Podcast: What does academic career progression look like? Interview with Lilia Mantai

To pursue a career as a researcher in academia is to embrace a lifetime of learning, relearning, and growth. Often, this path involves transitioning through long, fixed stages—from PhD to principal investigator and beyond. Several aspects of this progression have stayed the same across decades, like the importance of having a good publication record. But several others have changed or are gaining more importance, like the need to disseminate research through social media.

So, what does research tell us about the skills recruiters look for at different stages of academic careers? How should PhD students and mid-career or senior researchers upskill and prepare themselves for the next transition? What might academic careers look like in the future?

In this interview, I ask these and other questions to Dr Lilia Mantai, Senior Lecturer at The University of Sydney Business School and Academic Lead for Course Enhancement, where she currently oversees assurance of learning and guides curriculum development and assessment design.

Lilia’s research concerns academic and researcher development, doctoral education, graduate skills, and employability. She has published in higher- and doctoral-education journals, including Studies in Higher Education, Teaching in Higher Education, International Journal for Researcher Development, International Journal of Doctoral Studies, The Australian Educational Researcher. She is a Senior Fellow of AdvanceHE, Executive Member of the Australasian Council for Undergraduate Research (ACUR), and Associate Editor for the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) journal. Lilia can be found on ResearchGate, Academia, LinkedIn, or Twitter @LiliaMantai.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE.

[Podcast transcript]

Mriganka:  Hello, everyone. I am Mriganka Awati, Senior Writer at Editage Insights. Over the past several years, my team and I have learned a lot about what early career researchers need and want to know about how to progress in their careers as researchers. We’ve learned this through personal accounts, survey data, and the questions that they ask us. So, I believe this will be an especially interesting interview.

I’m speaking with Lilia Mantai, who is a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney Business School. Lilia conducts research on higher education, doctoral, and academic careers. Welcome, Lilia. It’s great to have you here.

Lilia: Thank you, Mriganka. Thank you for having me.

Mriganka: Okay. So, could you tell us a little bit about your background and the work that you do?

Lilia: Sure. Well, not sure how much of the personal story you want, but I’ll tell you a little bit. I’m originally from Germany. Born in Kazakhstan. I grew up in Russia and immigrated to Germany with my family at the age of 12, and I did a year-long teaching placement in England in about 2016, before coming to Australia where I followed my partner.

So, I think all these personal, cultural, and academic transitions I’ve made during those years really nurtured my curiosity and how people make sense of their ever-changing worlds and what it takes to adapt and succeed in a certain setting. So, watching some friends, while I was in Germany doing my education, watching some friends struggle and others not during their PhD, I became really interested in finding out what makes or breaks academic success.

And so my PhD, then, was on the doctoral experience with the focus of social support and researcher development. And recently, this interest shifted to early career academics and researchers and how they scale up and progress in academic careers. And we know that the academic labor market is a competitive place, and there are really interesting questions that the job data research can help us address.

So, I’ve been working in higher education since 2010, covering various areas—learning and teaching support, project management, curriculum design, etc. And I worked as a sessional academic, professional staff, and I’ve taken up my first academic position in 2018 at the University of Sydney Business School. So, in my current role as Academic Lead for Program Development, I oversee the assurance of learning.

I guide curriculum development and continue to conduct research on ECR [early career researcher] skills and careers. And I’m also actively promoting undergraduate research opportunities across Australasia as part of my executive role at ACUR, which is the Australasian Council of Undergraduate Research. We have a website; if you want to read up on it, go ahead. So, that’s a little bit about me and why I do what I do in terms of research.

Mriganka: Thank you for sharing that, Lilia, because it’s…it’s so interesting to know how you came to do the work that you do. And I think that also is a great starting point for our conversation because, you know, we’ve heard stories of PhD students and early career researchers where they wonder whether they can call themselves researchers.

And, you know, some of your work that I found particularly interesting was your exploration of when PhD students begin to feel like a researcher. So, I’m going to quote the first two sentences of the abstract of one of these papers, because I think it articulates really well what this transition means.

