ANZAM PD Session: 25/2/2025
‘Managing Career Tensions: Strategies for Making Tensions Productive, Not Destructive’
PRESENTERS
Bill Harley, University of Melbourne; Paul Hibbert, University of St Andrews; Tine Koehler, University of Melbourne; Paula O’Kane, University of Otago, Lisa Callagher, University of Auckland
SESSION DETAILS
As academics we typically work in large, complex organisations, with numerous and sometimes competing demands for our time and energy. As well as having a high degree of autonomy in some areas of our work, for example the topics we research, we are members of highly structured and often tightly managed bureaucracies and subject to numerous performance measures. The range of choices we have about how we structure our activities, the complex nature of the organisations we work in, and the pervasiveness of management systems can create significant tensions. Further, our academic careers are just one part of who we are and of our lives, adding additional complexity. Examples of the kind of tensions we confront are, how can we balance our departments’ need for us to do admin and teaching with our desire to maintain an active and meaningful research life? How can we reconcile the need for short-term research outputs to meet performance targets with the desire to do long-term projects which may not immediately bear fruit? How can we balance the need to undertake output-focused tasks and projects with the desire to maintain meaningful relationships with colleagues? How can we balance conventional career goals with our non-work activities and identities? We constantly must confront tensions such as these, as we attempt to build meaningful lives at work.