Research careers: Spinning the wheel

Developing a more realistic model of career progression

Most researchers will be familiar with career development. Frameworks, workshops and mentoring programmes are often used to help academics move up in their careers from lecturing positions to professorships. But for some, especially those who have come from professional practice into teaching, the research career path is less clear cut.

Lucy Kerstens, a research manager and leader of the Centre for Economic Transformation and the Centre for Applied Research on Business and Economics at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, created a tool to help academics decide where they want to go in their research careers and how they can achieve their goals. The research career wheel is a model backed by research that its developers hope can be put to wider use. She explains the thinking behind the model.