You say, “Becoming a researcher is one of the roads traveled in the emotional, social, and intellectual process of PhD journeys. As such, developing a researcher identity during doctoral study is a social undertaking.”

I think that captures pretty much what it really is. So, can you tell me when do those embarking on a research journey feel like they’ve become a researcher?

Lilia: Umm…oh, thank you for that throwback to my earlier research, I asked this…this question of when do you feel like you are a researcher, and when do you start developing a research identity? I asked that exact question in my earlier research with the PhD students, and that was published in Studies in Higher Eductation in, I think, 2015. The answer is not an exact timeframe or a specific number of years you need to be working in research, you know, for you to feel like a researcher. It’s really the tasks you engage in. And what I found in my qualitative study with about 80 PhD students at that time, it was that it was simply doing things like…simply doing things that researchers do, like hands-on research, you know, for example, being in the lab, and doing an experiment over and over again.

It’s also talking about your research, so, that dissemination aspect. And interestingly, it was also the publishing, so, that that research-output aspect, putting your work out there, your work being reviewed and signed off by others. That “publish or perish” mantra did not go unnoticed by the PhD students at that time. And so, while receiving recognition by your peers and your supervisors was important, really, PhD students placed greater value on gaining that external public recognition through publications.

And that was…those were the factors that really led PhD students I talked to to feel like they were becoming a researcher. And I think that’s just really the effect of the system in which doctoral students are enculturated, you know. They are exposed to the publishing, the focus on publishing during their PhDs through their supervisors. That’s how they pick up on what really matters in that game.

Mriganka: In January this year, you published a paper with your coauthor on what we can learn about career progression in academia from job adverts.

So, you know, what does the typical career progression in academia look like and how has it changed over the past few decades? And since we talked about publications, how much do publications, you know, factor in when it comes to requirements or expectations from those who are applying to academic positions?

Lilia: Yeah, well, the answer to your second question is a lot. But in terms of what does a typical progression look like in academia, well, the answer will really be slightly different depending on which academic career stage you look at, because our recent study shows that the academic career is evolving, like other professions do too. But overall, research and teaching skills paired with communication, personal and interpersonal skills are really key across the whole academic career.

And mobility also plays quite a big role in how fast academics can progress. So, by mobility we mean, you know, if you speak a different language, if you are able to geographically move, if you are flexible and mobile in terms of, you know, doing experimental work out there outside the campus, and if you’re mobile in that way and you…you know, your schedule allows you to be flexible, then that obviously will make your progression much easier.

We also noticed that the skill requirements changed over time, and we see in the number of diverse skills that the number of diverse skills actually increases over time as well. So, academic jobs are asking for more diverse skills over time. So, what that means is that the future academic we think needs to be multi-skilled and really engaged in continuous learning and development, as is the case in many other professions too.

And important to understand is that if, for example, research was the thing that helped you get promoted to the next stage, it might not be…to get…it might not be the thing to get promoted…to get promoted further. So, that reinvention is really key. And so, progressing from early career researcher—say, being a PhD student or a postdoc—to professor, you will need different skills essentially.

For example, at the beginning of the research career, starting with a PhD, we found that communication, research skills, interpersonal skills were absolutely critical to set you up for success. But going up the academic ladder, independent of discipline and country, we found that while research always maintains its prime currency status, so your publications with your…any other research outputs…academics also do need to advance their teaching skills, and professors are often expected to engage in outreach activities. They’re expected to understand curriculum development and the external forces that play a role and, you know, engage in fundraising, and do those kind of activities. And there are, of course, important differences at country and discipline level. But this is what we can say about the academic career overall.

Mriganka: Considering that…that the skills required change so much across different stages…different career stages in academia, I think it’s…another paper that you had…another article that you had published also was very interesting in that light, because you highlighted the gaps between the skills that PhD students need to develop and the training provided to them.

Could you talk a little bit about what these gaps are, and when you say gaps, is it gaps in the sense of what PhD students need immediately after they graduate and start with other research projects? Or is it skills…are you talking about more like lifelong skills that they need?

