Career Conversations

Feedback from our Staff Experience Survey and from focus groups suggested that some staff felt they would benefit from informal and confidential support from senior academics, to think about their careers. The Humanities Division developed Career Conversations in collaboration with faculty academics and the Senior Tutors Committee of the Conference of Colleges.

The main aims of the scheme are:

• to deliver something that is useful and meaningful to post-holders.

• to create something that could be rolled out across other divisions and across other job roles - researchers, postdocs etc.

• to minimise the administrative burden on academics and faculty administrative teams.

To get this right, we have built an iterative process and always welcome feedback.

It is hoped that Career Conversations provide a chance to meet, informally and one-on-one, with a senior academic either in your own faculty or elsewhere, to talk about your career – where you are, where you want to be, challenges and opportunities. The senior academic is drawn from a 'pool' of supportive colleagues who will have received training in active listening and coaching techniques, and will also be able to signpost individuals to other University support. Post-holders can arrange one Career Conversation a year. This limit has been put in place for two main reasons: firstly, to reduce the potential burden for those sitting on the 'pool' of senior academics; and secondly to ensure that Career Conversations don't morph into an on-going mentoring relationship. Career Conversations could be viewed as a 'one-off mentoring meeting'.

The content of the conversation is private, and won’t be recorded, although panellists will be asked if there are overarching themes emerging from the conversations they’ve had in a given year. This is to ensure that the Humanities Division can adapt its support to the needs of our staff.

All we ask in return is that you let us know if you’ve had a career conversation, who with, and if it was useful – any other feedback is warmly welcomed, but not mandatory.

The first request for senior academic pool members went out at the very end of 2019, and at that time not all faculties felt that the Career Conversation initiative, as it stood, was right for them. This was often because the faculty had a successful internal scheme that provided a similar offer.

In 2022, the Career Conversations scheme was extended to include fixed-term researchers, as part of the University's commitment to the Researcher Concordat. Some faculties, however, have chosen to operate their own internal career development review scheme for fixed-term researchers.

This table provides an overview of who is eligible for a Career Conversation, and who should consult their faculty for access to a similar faculty-led scheme:

If you are eligible for a 'Faculty-led scheme', please contact the Head of Administration and Finance in your faculty in the first instance.

If you are eligible for a Career Conversation, and you’d like to arrange one with a senior academic (either in your faculty or elsewhere), your next steps are:

1) Take a look at the table below, and decide who you would like to talk to.

2) Email career.conversations@humanities.ox.ac.uk to request a conversation with a specific individual, or to be put in contact with someone from the table if you have no specific person in mind. We are asking you not to contact individuals directly so as not to accidentally overburden someone. There is a limit to the number of Career Conversations any one of our panel of more senior academics can take part in. Using the central email means that workload can be balanced over the group - although of course a stated preference for one member of the panel will be taken into account.

This table may not capture the full range of the senior academic pool - do get in touch with career.conversations@humanities.ox.ac.uk for more information.

We will invite you to provide feedback on whether or not the conversation is useful to you - no records of the content of individual conversations will be made unless you find it helpful to do so yourself. 

Thank you for your interest. We hope that members of the 'pool' will find their role rewarding, and to help ensure this, we provide support. We have had an established pool since the 2019/20 academic year, and as we role out Career Conversations to Departmental Lecturers from the 2022/23 academic year, we may seek to increase the number of pool members.

All pool members are supported and provided with guidance. We are developing an online workshop that will hone your active listening and coaching skills, and give you an overview of other resources at the University.

We’ve designed the Career Conversation scheme so that pool members do not have any ongoing administrative tasks. You’ll be invited to the workshop, and at the end of the year we’ll request any feedback you might want to provide us with, including any overarching issues you’ve encountered. The time involved in Career Conversations will be recognised in the Workload Tool. If you are interested in becoming a pool member, please contact your Faculty Board Chair in the first instance: nominations to the pool are managed at faculty level.

You can request a Career Conversation every year, and it will be given by someone you pick from a group (a 'pool') of about 30 senior academics from all faculties.

The appraisal is normally conducted by your Faculty Board Chair, and this year the Division has collaborated with the Senior Tutors’ Committee, so that individuals can request a college colleague to join the discussion, in recognition of the importance of the college role for many Associate Professors in the Humanities.

Both Career Conversations and academic appraisals are confidential, and neither are connected to promotions, discipline, Recognition of Distinction or REF.

Career Conversations are designed to complement, rather than to replace, more formal meetings such as IPO review meetings.

• Career Conversations are private and confidential. Members of the 'pool' are not asked about the content of specific Conversations, and no records are kept, except those kept by the individual requesting the Conversation.
• The Division will record the fact that a Conversation has taken place, and which pool member was involved, and will also simply ask if it was useful.
• Every year, the Division will request a very short report from the panellists about any overarching themes or issues. This is to ensure we can provide support, both via the Career Conversations and more widely, that meets the needs of our staff. These reports will not include any personal information.
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