Open University maps new routes to career progression

Source: Alamy

Going up: the OU’s scheme has a strong focus on equal opportunities

The Open University has released details of what it calls a progressive new promotion scheme, offering academics several distinct routes to becoming a senior professor.

Under the new system, which aims to recognise all aspects of scholarly work, academics will be able to progress up four different career strands: teaching, research, combined research and teaching, and knowledge exchange.

But in addition to outlining the clear benchmarks that academics will be expected to achieve in order to climb the different ladders, The Open University is aiming to ensure that the new procedure has a strong focus on equal opportunities.

“When researching promotion schemes, I found that although university promotion schemes contained lots of warm words about equality of opportunity, there was nothing really tangible to back it up, or to show how it would work,” said Sally Dibb, professor of marketing and chairwoman of the Working Group of The Open University Academic Staff Promotions Committee, which devised the new approach.

“There were hardly any examples of how to do it, which is quite shocking,” she added.

Under the OU scheme, academic members of staff applying for a promotion will be able to complete an “individual circumstances form”, in which they will be able to specify reasons why they may have fallen short of some promotion criteria.

This might be a period of time spent on maternity or paternity leave, or the fact that a member of staff has demanding caring responsibilities at home.

Professor Dibb said that the system was based on the approach taken by the Higher Education Funding Council for England in the research excellence framework, which allowed individual researchers to submit fewer than the expected four outputs to the exercise if they had a good reason.

“The OU is well placed to provide a lead to the sector in handling equality in promotion,” Professor Dibb said. The university’s promotions committee has also appointed two members with specific expertise in equal opportunities to help handle cases in which individual circumstances are a factor.

The university is also thought to be one of the first in the UK to offer a dedicated knowledge exchange career path, meaning that academics can become senior professors by demonstrating their effectiveness in this area.

Professor Dibb dismissed the suggestion that this path would be seen as a less academically rigorous option.

“The knowledge exchange route reflects the trend in the sector to demonstrate impact, and we wanted to support people on that career path,” she said, adding that scholars on this path would still be expected to bring in income.

All the career paths come with clear objectives that scholars must achieve if they are to be considered eligible for promotion.

A senior lecturer on the “research” track would be expected to have published at least four “internationally excellent” papers in the past six years, to have effectively supervised a research degree student, and to have shown evidence of public engagement, among other benchmarks.

In the sector as a whole, “promotion schemes tend to be quite vague”, Professor Dibb said, adding that the OU’s new approach sought to give staff “more clarity” about what was expected of them.

chris.parr@tesglobal.com