Lilia: Right. So the article that you mentioned, I think the Nature article was based on academic career progression, and of course the findings have implications for PhD and ECR skills, if we look at that stage as the entry point to an academic career, right? Because teaching and supervision skills are gaining importance in later career stages, as we see in the data, we would advise that developing these skills—like teaching, supervising other students—during PhD candidature would be a really good skill to develop for PhD students. Many ECRs and ECAs [early career academics] will be asked to teach large classes. They will be asked to work with others on research, and manage budget and other people. They will be involved in academic, in other academic activities and projects with other colleagues. And so, skills that are relevant to that, like teaching teamwork, project management, budget management, should be developed during the doctoral candidature and otherwise, you know, ECAs/ECRs get really so overwhelmed with managing and learning on the job all these new skills that they lose precious time to build their research track record, which they started during their PhDs.

And that’s really where many of them get lost. I think. So, yeah.

Mriganka: In that respect, then, you know, what advice would you offer early career researchers on how to progress in their academic careers, especially if their training...if it’s not supporting their development, which skills and competencies do they need to build?

Lilia: That’s good. I get that question a lot. Well, based on the previous study on what type of skills are requested by PhD programs, we see that interpersonal attributes, so things like working with others, the way you work with others, the way you…also communication skills, including oral, written communication, as well as your engagement with social media and your use of social media for research dissemination purposes, for example.

These are the things that are just as important as some level of research skills at the start of an academic career, that’s if we see the PhD as the entry point to academia. So, interpersonal attributes or communication skills are absolute…skills that I would really focus on developing as a PhD student. But, overall, for the academic career, I would say what got you here won’t get you there.

So, you really need to upskill and reinvent yourself and be open and flexible to ongoing learning and development.

Mriganka: You’ve shared your thoughts on what early career researchers need to upskill on. Now, what can seniors researchers do? How can senior researchers upskill to both continue their professional development and support people who they supervise and mentor?

Lilia: Yeah, that’s an excellent question. So because we focus so much on early career researchers, but less so on the senior researchers. I think that the senior researchers will, well, we know that they will likely mentor more junior colleagues and supervise PhD students, for example. Senior researchers and supervisors are the ones enculturating new students to the academic career and…or academic culture, I should say.

So, I would like to see senior researchers really advocate for the more junior colleagues. First of all, it would help to…to view students as colleagues and equal members of academic staff. That’s not necessarily the case in every country. Some countries do that better than others. But I think, for example, Germany does it quite well. And the reason this is important, I think, that this sort of mindset of viewing PhD students as, you know, equal colleagues and members of the academic staff, really would provide a different platform to work with them.

And secondly, I would suggest to senior colleagues to start every new supervision by asking the student about their career aspirations and really be open to…to nonacademic pursuits. If they say, no, I actually don’t want to be an academic, that should be okay. And in the current climate, in the current academic labor market, overall, it’s really advisable to…for students to consider nonacademic roles from the start and see how they can position themselves during their PhD candidature for diverse, you know, career outcomes.

So, I think for senior researchers to be open and transparent about the realities of securing ongoing…ongoing academic roles towards PhD students would be beneficial and perhaps help PhD students or junior colleagues in building career-development opportunities early on. So, and the reason I…I say that or suggest for senior researchers to do that because they’re probably likely to be in the position to implement and advocate for policies that would support ECRs and ECAs. And so things like, you know, recognizing career-building, professional development, part…as part of the academic workload and work schedule is…is one way to go, or to reward  upskilling and learning is one way to go. And not only for junior researchers. That would apply…that’s something that the university could do for senior researchers as well—providing support or diverse and adequate learning and development opportunities, creating social opportunities to learn and develop new skills, for example, you know, things like buddy programs, mentoring, job shadowing, communities of practice building—all those opportunities are really good social opportunities for researchers to learn with each other, from each other, and develop their skill set.

And so, those are the kind of things that I would suggest researchers do…senior researchers do, to help or to support junior academic…junior faculty. But as for themselves, I think many already recognize that ongoing development and learning is key already, at least in the Australian context. And the difficulty is just to accommodate career development into their already busy academic schedule. And…but I think, you know, universities really offer, already offer opportunities nowadays, or at least in the Australian context, again, they do offer opportunities to upskill and learn and develop further.

