, an associate professor in STEM, earned promotion and tenure two years ago at a comprehensive university. They took a year off from what they referred to as the hamster wheel that is the promotion and tenure pathway; the journey to get there was not without its challenges, personal and professional. Sam is an out LGBTQ faculty member on their campus but is still guarded given the campus is surrounded by rather conservative communities. Over the past two years, Sam went on sabbatical and was able to finish some lingering projects and felt good about having a clean slate from which to build. Now that Sam feels like they are in a better space mentally and emotionally, they are eager to advance toward full professorship. Sam reached out to trusted colleagues to have preliminary conversations about their experiences and plans (some had already earned full professorship and others had plans to do so in the near future). Sam realized, however, that their colleagues were successful despite of a lack of resources and developmental supports at their institution, rather than due to targeted programming to help faculty members advance towards full professorship. Sam quickly realized they needed to take matters into their own hands but struggled to envision what those could (or should) be beyond some basic preliminary steps. Sam also realized their faculty handbook language was unclear about the general promotion process and timeline. For example, Sam heard three different associate rank requirements one must be at before submitting materials; Sam is also not clear if faculty at their institution need to be nominated by their chair to advance to full professorship or if self-nominations are accepted, given the mixed responses they are hearing. Sam is beginning to wonder if advancing to full is worth it, especially given the lack of guidelines, developmental support, and mentoring.

Sam’s experience is unfortunate, but sadly, not unusual in the academy. Extensive scholarship has featured mid-career faculty (MCF) facing similar experiences to Sam and shows that the underlying problem is a lack of clearly defined career hurdles or developmental milestones. As previously noted, the professorial path for those on the tenure track is prescribed starting as early as the doctoral student experience. Disciplinary nuances and institution type (e.g., research university, comprehensive college/university, liberal arts college, and community college) certainly contribute to the mid-career experience and how faculty members evolve as professionals. Regardless of discipline and institution type, however, aspiring faculty members in the academy seeking to advance in their careers traditionally: (a) earn their doctorates, (b) serve as post-doctoral fellows in some disciplinary fields, (c) seek to secure tenure-track positions, (d) serve as assistant professors for a clearly specified period of time (typically seven years where a tenure system is present), and (e) submit dossier materials for promotion and tenure (P&T) consideration. Once this P&T hurdle is surpassed, the prior structure and guidance is now lacking or non-existent.

This chapter focuses on the ill-defined mid-career stage and the associated implications of that reality. Later in the book (see Chapters 7 and 8), I offer an institutional perspective into this problem; here I share insights and knowledge from the individual faculty member perspective. This reality has serious implications for how faculty members experience and engage in the academy after achieving P&T. For many, those implications are negative and can have long-lasting consequences at the individual and institutional levels.

Lack of Clearly Defined Hurdles and Developmental Milestones—Why Should We Care?

Characterized as the “bridge between employee generations” (Baldwin & Chang, 2006), MCF are the backbone of higher education institutions. They serve as mentors and sources of support for early career colleagues while also serving as formal and informal leaders on their respective campuses (Baker et al., 2019). Their contribution is critical to the success and vitality of their institutions (Strage & Merdinger, 2015). Simply put, “Midcareer, tenured faculty members power their institutions” (Flaherty, 2017). Yet, they offer their support with little to no institutional resources to do so effectively. In fact, teaching, leadership, and service often do not “count” toward professional advancement within the academy, a reality that is consistent across institution types (Baker et al., 2019) and is disadvantageous for women and faculty of color given they traditionally spend more of their professional hours engaged in these areas (Perry, 2014; Strunk, 2020). While on the surface, I think most people would agree this is problematic; I also think this insight should prompt the question—Why should we care?

Mid-career professionals are the least satisfied employee population, a finding consistent in higher education and industry (Baker et al., 2017; Gibbons, 2018). This finding should cause concern for all of us, especially given MCF are the largest cohort of faculty in the academy (Grant-Vallone & Ensher, 2017), and institutions rely on and are in need of their contributions to support the overall functioning and advancement of the institutions in which they are employed.

