Career pathways

• Job insecurity is a difficult reality for many ECRs starting out, especially for post-docs. 
• Diverse career paths exist within and beyond academia, including technical roles, entrepreneurship, and research in non-academic sectors like government or industry.
• Your journey may include false starts, and life circumstances might influence your choices.
• Experience in different sectors can enhance your value, but you must effectively communicate these benefits to others.

Read time: 7 min

Early-career researchers often find themselves in precarious employment, jumping from one short-term contract to the next. Even mid-career academics may sometimes lack long-term job security, or they might find it challenging to secure a continuous stream of funding for their research. Those fortunate few who secure research fellowships often face the anxiety of what happens when their fellowships end.

Whilst there are more PhD graduates than there are academic jobs, PhD graduates are in demand, and there are diverse career pathways for people with research backgrounds to consider – some within academia or other sectors, with others oscillating between the two.

If you’re wanting to pursue a career in research or research-related work, you may not want, need, or even be able to spend your life in academia. You may find academic jobs hard to come by, or teaching is just not your passion. You may have ambitions to apply your expertise in industry, government or other sectors. You may want to work in other sectors and retain a foothold in academia.

Career pathways can be incredibly diverse, and all things are possible these days. Here are some research or research-adjacent possibilities to consider, from the traditional academic career to a range of alternatives:

Even within a ‘traditional’ academic career, there are various paths open to you. Importantly, these paths don’t lock you in. If you start out focusing on teaching, you can later focus on research. If you take up a university leadership role, you can later relinquish it and return to your teaching and/or research. 

Although there are no one-way streets, keep in mind that as your track record develops and each decision builds on the next, your previous experience can influence your competitiveness for future opportunities.

Here are a few common ways to think about an academic career path and how it might change over time:

Academic promotion – that is, progression up five academic levels (A-E) – is the same regardless of your discipline and is a hallmark of virtually all academic careers. It is therefore not strictly a “career path”, but each promotion is a major milestone in an academic career.

Want to plan for promotion? Check out our promotion planning pages.

How your time is spent at different stages of your career across teaching, research, and formal ‘Governance, Leadership, and Engagement’ (GLE) activities is also a type of career path. 

Are you after a 40:40:20 appointment? Do you love education and want to be a teaching-focused academic? Is research your passion and you want to win fellowships to secure protected research time without teaching? Or are you interested in pursuing leadership roles at university? 

Although these things might not always be in your control – that fellowship and increased research time might prove elusive, for example – you can certainly make decisions and take active steps to push your career along the trajectories you’re interested in.

Want to focus on teaching rather than research? Explore Teaching@Sydney.

What you research and how it changes throughout your career is also a type of career path. For example, someone who starts out doing basic biomedical research may decide, as projects and outcomes progress, to also get involved in clinical research in order to translate their basic discoveries; or they may instead stay squarely in the basic sciences. An Australian literature researcher trained in traditional archival research may develop an interest in digital humanities or machine learning and build collaborations with computer scientists. 

Where you take your research is a mix of intention and serendipity, such as what gets funded, how projects unfold, or who you meet as a collaborator at a conference. New directions don’t always work out, but don’t be afraid to try! You’ll almost always learn something along the way.

Want to plan your research? Check out our research planning pages.

The decision to pursue or take on leadership roles is another type of path in your academic career. Typically, these roles will increase in scale, breadth and level of responsibility as you move up the hierarchy. 

As a researcher you will be expected to show increasing leadership within the research community as your career progresses. This might start small, like taking on a leadership role within an EMCR network, but if you scale your research and funding one day you might even lead a whole research centre or institute.

Some people might pursue formal leadership roles within the University, such as Head of School or Associate Dean. University leadership roles offer excellent opportunities to influence research and institutional culture at scale, but the administrative responsibilities of such positions mean that the time for research is typically diminished. 

Want to build your leadership? Check out our leadership pages.

Until you’re well-established on a career path, you may struggle to find job security. You may try different things, just miss out by a narrow margin, and perhaps have a few false starts. If your plans don't go as expected, it’s important to keep in mind that it happens to everyone, so don't beat yourself up! 

Diverse, flexible career pathways offer opportunities, but can also carry risks. You will need to think about how adaptable you can be, what your appetite for risk is, and how long you can cope with a precarious existence. This can change over time, of course. Starting a family and/or getting a mortgage are two classic incentives for reducing exposure to job insecurity.

It’s important not to assume that oscillating between academic and other sectors will be seen as a negative. Experience gained in one sector can be incredibly beneficial to the work you do in a different sector. But it is your job to explain this, whether to prospective employers, to a promotions committee, or to reviewers assessing fellowship applications.