Mriganka: You’ve already talked about a few regional differences or you’ve commented on, you know, some regional trends that you’ve noticed. So, in terms of job adverts, then, have you noticed any differences in what’s required at different career stages…if you’ve noticed any regional or interdisciplinary differences?

Lilia: Yes, that’s an excellent question, and I absolutely urge every reader to look at the country- and discipline-specific data that we provide. We provide some specific data for the top five represented disciplines and countries in that particular paper. And, of course, we couldn’t understand really, or we couldn’t include all of the detail on all the other countries or even more detail on these five countries, because there’s…there’s just not enough scope in one paper.

But the country- and discipline-specific differences are really key because, obviously, academic careers are part or are shaped very significantly by the institutional policies, by the local regional governments and national governments, and also what else is going on in the world. So, while we provided a global picture, if you wish, of the academic career as a whole independent of country and discipline differences, if you wanted to move to a particular country, if you work in a particular country and you really don’t have a way of moving elsewhere, I really…you really do need to look at, you know, what’s happening at the country level.

And so, just to give you a couple of examples of the kind of differences we found, Austria, Netherlands, Poland have, for example, diverse skill requirements as they highly value more…as we’ve seen they highly value more than half of the attribute categories that we investigated. So, they want their researchers to have very different and diverse skills. With Spain, for example, only really paid significance on digital skills and previous work experience and did not cover all of the other category…skill categories so much.

And in terms of the discipline differences, I’ll give you another example. We found out that in biological science, for example—the discipline with the most ads posted in the data set that we had—requested a large number of attributes. So, they covered five out of eleven attribute categories, and some other disciplines emphasized only one or two particular skill category.

So, biological science, for example, asked, again, for very diverse and wide skill set, right? And so it does…it does definitely make sense to look at the discipline and the country differences.

Mriganka: I have one last question. What do you think academic success and progression will look like in the future, about say ten or twenty years from now?

Lilia: Oh, this is a $1 million question. What does the future look like? Well, I…so based on my personal experience and the research that I do and the readings I come across and what I observe, I think as long as teaching and research remain the bread and butter of academia, I think we will need to develop those respective skills. And, you know, preparing academics for teaching and research will be the focus of academic development. Unless there are major shifts in national and institutional policies that affect how research success is measured and assessed, I don’t think that the “publish and perish” dogma will change, so, publications will continue to be really important. But I think, you know, someone who researches the policy space will probably be better placed to provide an informed response here. But from my understanding, I think future research will be more interdisciplinary and I think it has to be to resolve the really big problems of today.

And so, researchers have to be flexible and curious to span different disciplinary ways of thinking and integrating different knowledges to come up with new approaches to current problems. And I have a bit of a wish list maybe, so I would like to see some other aspects of what underpins research assessment and research activity to be better recognized and valued more.

So, for example, peer review is one aspect for me. We know journals and reviewers are the gatekeepers of what gets published, yet good and suitable reviewers are sometimes hard to find. And well, guess what? They’re busy doing research and good work, of course. And sometimes it’s the luck of the draw whether your paper gets reviewed…and can provide constructive feedback, and your paper gets published.

And it seems odd that so much of the research assessment is based on that sort of process. And then mentoring is another aspect for me that I feel is massively undervalued yet so important in academia. And it takes…because it takes genuine care, time, and effort to do and it’s also at the same time really tricky to support because the best mentoring relationships are arising organically and they grow really organically. So, I think it’s really important to make time for those opportunities in a busy academic life through these relationships to occur and to develop. So, I would like to see, in whatever the future of academic success and career looks like, mentoring to be a much bigger, more valued piece of academic activity and peer review to be perhaps better, better managed.

I’m not exactly sure what it would look like, but those are the things that pop to mind.

Mriganka: Thank you so much, Lilia, for doing this interview, because all of this has been valuable, and I’m sure that our audiences will love these… these insights. Thank you so much.

Lilia: Thank you. Thank you for giving me the chance to talk about my research and a little bit more of the work that I do.