Career Strategies for Higher Education Teachers

The article analyses autobiographical essays on key career stages and typical career paths written by Russian university teachers. Motives and attitudes influencing their decisions whether to continue or finish their careers are identified. The article studies career strategies and motivation of academic and teaching staff to be involved in the academic labour market. Based on these results, three key career tracks are formed: 1) intracorporate (classical inbreeding) – university graduates are employed in the same university they graduated from; 2) intraprofessional – university graduates choose to work in the academic field outside their alma mater; 3) mixed (intercorporate) – university graduates may leave the academic field immediately after graduation or sometime later, but then return to the field of higher education as members of academic and teaching staff. The study of the autobiographical essays of academic and teaching staff in higher education has shown that there are eight stages of academic career related to: obtaining higher education, having work experience and subsequent employment, obtaining a Candidate of Sciences Degree or second higher education, career changes after defending a post-graduate thesis, obtaining a PhD and subsequent career changes and becoming a corresponding member or an academician at the state academy of sciences. These stages create a fork in the road (potential opportunity) for academic and teaching staff to follow or to change their career paths. The study was conducted using the method of semi-formalised expert interview with 86 members of academic and teaching staff from five Russian universities – Tyumen State University, Tomsk State University, St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, National Research Nuclear University (MEPhI).