Benchmarking can save you considerable time and help you plan for success.
Read time: 6 mins
Applying for a job, promotion or fellowship requires considerable time and effort. Before you invest your energies in this endeavour, we recommend you do some homework to find out whether you’re likely to be competitive or not.
If you discover that you’re not, you can avoid the ‘opportunity cost’ of producing an application that has no chance of succeeding, and instead write that journal article you’ve had on the backburner – or whatever else would be a more worthwhile investment of your limited time.
A useful way to do this is called ‘benchmarking’. Essentially this means comparing your track record against the track records of those who have previously been successful in securing the job, promotion or fellowship in question. Although it may turn out to be a rather humbling experience – there will (almost) always be someone doing better than you – it is nevertheless extremely useful.
Here’s a suggested approach to benchmarking. It’s not an exact science – not a simple matter of comparing numbers of publications, for instance – and requires some judgement.
For a fellowship, this information is usually publicly available on the website of the funding body. For an academic job, you’ll need to dig around the website of the advertising university to find out who holds a similar position to the one you’re interested in.
Try to find people whose research discipline and career stage are similar to yours. It’s crucial to compare apples with apples as much as you can – different disciplines will have different typical publication and metric profiles, and those later in their career will have a greater productivity footprint.
In both cases, it can also be worth identifying people who hold positions/fellowships above and below the level you’re interested in. For example, if you’re interested in applying for a Senior Lecturer role, you might check out the track records of some Lecturers and Associate Professors, as well as Senior Lecturers. This will give you a more thorough appreciation of the context.
Publications is the obvious place to start – it’s the common currency of academic life. Here are some key aspects to compare:
INDICATOR |
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER |
|---|---|
| Quantity |
|
| Quality |
|
| Role |
|
| Impact |
|
| Trajectory |
|
*This is the easiest indicator of publication impact to find. But be careful: don’t compare their Google Scholar citations with your Scopus citations – Google Scholar’s numbers are usually higher.
What these are will depend on what you’re applying for. We don’t want to be prescriptive about this because there will be considerable variation in the skills, expertise and experience that employers and funders are looking for, and in the priorities they accord to these things.
Some common benchmarking indicators are in the table.
In assessing these and other aspects of people’s track records, including your own, you might use Step 2 as a model. That is, go beyond focusing exclusively on quantity and consider performance in other terms as well.
INDICATOR |
EXAMPLES |
|---|---|
| Prizes, awards and honours |
|
| Scholarships and fellowships |
|
| Research funding |
|
| Patents |
|
| Inter/national profile |
|
| Research impact |
|
| Teaching |
|
| Supervision |
|
| Professional contributions |
|
| Institutional service |
|
| Industry, government and/or consumer engagement |
|
| Community outreach |
|
The University’s Academic Excellence Framework (AEF) defines what success looks like for each academic level and for different role types. You should assess your performance using the AEF as a guide, and you can use the Evidence Menu for your faculty or University school to select relevant indicators of excellence in research, education, and service.
The AEF is being incorporated into the AP&D process, the academic promotions process, recruitment, and confirmation, and is a key benchmarking tool at the University.
It’s worth noting a common scenario that can lead you astray if you don’t benchmark yourself. You may have enthusiastically supportive supervisors and peers who will advise you to ‘go for it’ – to take that next ambitious step. This is wonderfully encouraging, but the advice may not be informed by a keen appreciation of the requirements of the job or fellowship, nor of the competitiveness of the field. For promotion, they might be basing their advice on anecdotal experiences which don’t capture the nuance or a breadth of scenarios. It’s therefore worth taking the time to benchmark yourself in order to gain a bit more information.
Benchmarking is only as good as the information it’s based on. In most cases, this means your ability to benchmark accurately will be limited by what’s available to you in the public domain, which may not tell the whole story.
For example, you may think that this fellowship winner has fewer publications than you would have expected, or that one has supervised remarkably few students. But perhaps the first one spent years in industry and couldn’t publish for reasons of commercial confidentiality, and the second one had time out of academia due to illness. It’s unlikely that you’ll find this information on the public record.
While benchmarking remains a very useful exercise, it does require a degree of caution. One way around these limitations is of course to benchmark yourself against people whom you can legitimately find out more about, and who are at a comparable career stage. These may include colleagues who are happy to share their successful applications and/or CVs with you. You can also access the online Successful Applications Library which includes funding applications from University researchers that you are entitled to peruse.
Another option is to talk to people who have been on promotions panels or assessed funding schemes. To find these people, you may need to make enquiries through your supervisors, colleagues and networks. Bear in mind that some funding bodies (e.g. the ARC) require previous winners to become scheme assessors themselves. So, for example, if someone won a fellowship three years ago, there’s a reasonable chance that subsequently they will have assessed fellowship applications.
