{"id":1734,"date":"2025-03-16T16:54:30","date_gmt":"2025-03-16T16:54:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/?p=1734"},"modified":"2025-03-16T17:11:56","modified_gmt":"2025-03-16T17:11:56","slug":"career-opportunities-the-ones-that-never-knock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/?p=1734","title":{"rendered":"Career Opportunities,  the ones that never knock"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Clash - Career Opportunities (Live at Shea Stadium)\" width=\"750\" height=\"563\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/MsE5NAAU39k?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The <em><a href=\"https:\/\/21percent.org\/?p=1716\" title=\"\">Staff Culture Survey <\/a><\/em>at Cambridge University is not just restricted to bullying and harassment, prevalent though these are in academic life. It also asked questions about career progression. And this revealed another shocker of a statistic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>I think there are sufficient opportunities for career progression at the University&nbsp;&#8230; 32 %<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Only 32% see opportunities for themselves to progress. This shows how disheartening a place the university is for young researchers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cambridge University has failed to take advantage of existing opportunities to advance prospects of its early career or fixed-term researchers.&nbsp; When UKRI launched its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ukri.org\/what-we-do\/developing-people-and-skills\/future-leaders-fellowships\/\" title=\"Future Leaders Fellowship\">Future Leaders Fellowship<\/a> scheme, the university did not allow prospective candidates to use it, even ones already on its so-called (fixed term) &#8216;early career lectureships\u2019. (Cambridge only allowed those already in possession of offers of open-ended jobs to apply, so this effectively reduced the number of possible new jobs in other UK universities. Cambridge&#8217;s policy also seemingly violates the Fixed Term Employee Regulations (2002) blogged <a href=\"https:\/\/21percent.org\/?p=1672\" title=\"here.\">here.<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The UKRI scheme offers generous funding for up to 7 years for untenured staff, but requires a commitment from the host university to provide a permanent position upon completion of the fellowship. The scheme has a focus on diversity, and other Russell Group universities used it to broaden the backgrounds and ages of their staff.&nbsp; Over 500 new jobs have been created at UK universities with the scheme, but none at Cambridge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"575\" src=\"https:\/\/21percent.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Screenshot-2025-03-16-at-16.44.33-1024x575.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1743\" style=\"width:801px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/21percent.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Screenshot-2025-03-16-at-16.44.33-1024x575.png 1024w, https:\/\/21percent.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Screenshot-2025-03-16-at-16.44.33-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/21percent.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Screenshot-2025-03-16-at-16.44.33-768x431.png 768w, https:\/\/21percent.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Screenshot-2025-03-16-at-16.44.33.png 1264w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Compared to University College London, this policy has deprived Cambridge of ~ \u00a336 million of funding over the last 7 years. And it has restricted opportunities for its early-career researchers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cambridge University\u2019s record on academic vacancies is amongst the worst in the Russell Group. The university does urgently need to create new academic positions to maintain its international standing in teaching and research. However, over the last decade, Cambridge has found it much easier to create fresh senior managerial and administrative positions than academic jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Many UK Universities offer their own funded Fellowships that lead to permanent positions. For example, the University of Edinburgh supports early career researchers by recruiting a cohort of <a href=\"https:\/\/human-resources.ed.ac.uk\/job\/chancellors-fellowships\" title=\"Chancellor\u2019s Fellows\">Chancellor\u2019s Fellows<\/a>. In 2024, up to 38 such Fellowships were available. The Fellows are supported with a 5 years of predominantly research time, and then the job transitions to open-ended Lectureship positions. The University of Edinburgh\u2019s scheme is exceptional in its scale and generosity, but similar smaller schemes are also common in other UK Universities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cambridge University has much more financial resources available than most other UK universities, yet it runs no such schemes to support early-career academics. (There are Junior Research Fellowships at the Colleges, but these do not usually become open-ended positions).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The 21 Group thanks Dr Eileen Nugent for the detailed comparison with University College, London<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Staff Culture Survey at Cambridge University is not just restricted to bullying and harassment, prevalent though these are in academic life. It also asked questions about career progression. And this revealed another shocker of a statistic. I think there are sufficient opportunities for career progression at the University&nbsp;&#8230; 32 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1734"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1749,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions\/1749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}