Academic Career Development
This programme is intended for postdoctoral researchers who are considering an academic career path and want to start taking steps to strengthen and grow their academic teaching and research profiles, to be ready and competitive for an academic post in future.
This course is a good primer for new postdocs, and postdocs new to the UK!
It will introduce you to some of the things about UK Higher Eduction that you should understand, whether your focus is in teaching, research or a combination. This includes things like considering different kinds of institutions, how research funding works, how to develop your teaching skills, how to go about building a profile as an academic, and why is 'fit' within an institution important. You will get to ask advice from academic staff, and plan your next career or development steps with a Careers Consultant.
Format
It runs as a series of interactive seminars, disscussion sets, and career workshop; each one week apart.
You will need to book on to each session separately on the CPD-Training system.
In this interactive seminar, we will review different types of higher education institutions, contract types, and go over how research funding works in the UK.
We will discuss the kinds of funding you should have on your radar, to help grow your research profile. We’ll examine a couple of research funding search tools you’ll get to try out.
Running time: 2-hours
Your niche is the intellectual and methodological centre, from where you investigate research questions, or develop your pedagogical acumen. Your Profile and "fit" are qualities you'll need to consider as your career progresses; we'll discuss how you cultivate and communicate these to support the kind of academic career you are aiming for.
Running time: 2-hours
Fellowships are a major source of research funding for postdoctoral researchers and offer fantastic career development opportunities for early-career academics.
In this workshop, we’ll talk about the qualities that funders look for in their fellowship candidates, and discuss how you can begin to develop your profile and networks to be competitive for these awards in future. We’ll build on discussions from the finding funding and intellectual niche sessions, and explore some of the fellowship programmes that are available to fund work in your discipline.
Running time: 2-hours
Supported by Queen Mary Academy Learning and Teaching support colleagues, we will discuss how you can go about gaining experience with teaching, demonstrating, and mentoring during your postdoc
This session will pilot in Spring 2026.
Running time: 2-hours
You will hear from a panel of Queen Mary early-career academics who were recruited to their current role within the last 1-2 years.
The session will also allow you to ask the panel questions about their transitions beyond their postdoc, how they developed themselves to be competitive for academic roles, and practical advice on things like interviews and funding.
For information on the latest panel, visit the CPD-Training course page.
Running time: 90-minutes
In this session we look back over all the areas covered and ask you to think about what next steps are relevant to you.
After this session you will have assessed how you might gain a funding track record, have assessed your career stage-development needs, and made plans about where to focus your efforts in the short and medium terms.
This session is delivered by Emma Marie-Fry, Careers Consultant for Researchers.
Getting resources and signposting for questions about funding opportunities, great overview for me as I just moved to the UK a few months ago— Jan/Feb Pilot Participant
I still learned a lot about the aspects of my CV I should try and improve/develop— Jan/Feb 2024 Pilot Participant
[The most useful aspects of the course were...] Learning about the different types of grants there are and the organisms that fund them [and] learning what aspects of my CV I should reinforce.— Jan/Feb 2024 Pilot Participant