If you’re a UK academic working in a university that is planning redundancies, you may understandably be worried about getting another academic job in the sector you’ve worked in all your life.
You may be at sea and wondering what else you could possibly do if you had to leave academia, seeing as ‘all’ you’ve done is ‘just’ be an academic. It’s a key part of your identity. Who would you be without it?
Well, if you actually shine a light on what it is you currently do, it probably looks something like this wonderful graphic that Susan Wardell, a New Zealand academic, created a few years ago: What a lecturer does.
Then, you might consider removing the word ‘just’ from your vocabulary.
If you consider all these experiences and skills and how multitalented you are and think about how these might transfer to many other contexts, give yourself some credit.
You are a highly skilled and experienced individual with so much to offer the world beyond academia. Read that again. Believe it.
I often show this graphic to academics I coach who are pondering a career change and considering what they can do. The sector is good at making people feel small and demoralised. Often in coaching clients like this, some of the coaching can be about re-finding yourself, working with your values, building understanding and confidence in your own abilities again.
Of course it is depressing, anxiety inducing and for some, infuriating, to be ‘forced’ to shift career, especially under the urgency of perhaps having a mortgage to pay etc. But please take some comfort that as an academic you’re probably already doing multiple jobs, as shown in the graphic, and if you’ve been in academia any length of time you’ve had to adapt and adapt again to the latest requirements. You’ve had to be resilient. You are a survivor.
When I chose to leave academia myself in 2017, I didn’t quite know what I’d do. But I found by experimenting that working for myself was right for me. I adapted and built on my skills and learned lots through the process. It was by choice for me, so very different to the current situation, where the emotional as well as practical impacts will benefit from lots of care at such a fragile juncture.
If you are an HR director at a university, are you doing things to support staff at risk of redundancy? Are you offering coaching workshops or 1-2-1 coaching to staff? Or if you’re an academic facing this challenge, are you getting support?
