Early-career researchers are well aware of the uncertainties that an academic career can bring. Nevertheless, many expect that if they remain in academia, their careers will progress in a relatively familiar way: after completing a doctorate, they will move into a postdoctoral position, establish research independence, obtain a permanent post and, eventually, enter a more settled stage of academic life.

The conversations that my colleagues and I have had with established researchers while working on the White Rose Established Researchers project — a collaboration between the UK universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York that aims to support career development — suggest that career progression is often much less linear.

Research independence, which is characterized as a researcher’s ability to lead and sustain an original programme of research, is typically associated with the mid-career stage in academia. It brings with it a fresh set of challenges: how to sustain research while leading people, managing competing responsibilities and prioritizing the tasks that can have the greatest impact. The researchers whom we interviewed rarely spoke about having ‘made it’; instead, they described having to regularly refresh and revise how they think about their careers, in circumstances of increasing uncertainty.

It is striking how little attention has been paid to understanding the period between establishing research independence and the later stages of an academic career. Universities have invested heavily in supporting early-career researchers and have developed sophisticated programmes for senior leaders. Yet, relatively little attention has been given to the distinctive experiences of academics occupying the space between those career stages.

Resources for mid-career scientists

Our collaboration explored how established researchers experience the middle stage of their career. Across four months, we interviewed 27 established researchers, held two focus groups with them, sent them a follow-up survey to validate our findings and mapped institutional resources across the three universities.

Because no widely accepted definition of an established researcher exists, we defined them as “an academic who has achieved functional independence and institutional recognition in their research capacity, whilst continuing to develop their professional identity and navigate complex career transitions”.

The established-researcher career stage is characterized by a distinct research agenda, the capacity to secure and manage funding, a strong track record of scholarly outputs, recognition in relevant research communities and the ability to make substantive intellectual contributions to their field.

The common experience: juggling complexity

Across disciplines, established researchers described a shared experience of juggling various, often competing, responsibilities that span research, teaching, leadership, administration and collaboration. The challenge was rarely any individual role; instead, it was the continual negotiation of priorities across them.

As we analysed the interviews, we found that researchers were making sense of this complexity in different ways. To help to illuminate these recurring patterns, we outlined four personas that can be used to articulate different approaches to navigating the established stage of an academic career.

No researcher fits perfectly into a single persona. Many recognized aspects of themselves in more than one and described moving between them over time. But we developed these personas to understand how researchers think about success, make decisions and respond to the continuing complexity of academic life.

The laboratory builder

For some established researchers, academic life revolves around people as much as projects. Alongside developing their own research programmes, they recruit and train staff, secure funding and create opportunities for others. Many described an important transition from being the person who mainly conducts research to becoming the one who galvanizes the collective efforts of a team to enable research to happen.

Career planning strategies for scientists

For anyone hoping to lead a research group, this persona offers an important reminder: independence entails leadership, delegation, shaping research culture and balancing investment in others with maintenance of your own scientific expertise. Many researchers described the challenge of redefining success as their role shifted from doing research themselves to enabling the work of others. What got them to this point in their career was not always what was required to succeed in the next stage. This work is not routinely celebrated, yet it is fundamental to the long-term success of many research environments.

The independent scholar

Many early-career researchers assume that becoming established means leading ever-larger groups. However, independent scholars organize their careers around sustained intellectual contribution: their influence comes from the ideas they develop and the scholarship they produce, pushing forwards thinking in their discipline. They might collaborate widely, but their work is characterized less by organizational expansion than by continuity of intellectual purpose.

One of their greatest challenges is protecting the quality thinking time that sustained scholarship requires while juggling the pressures of increasingly fragmented academic roles. Many also described the challenge of gaining recognition for forms of contribution that do not depend on large-scale grant funding, including editorial work, intellectual leadership and the development of scholarly communities that stimulate fresh debates and directions for research.

The project architect

Some established researchers described careers centred on leading collaborative research on a large scale. Whether coordinating multidisciplinary teams, cross-institutional partnerships or large funded programmes, they bring together people, expertise and opportunities across several projects that do not necessarily form a single coherent research programme. Rather than building one permanent team, these researchers create successive collaborations that evolve as ideas, funding opportunities and partnerships emerge.

Their biggest challenge is maintaining a coherent sense of purpose while managing numerous projects, partnerships and opportunities simultaneously. As their portfolio grows, deciding which opportunities to pursue and which to decline becomes an increasingly important part of their professional development.