Careers within academia

• Research intensive universities – In the UK a group of 24 Universities form the Russell Group, defining themselves as research intensive universities (although they still care about delivering excellent teaching).
• Teaching focused universities – Teaching focused universities in the UK are part of groups such as the Universities Alliance, Million+ and GuildHE. Whilst they place less emphasis on research, they also host excellent and active research.
• Cathedrals Group – A number of universities in the UK form the Cathedral’s Group which unite on the grounds of faith and ethics. They are a mix of teaching and research focussed institutions.
• Research Institutes, Facilities and Centres – There are a number of places which academics and postdocs may be employed that often have a very narrow remit or well-defined research focus (for example the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Francis Crick institute). They typically do not teach undergraduate students, but may host PGR students working towards their PhD.
• Further Education Institutions – Further education includes any study after secondary education that’s not part of higher education. Further education colleges offer courses including A-levels, BTECs and T-levels, however many also provide undergraduate programmes. These can include Higher National Certificates (Level 4) and Foundation degrees (Level 5).

A ‘lectureship’ is the typical mid-career goal most postdocs wanting a career in academia have in mind. Most lecturers in the UK are responsible for both teaching students and pursuing their own research, but the balance of these varies based on the institution, the hiring department’s needs and any research funding gained. There are also academic lectureship roles which are teaching-only, with no time or resources formally allocated to research. In the UK career progression from lecturer typically goes Senior Lecturer, Reader, Professor.

In addition to the role of lecturer there are other academic and research adjacent roles within Higher Education:

• ‘Third space’ roles sit between purely academic and professional service career paths, working on institutional projects such as academic development or widening access (Denney, 2021). 
• Research coordinator roles (can be permanent but aren’t always) typically found in a large research groups or overseeing a large project, can be a type of senior postdoc role, still working beneath an overall PI but may oversee/direct other postdocs and PhD students. 
• Staff scientist type roles (generally less common and we aren’t aware of a non-science equivalent role). 
• Lab coordinator/lab technician/other technician or technical roles. 
• Project management of a research project (sometimes these can be academic). 
• Institutional strategic research coordinator, developer and manager roles. 
• Developmental roles like research staff development and organisational development. 

If your postdoc is interested in becoming a lecturer at a higher education institution there are a number of routes they could take. The two most common are to obtain an independent fellowship or apply directly for a lectureship position. 

Fellowships are funded short-term opportunities lasting between a few months and five+ years. Whilst some fellowships are essentially a postdoc role in all but name (led by a principal investigator), independent fellows have obtained their own research funding to develop their own research (the funding could be from a funding body or the host organisation). Some independent fellowships are tenure-tracked, meaning that if the fellow meets all the appropriate requirements they’ll be offered a tenured faculty academic position at the end of the fellowship. Whilst far from essential, successfully obtaining an independent fellowship, whether tenure-tracked or not, is viewed as helpful in securing a tenured academic position. 

However, these aren’t the only two routes and one study suggests that a third of tenured academics have not followed the traditional academic pipeline (Edwards et al. 2021). For instance, your postdoc could work as a lecturer at a further education institution and later cross back into higher education. Alternatively, your postdoc might move beyond academia and later return, their experiences viewed as equivalent to that gained by being a postdoc, fellow or lecturer.