The quality of the academics who undertake the work of teaching and research is critical to the significance, status and relevance of our universities. There is widespread evidence that doctoral students are not being properly prepared for the changing face of higher education and that once they take up academic positions, they often experience many frustrations and tensions. This book, based on a four-year-long research program conducted by four academics and four graduate students, investigates the experiences of doctoral students, new academics and senior academics as they engage in their...

This book argues that post-PhD career planning should ideally begin at the same time as the PhD itself. Drawing from ten years of research and stories of close to 50 individuals, each chapter focuses on the stories of individuals who share common career intentions and how they negotiate these both before, during and after their studies.

This book draws on research in Australia, Canada, UK, and US into the experiences of doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers and new academics. Each chapter develops research-informed implications for policy and practice to support developing academics, and concludes with commentaries by early career academics, developers and administrators.

The book asks how we can make sense of career paths for PhD graduates, something that has rarely been systematically studied. It offers a coherent synthesis of the empirically-based insights that arose from the experiences of 48 early career researchers, who were participants in a 10-year qualitative longitudinal research program. The book has the power to inform other researchers' conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of post-PhD career trajectories.
The authors draw on the conceptual lens of 'identity-trajectory', which emerged from their research program, to examine...