The aim of this course was to develop a deeper understanding of your working context as a starting point for creating a sustainable academic career.
You were going to do this through the following objectives:
- Describe your working context
- Identify a pressing problem to focus your career on
- Build routines that help master your craft
- Strategically position yourself within professional networks
- Embed self-care into your career development
Overview of lessons
The first lesson in this course helped you to reflect on the working paradigm that positions your career in a larger context. It’s easy - and comfortable - being a passive bystander to our careers, where things happen to us. By examining our values and beliefs we can develop insight into where we are in our career progression, as well as how to get where we want to be. In order to kick-start that process, it may be necessary to shift paradigms, to one where we are active agents in our career development. This lesson was about situating our careers within a bigger context.
Over time we can all fall into the trap of simply ticking items off a list; prepare lecture, complete report, answer emails. Even though we may be ‘productive’ in this sense, there’s a dissatisfaction that comes from a disconnect between your daily work and a larger purpose. We all want meaningful lives, and making even small contributions to addressing big, pressing problems can help us feel like our work matters.
The third lesson focused on establishing routines to help master the craft of knowledge work. An emphasis on excellence as the result of small, iterative improvements over time, showed that high-value outputs can come from daily rituals where results compound over time. Academics need to focus on skill development in the same way that musicians and athletes build routines to improve performance.
But skills alone aren’t enough to really move pressing problems forward. Lesson Four was about strategically positioning yourself within professional networks to develop and amplify your skills. Knowing what you can contribute, and what you need to improve, can help identify which learning networks will yield the biggest return on the time you invest.
The final lesson in this course aimed to embed self-care into your career development. Many academics believe the key to success is simply to work harder. But we can’t sustain a productive schedule without restorative breaks. We need periods of down-time built into our schedules. These periods of rest aren’t rewards for the work we’ve done; they’re the foundation of the creative and important work we’re still going to do.
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