Research domains
Context and considerations
This idea is especially relevant for institutional hiring, and career development for existing staff/researcher. Experimentation in this regard is more likely to take place in individual assessments run by assessment committees.
Preparation and guidance is key, as well as a clear/transparent process. This is crucial given the implication of hiring decisions on individuals’ lives.
Regulations must be adhered to, but also potentially modified to fit. Yet, fairness needs to remain a crucial element for consideration in any processes, and experimental changes should probably be avoided within a single call to ensure consistent evaluation of candidates within a call.
Hiring as a site for experimentation could be used in many different ways. For example, this could take the form of:
- Developing people more broadly, or mainly evaluating people for a more broad profile
- Tandem professorship (exists in Germany) - How to ensure that people aren’t only covering the typical aspects of research (and education to a lesser extent)
- Bringing people with different career paths into academia (e.g. industry, public sector, practitioners)
- Can also be potentially two people with different expertises collaborating
- Intersectoral mobility between academia and other domains
- Look at the overall strategy/needs of the unit rather than at individual level - don’t think individually, more systematically
- First step: teams/groups need to learn how to think about their development as a group - “what do we need in the system/unit?”
- Expanding career models
- Start with Junior professorship (academic path) - acquire experience in the next years - either academic or joint between academic/industry - building a more broad set of skills
- Rethinking the hiring requirements
- e.g., Teaching and research are equally important - but education is “forgotten” in hiring - Narrative CV developed to abolish distinction between teaching/research - all professors (even those focusing on research) must teach as part of hiring procedure
Challenges and mitigations
Entry into an academic career - person hired stays a really long time! Career development requirements and incentives - mandatory staying up-to-date Careful with quality assurance and career model fitting
- Challenge: Regulations around are quite strict, hard to experiment
- Mitigation:
- Easier to evaluate “what everyone knows” - people want to be careful
- Challenge: Hiring committee needs to be targeted for guidance/process change
- Mitigation:
- Building good guidance and process for assessment should be standard practice even without experimentation.
- Challenge: Hiring committee is very diverse - rules about who is represented are strict
- Mitigation:
- The composition can be modified - e.g. person focusing on EDI, etc..
- More training for hiring committees - e.g. assessment reform
- How to get more diverse people in the hiring committees?
- Mitigation:
- Depends on institutional regulations - these can potentially be modified.
- Need to have enough diverse people in the institution to make it work (look at the issues getting gender diversity on committees with few women having to do everything)
- Challenge: How to reach more diverse people and make them apply?
- Mitigation:
- Using network with other sectors (e.g. industry) - people are usually interested in working part time, or trying an academic career again
- Fostering intersectoral mobility
- Challenge: Important to be fair and transparent - Lots of rules here
- Mitigation:
- Experimental changes should probably be avoided within a single call to ensure consistent evaluation of candidates within a call
- Additional challenges:
- There’s a fallback to just “replace what was lost” when professors leave
- Shouldn’t hire diverse people just for that sake, it should be towards a bigger strategic target
- Competitive to get a professorship - Lots of really good people who don’t fit the more diversity target - it’s tough enough to be a good researcher
- System level view - always need people who cover the research part to ensure the experimental elements and conclusions are sound and evidence-based
Evaluating success
While success will depend on the objective for the experimentation, certain questions may help situate whether the experimental assessment is successful or not.
- Which areas are important to highlight/develop for the institution (e.g. research, teaching, and practice - maybe others) and has the experimental assessment pursued these areas?
- Are the diverse dimensions assessed and developed in individuals or in the breadth of profiles existing in an institution?
- Do individuals (and their skills) meet the needs coverage for the unit?
- Profile plan/resources plan for teams/institutes/departments/
- Reflective evaluation on the plan (after a few years) and how the people in the unit are covering everything, and if the goals have been reached, and how the people contributed to this
- Do the experimental assessment promote intersectoral mobility and collaboration? (i.e., if promotion of diversity of skills and sector is valued for the assessment)
- Are diversity distributions improved quantitatively?
- (e.g. how many people came from other institutions/sectors, what areas/focuses do they cover, experience level mix).
- Note that it is diffcule to have “what is good”/benchmarking - if you see a few areas with high coverage and others with low, then you see the weak spots.
Relevant resources and literature
This section includes resources, literature, and reports relevant to this specific experimental idea (where available).
Comments/lived examples