Watching the research job vacancies disappear from university websites feels like it has become something of an obsession for John D. Howard.

In a year of searching for a new role since leaving the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the contraction in opportunities has been obvious, the biochemist told Times Higher Education.

¡°A year ago, if you went to the University of Liverpool website and clicked ¡®show me all the research positions¡¯, there would have been about 40 or 50 posts. Last week, there were 15 across the whole university,¡± he said.

Neighbouring Liverpool John Moores University ¡°used to have a dozen or so and now there¡¯s maybe four, and three are part-time. Chester and Edge Hill used to have a few occasionally; they¡¯ve had nothing at all recently. Even Manchester¡¯s endless list of things is a lot shorter now. Every time you go back and look, the number has shrunk again.¡±

ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

It¡¯s a familiar story for many thousands of academics who have recently left roles at UK universities, either via redundancy or, like Howard, by coming to the end of a fixed-term contract. Conservative estimates put the number of job losses this year alone at 10,000, and that¡¯s just the latest figure in a crisis that dates back at least until inflation started soaring in 2022.

With no universities in a buoyant state, the options for academics hoping to continue their careers elsewhere are limited. Some have managed to land new full-time academic jobs, even if those jobs aren¡¯t always an exact fit to their area of expertise. Others have moved into lecturing work paid by the hour. Many more still are resigned to moving into wholly new careers.

ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

Howard hasn¡¯t yet given up hope of remaining in academia, but even when he does see a job he can apply for, he is pessimistic about landing it.

¡°Friends at universities still hiring people say: ¡®We used to have 10 candidates we could interview out of 30 or 40 applicants. Now we have 80 to a few hundred [applicants] and there?are 20 or 30 people we could shortlist,¡¯¡± he said. ¡°It feels like it¡¯s on a coin flip as to who gets the interviews¡­They are going through the fine print to make decisions between people who are equally qualified for the role.¡±?

It is those just starting out in their careers that Kate Aughterson feels for the most.

The blow of her own enforced exit from the University of Brighton in the autumn of 2023, after 20 years as a lecturer in English literature, was somewhat cushioned by being able to draw on her retirement income via the Teachers¡¯ Pension Scheme ¨C even if it offered her ¡°nothing like the income I would have anticipated had I been able to work until 67¡±.

Aughterson considered going abroad to continue her academic career, applying for 30 jobs around the world, but eventually secured some online part-time teaching work for a private business school in London.

When that ¡°petered out¡±, she secured a one-year post at the University of Manchester in an area slightly outside of her area of expertise. That post ends this summer and she doesn¡¯t know what she will do after that.

¡°I suspect it is quite typical of many people¡¯s experience,¡± Aughterson said, of her Manchester post. ¡°You are helicoptered in to meet a particular need. There are lots of experienced academics around and many people are able to do that and get up to speed quickly.¡±

Such roles involve high teaching loads and their short duration undermines the continuity of any associated research projects. What¡¯s more, they are becoming harder to come by as more and more people flood the jobs market.?

ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

The precarity, Aughterson said, reminds her of being an early-career researcher. ¡°It is almost like going back to the status you had at PhD level,¡± she said. ¡°At the end of your career, you are in this precarious position as if you were 25.¡±

Academics who jump into new professions may also find themselves back at the skill level of a twentysomething-year-old, warned Jameson Tucker, formerly a lecturer in early modern European history at the University of Plymouth.

Source:?

Getty Images montage

When he left in a round of redundancies during the summer of 2023, options to pick up his academic career elsewhere were limited. ¡°I¡¯m¡­aware that no history departments are doing any serious hiring,¡± he said. ¡°And if they were, they would be much more inclined to [hire] a just-coming-on-stream researcher. I have been on a fair number of hiring panels myself, and I knew I wasn¡¯t in with much of a shout there.¡±

Instead, Tucker found a post at Birmingham City University working with students to improve their academic skills ¨C or ¡°helping accounting students write essays¡± as he puts it.

Birmingham City doesn¡¯t have a history department and he has no real capacity to do research or undertake the module design and course leadership he did at Plymouth. Still, the familiarity of being in a university is somewhat comforting.

¡°It is nice to not be completely raw. I don¡¯t have a problem with looking for other jobs but the idea of starting afresh is a little unnerving,¡± he admitted. ¡°If I joined the Civil Service, for example, I would¡­have very little practical experience beyond what a fresh 22-year-old graduate would have. Whereas in academia I do have a lot to draw on. I know how university systems work. I know the rules and regulations. I can give students useful advice.¡±

Yet he doubts that he will ever go back into a mainstream academic role. ¡°Even if in 10 years from now, we were somehow back in the boom days, there will be a lot of 28-35-year-old newly minted PhDs out there as well,¡± he points out.?¡°We¡¯d joke at Plymouth that we¡¯d find it hard to be hired for our own jobs now. There is always someone new coming through. There will be a lot of people in the queue.¡±

Academics often assume that former professional services staff ¨C who have been hit just as hard, if not harder, by the current redundancy wave ¨C are in a better position to land another job. However, this is not necessarily the case, said a former administrative manager of an academic department, who is still searching for work and who prefers to remain anonymous due to the terms of her departure.

