Universities are overlooking their established researchers

Universities tend to pay most systematic attention to academic development at two points: when researchers are entering the profession, and when selected colleagues are preparing for senior institutional leadership. But what about the pivotal years between?

A recent Wellcome landscape report on mid-career research leadership and team development has drawn attention to the limited and uneven support available during this period. Matthew Beach and Joanne Yao have also described the competing obligations carried by mid-career academics, and the value of giving them space to reflect on their experience.

Our research with established researchers at the White Rose universities of Leeds, Sheffield, and York found these pressures across a deliberately varied sample of disciplines, contract types, and academic careers. It also revealed a mismatch between how universities organise development and recognition, and how researchers experience their working lives.

Responsibilities do not arrive one at a time

The White Rose Established Researchers project involved resource mapping and 27 in-depth interviews, followed by focus groups and survey validation. We defined an “established researcher” by functional independence and institutional recognition, rather than years since PhD or contract type (e.g. research versus academic staff).

This deliberately broad definition encompassed markedly different working lives, which we came to understand through a series of “centres of gravity” or “personas”. One established researcher might lead a laboratory of twenty people, coordinate expensive equipment, and manage several grants. Another might work largely alone, while exercising considerable intellectual leadership through international networks. Others might repeatedly assemble temporary interdisciplinary teams or sustained relationships with policymakers, businesses, or communities. The ways in which the work was organised often had more bearing on development needs than the researcher’s field. People could also move between several configurations as their responsibilities changed.

What connected their experiences was how responsibilities accumulated and interacted. A decision about pursuing a major grant might involve longer-term intellectual direction, the capacity of an existing team, teaching commitments, and the value the university would place on the work. Likewise, workload cannot neatly be separated from career direction or the expectations attached to being a good colleague. And there’s nothing to say that a grant decision, a staffing issue, and a question about promotion won’t all arrive in the same week.

Asking researchers to diagnose themselves

Our resource mapping and interviews identified a recurring difficulty: established researchers struggled to locate development pitched at their level of experience, especially when their careers had not followed a typical path.

Universities have understandable reasons for dividing development between specialist services or areas of expertise, and support is often organised into a catalogue of discrete development needs. Researchers, however, rarely experience their careers in those categories. They must diagnose the problem before deciding which institutional door to knock on: is this a workload problem, a leadership problem, a career problem, or a funding problem? Our findings suggest that, for established researchers, it is often several at once.

The White Rose project offered a different starting point. Our personas were recognisable portraits of researchers working in different circumstances, tracing how responsibilities, ambitions, and constraints interacted. They helped people recognise the contexts in which development needs arise.

This principle informed the resources subsequently created for the White Rose Established Researchers Hub. A researcher can begin with a situation or decision they recognise, then follow its connections into other aspects of their work. In early feedback on the Hub, researchers have particularly valued this interconnected approach, including the decision to avoid separating leadership and management into a self-contained topic.

The answer cannot be an ever-larger programme catalogue or a bespoke solution for every academic, not least because of increasing pressures on development budgets. It requires entry points that correspond to situations researchers encounter, and connections between existing specialist support.

Recognising whole careers

The same mismatch between academic lives and institution categories appears when individuals are asked to present complex careers through the categories of a promotion process.

Progression and recognition exercises necessarily have to organise evidence into standardised frameworks, but academic work does not always divide cleanly between research, teaching, leadership, citizenship, and impact. Our findings reinforce a related point: researchers at similar grades may exercise leadership through very different forms of work.

The leader of a large research group can point to grant income and team size. Intellectual agenda-setting, repeated leadership of temporary collaborations, and sustained external influence may be harder to capture. Indeed, Nick Quinn has argued that universities struggle to recognise leadership expressed through careers that do not fit the conventional academic template.

Mentioning collaboration, leadership, and impact in promotion guidance is easy, but recognising those contributions consistently is considerably harder. The difficulty may lie in the criteria themselves, including the evidence they require and the assumptions panels bring to its interpretation. Institutions should therefore examine what counts as evidence of success under those headings, and whether comparable contributions receive equitable consideration. Can the researchers represented by our personas give a coherent account of their contribution without having to recast their career in somebody else’s image? If not, apparently inclusive criteria may still rely on a narrow idea of academic achievement.

This is becoming a more pressing institutional question. The REF 2029 Strategy, People, and Research Environment guidance asks universities to describe the roles and career stages within their research communities, including mid-career and expert researchers, and to demonstrate how their systems both support and recognise that diversity.

Support cannot carry the whole burden

Herein lies a danger. Hanna Groothuizen has warned that mentoring, networks, and development schemes can become “compensatory culture work”.

They help individuals navigate difficult systems while leaving the conditions that created the difficulty intact. Our findings strongly support continued investment in academic development, while also exposing its limits. Career-planning resources cannot remedy unclear promotion criteria or inconsistent application. Nor will development make an impossible workload manageable or compensate indefinitely for poor line management.

Recurring development needs should therefore prompt institutional questions about the conditions generating them. Persistent demand for time-management support or informal mentoring, for example, should lead institutions to examine workloads and the quality of formal career conversations. Development can help individuals to make informed choices within their current circumstances, while patterns in the support they seek can tell institutions which features of the research environment require attention.

Looking upstream

The White Rose study did not track participants into senior institutional roles, and it cannot tell us which of them will eventually become heads of department, deans, or PVCs

It does, however, identify an underserved constituency from which future senior leaders will be drawn. How universities develop and recognise established researchers is therefore crucial to succession planning.

During the established researcher years, academics are learning how to lead people, resources, and scholarly communities in markedly different settings. They are also weighing up what kinds of contribution their institution values, how much further responsibility they want, and whether senior leadership represents an attractive future. Universities concerned about their long-term leadership capacity should pay closer attention to the academic lives in which that capacity is already being formed.

This project was developed in partnership with the Established Researcher Forum at the University of Sheffield. I am grateful to my fellow project team members: Karen Hinxman (White Rose University Consortium), Amy Shaw (University of Sheffield), Monica Busse-Morris (King’s College London), and Tracey Stead (Tracey Stead Development Ltd).