Crafting Your Mid-Career and Beyond as Faculty

Last updated September 14, 2021

Crafting Your Mid-Career and Beyond as Faculty

Last updated September 14, 2021

Get “unstuck” or be intentional when it comes to thinking about advancement and fulfillment in the middle of your career.

Overview

The mid-career years – often characterized by being at the associate professor level – can be both the most rewarding and the most challenging time in a faculty member’s career. Once you reach the mid-career phase, not only does institutional support and guidance around career advancement tend to decrease, but your pathway forward can seem unclear. For faculty of color and women faculty, the research also shows that higher expectations around service and mentoring during the mid-career years can slow career advancement.

These factors make the mid-career an important crossroads where you could aim to become a full professor, aspire for a leadership role, or carve out a different path. Getting there requires intentional self-reflection and proactive steps. Otherwise, you may find yourself being pulled in too many directions or following someone else’s priorities for your career.

Join this training to learn more about:

  • The opportunities and challenges faced by mid-career faculty and why so many associate professors feel lost or languishing in their careers.
  • The process of career crafting and the different types of crafting techniques (e.g., task crafting, relational crafting, cognitive crafting).
  • Why design thinking is a useful framework for crafting your mid-career.
  • How to make purposeful career decisions and select your ideal time distribution across scholarly, teaching, service, and leadership responsibilities.

Who should attend?

This workshop is designed for mid-career faculty members, both tenured and non-tenure track. Faculty recently promoted to associate professor will find this training helpful for proactively designing the next phase of their career. Any associate professor who wants to get re-energized will learn how to create a plan for moving forward.

Agenda

November 15, 2021

1:00 – 3:00 p.m. Eastern

Options and Opportunities in the Mid-Career Years

In this section, you will gain an understanding of the career pathways, opportunities, and challenges for associate professors. Our subject matter expert will share research, from primary and secondary sources, on trends in institutional support for mid-career faculty.

 


Job Crafting: A Process for Designing Your Mid-Career

Once you understand the options and opportunities available to you in your mid-career, you will be introduced to the idea of job crafting: proactive changes you make at work to focus your efforts and energies on what you find most fulfilling. Job crafting can include task-specific decisions as well as changes in mindset and relationships to align your work with your current values, preferences, and motivations. While faculty members tend to have a fair amount of flexibility to craft their job, we will address the various aspects of university culture that are more or less supportive of job crafting.

 


How to Start Crafting Your Mid-Career

The final segment of the training is highly self-reflective and interactive. We will conduct activities that are based on design thinking to get you crafting your career. The webinar will end with an introduction to prototyping, an approach you can use after the webinar to select, implement and evaluate the changes you want to make in your career.