Development and Career Profiles for Academic Staff
A draft advisory report outlining the framework for development and career profiles for academic staff within the Faculty of Social Sciences has been prepared. This report has been developed by extensive input from colleagues, including members of the feedback group and the career profiles committee, which consists of postdocs, lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors, professors, and directors of education and research. In addition, a range of other sources has been consulted, such as the university-wide vision on Recognition and Rewards, (inter)national documents on this theme, the university-wide development matrix, and the 2022 report by Geurts & Den Ouden, “Balanced Recognition and Reward of Academics within FSW”.
Sabine Geurts and Hanneke den Ouden presented the draft advisory report to the Faculty of Social Sciences board and the faculty joint assembly (FGA), where it was initially received positively by both parties. This is a promising start! We are now at the stage where we would like to discuss the report more widely to allow for further development. In early 2025, we will organise an awayday to seek your input. Will you join us?
Workload reduction
An advisory report has also been developed on the principles for teaching task models and workload reduction within our faculty. The key principles are:
- Harmonising teaching models within the faculty;
- Ensuring that the hours allocated to different components are sufficient;
- Creating a realistic allocation of time for teaching, research, impact, leadership, and academic citizenship. This revision should not result in additional workload and must align with a responsible budget reduction.
As a sneak peek, here are two of our recommendations:
- Create more flexibility in teaching task models by:
- Applying additional parameters, such as time for new courses or for new teaching staff.
- Accounting for activities that go beyond teaching responsibilities (such as attendance at faculty meetings and ICT transition costs).
- Reducing teaching responsibilities. Given budget cuts, we will need to make our teaching less intensive on multiple levels: within courses (for example, by holding fewer sessions and/or assessments) and within degree programmes (for example, by offering fewer elective courses).
Our survey on ‘additional’ tasks, completed by more than 150 colleagues, also showed that a considerable amount of time is spent on academic citizenship and leadership tasks, which often receive little to no allocation of hours. We will soon share the results of this survey and its implications more widely.