According to research, being ill-prepared and under-supported at mid-career has individual and organizational implications:

• Less than 50% of decisions made in mid-career were rated as successful (Minsky & Peters, 2019).
• Longer time in rank, or “stalling,” at certain career stages for women and other minorities (Baker, 2020).
• Loss of worker productivity and engagement; employee turnover is high at mid-career, particularly for college-educated individuals (Hagerty, 2016).

In the following section, I focus on the second bullet point and offer insight into the other individually focused implications most prominent in the literature: job burnout, faculty disengagement, and stalled career progression.

Job Burnout

According to the Mayo Clinic (2020), job burnout is defined as “a special type of work-related stress—a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity” (para 1). One of the many problems associated with job burnout is that contributing symptoms occur over time, making it challenging for the individual to realize they are headed toward or firmly in a state of burnout. At the individual level, burnout looks like a cynical or overly critical co-worker, irritable or impatient with others. Job burnout looks like a colleague struggling to concentrate, stay on task, or complete a given task; someone with seemingly no energy or interest in projects, topics, or activities that were once a motivating force. I think many of us have witnessed this firsthand in relation to our colleagues or perhaps, experienced burnout ourselves.

Look no further than the list of contributing factors of job burnout such as loss of control, unclear job expectations, lack of social support, negative leadership behaviors, and work-life imbalance to understand why MCF are in need of support (Cleveland Clinic, 2020; Mayo Clinic, 2020; Valcour, 2018). These are the very characteristics that have been used by MCF themselves to describe their lived experiences in the academy during this phase of their careers (Baker & Manning, 2021; Mulholland, 2020). The global pandemic has only exacerbated these issues with faculty reporting even higher levels of burnout causing some to consider leaving the academy altogether (Course Hero, 2020). Job burnout is real and has implications at the individual, student, and institutional levels (Minter, 2009; Sabagh et al., 2018).

More recently, scholars have sought to better understand the contributing factors and implications of job burnout for faculty (Sabagh et al., 2018). This line of inquiry has examined the role of organizational and workplace climate (Dinibutun et al., 2020; Pedersen & Minnotte, 2017), work-family conflict (Zábrodská et al., 2018), and job satisfaction and scholarly productivity (Woo et al., 2017) as contributing factors of faculty burnout. Taken as a collective, this line of inquiry revealed that context matters (see Chapter 7), relationships matter (see Chapters 6 and 7), culture matters, and investing in resources and support to help faculty combat burnout matters. When lacking, faculty members’ physical and mental well-being suffer.

Faculty Disengagement

Research by Beauboeuf et al. (2017) targeted MCF members in an effort to move past the dominant focus on mid-career malaise to instead focus on the ways in which MCF highlighted the positive aspects of mid-career. Important to their work was a focus on faculty engagement (and disengagement). They found that MCF who participated in their research study focused a great deal on non-material needs, specifically the need to be recognized and to feel and experience a sense of belonging: “To be seen, valued, and included was a critical aspect of their career satisfaction and affected the degree of connection they felt to their campuses” (para 10). The absence of such support resulted in faculty disengagement, which could be linked to institutional practices that leave faculty members feeling undervalued, overcommitted, and expendable (Beauboeuf et al., 2017). No doubt, job burnout is but one contributing factor to faculty disengagement; when left untreated that disengagement comes at a high individual (and institutional) cost.

Recently, a colleague and I wrote an article titled, “Preparing the Next Generation of Institutional Leaders: Strategic Supports for Mid-Career Faculty,” to highlight the value and importance of succession management and onboardi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figure
• List of Tables
• Foreword—Dr. Kimberly Griffin
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Individual Faculty Perspective
• Part 2 Departmental and Institutional Perspectives
• Part 3 Thriving at Mid-Career
• Index