She said there are barely any jobs inside higher education for professional services staff as many universities have moved to centralise their administrative functions. But the specificities of the university sector also make it hard to compete when applying for roles in other sectors, she added.

The manager, who left at the start of the current wave of redundancies, said she had ¡°not anticipated how quickly things would fall apart across the board¡± in the UK sector and how ¡°incredibly difficult¡± it would be to secure a new role. And as more and more staff join her in professional limbo, she believes universities have a duty to do more to help them ¨C by offering opportunities to retrain or other forms of career advice and guidance.

ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

Aughterson said three of her former colleagues have not found new posts, which has left them ¡°traumatised¡±. Others are retraining, and some are taking on hourly-paid work. Yet despite their troubles, they also have a feeling that they are better off leaving behind an academic world of ¡°mergers, huge lectures and factory conditions¡±.

That is also the case for Sandra Barkhof, a former lecturer in modern history at Plymouth who was laid off at the same time as Tucker.?Needing to stay in the south-west for family reasons and with no other history departments close by, she instead found a job in the Civil Service. The switch, she said, has been both ¡°exciting and scary¡±.

¡°I had been in academia all my life and worked as a lecturer for the past 20 years. I knew what I was doing. I knew all the rules and regulations and ways of doing things.?It is a certain way of life. You feel you are ill-prepared for something different and like you are leaving all your friends and family behind.¡±

While she misses teaching students, however, she said leaving academia has generally been positive for her ¨C not least the regular working hours and being freed from the endless cycle of grant applications.

Barkhof¡¯s new role still has a research element, and she said many academics will similarly find that the skills they have are, in reality, transferable to other sectors ¨C if they are prepared to consider posts that may at first seem out of their area of expertise.

¡°I keep saying to all my former colleagues that there is life after academia,¡± she said. ¡°There are other things out there. It is not the end of the world.¡±

?

¡°You need a plan B in case academia doesn¡¯t work out.¡±

This was a piece of advice I always gave my PhD students, little knowing that soon I would need a plan B of my own.

I was put at risk of redundancy in November 2023, barely 10 weeks after the end of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. My department, where I held a professorship, was to be closed, and the staff team was divided into two groups: those who would be kept on for the ¡°teach out¡± and those who would be made redundant as soon as the year¡¯s teaching was done. The policy was to cut from the top: those who were most senior, experienced and expensive were dispensed with first.

I was lucky enough to secure a 13-month salaried research residency at a London conservatoire and have also been appointed to a senior research fellowship at an Oxford college. Although non-stipendiary, these positions feed me, support my research and provide me with a welcoming community and an ongoing foothold in academia. I am extremely grateful for these lifelines. This August, nevertheless, I will find myself salary-less, for the first time since 2001, when my post at the conservatoire ends.

Of course, I am far from alone, with countless cuts and closures happening across the country in multiple disciplines. A new problem is rapidly emerging: precarity for academics at all career stages, which is devastating for the individuals involved and represents a shocking haemorrhaging of experience and expertise from the sector. ?

Source:?

Getty Images montage

It goes without saying that there are very few academic jobs to apply for, as departments rely on ¡°natural wastage¡± to reduce their salary bill or appoint only at the junior level. An average keyword search for my discipline on jobs.ac.uk typically brings up about 35 hits, but only two or three at most will be for proper academic posts, usually requiring a niche specialism that is statistically unlikely to be yours.

Moreover, ties and commitments ¨C to partners, children and/or elderly parents ¨C make it unrealistic for most of us to drop everything and move to the other end of the country or abroad to take up a different position.

Yet retirement may be 15 years away and mortgages still sizeable. Most of us will find ourselves ineligible for unemployment benefits and in receipt only of the statutory minimum redundancy payout. So we must find an alternative way to make a living.

Alternative career options for arts and humanities academics, who cannot ¡°go into industry¡± like scientists, are limited, however, even if you disregard the widespread workplace ageism that makes the idea of reinventing yourself professionally in your fifties so daunting.

School teaching might be a possibility, though only if your field maps neatly on to the school curriculum (mine, which sits between two disciplines, would not). A younger colleague who was disillusioned with academia retrained as a civil servant, but this might be difficult in your fifties. Some academics are moving into university administration, where opportunities remain reasonably plentiful. This is a potentially promising strategy, which could enable a return to academia as a manager further down the line.

There are a few modest things the academy itself could do to help. Fellowships and prizes are almost always restricted to early-career researchers, and most funding schemes only cover research expenses and teaching buy-outs and are only open to those who already have an academic post (and salary). In the current climate, surely we need something akin to the Leverhulme and British Academy postdoctoral fellowships (which cover salary) for senior scholars at risk of otherwise being forced out of academia.

Furthermore, the Research Excellence Framework¡¯s non-portability rule ¨C which allows universities to retain the credit for the work of academics they have laid off ¨C must surely be waived for academics who have been made redundant. If the credit went (as it used to) to their current institution instead, this would give them the agency to promote themselves as ¡°REF hires¡± (in the unlikely event that anywhere is hiring).

My own Plan B, for the time being, is to combine continued academic research with freelance writing of various types. I have been building up this sideline for years and relish the creative freedoms it gives me.

However, it would be optimistic to suppose I will be able to earn even a third of my professorial salary this way. So the job hunt goes on.

ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

Alexandra Wilson is a musicologist and cultural historian.