Are contemporary notions of academic career progression ‘fit-for-purpose’? Evidence for a new framing of (academic) careers
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Of what value are institutionally rooted terms notions like ‘mid-career’ or ‘early career’ academic? I argue here we need a more expansive perspective on careers than the linear institutional process represented in such terms as they as do not represent the reality of contemporary academia. This argument is rooted in the evidence emerging from our close to 20 years of narrative methodology research which demonstrated that today’s (academic) career progression can better to understood as a rich contextually embedded set of experiences in which individuals self-author and self-define their careers across organisations, time and space. As already noted, terms like ‘mid-career’ draw on a no longer existing career pattern. Second, this traditional framing narrowly focuses on academic work alone, rather than situating work within the influence of individual biography: how work is embedded within life, with work-life decisions intertwined. Third, we need to place individual experience within the broader historical and contemporary socio-economic affordances and constraints that influence careers. Such influences – for instance these days, greater mobility and more accountability – are in constant flux. These results provide an alternate view that offers a firmer and more expansive foundation for today’s Master’s, PhDs and graduates to develop their career literacy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it