From caring burdens to pension worries, the life of the older early career researcher is fraught with challenge while they queue for an already precarious career. Here, an older ECR, who has chosen to remain anonymous, shines a light on this little studied demographic

After a career of more than five years, and more than 10 years after completing my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree, I decided to fulfil my childhood dream of becoming a philosopher and enrolled for my PhD. This signalled the start of my journey as an older early career researcher (ECR). Even such an account of my journey is too linear, obscuring the four years it took to get the courage to complete and submit the PhD proposal, due to anxiety over my then-young family.

My account represents the lived experience of older ECRs, whose route to the academic career is non-traditional and is less studied in the UK. Academic early career is generally defined as “research capability in the five years following PhD completion”, with an assumption of a continuous research path, from PhD to becoming a professor, which is known as a pipeline. Research examining the lived experience of ECRs in the UK has focused on the precarity of their experience. Such precarity is defined by short-term and insecure contracts, or what is seen as the post-doctoral treadmill of moving between short-term or insecure contracts without transitioning into a full academic position. However, these discussions on ECR precarity tend to homogenise the experience of diversely located ECRs and need to be nuanced. Further, the pipeline metaphor can be misleading, obscuring the multiple entry and exit points of academic careers. Here, I focus on the lived experience of precarity for these academics that I loosely refer to as older ECRs, or those who start academic careers later in life. They are also referred to as ECRs on a second career or late-career ECRs.

Stagnating in the queue

My starting point is the burden of family care for many older ECRs. Research shows that the increased casualisation, coupled with the terrors of performativity, in the neoliberal university in terms of pressure to publish and other metrics of success, force many ECRs to delay families. Further, the marketisation of university culture, with academics expected to achieve more with less time, implies less time for the family. For those older ECRs who enter the academy already encumbered by caring and family responsibilities, including care for children and aging parents, the challenges of precarity are accentuated. Indeed, to qualify Guy Standing’s view, for the family-encumbered eternal supplicants, constantly looking for jobs is a burdening experience. In a context where the principles of meritocracy in the form of citations and grants secured have disciplined everyone, breaks to care for the family may be a disadvantage, and ultimately this might mean stagnating in the queue.

ECRs globally, but specifically in the UK context, are seen as cruelly optimistic for staying in the queue of a precarious career while hoping to get a permanent position; the hallowed promise of a good life. However, research elsewhere reveals nuanced differences between older and young ECRs. For example, Bexley and Richardson established that, in Australia, the younger ECRs in STEM were more likely to plan to leave academia than older colleagues who felt tied by familial and other considerations. The family also presents challenges of geographical mobility, a valued route to advancement in the UK and elsewhere. As a result, some older ECRs find it difficult to relocate institutionally or internationally to avoid uprooting their already established families.

Pension anxiety

Then there is the daily anxiety and angst that characterise the experience of older ECRs in the academy. First is the stress about the future and job security as an older ECR when reaching retirement age without having achieved or progressed through the pipeline. Research in Australia revealed this palpable anxiety by one ECR:

“You have to accept pretty much that, that’s the end of your career, you know. And the closer to 60 I get, because I’m 58 this year… I have to think, well perhaps it’s true, maybe it really is close to the end of my useful working life, I just have to accept it.”

Within the context of Covid-19 disruptions in UK universities, Fien and others opined that some ECRs were likely to perish before they publish. The same might be said of some older ECRs, who fail to advance or do not see the possibility of advancing in their career. Anxiety over pensions also came through in discussions I had with colleagues, revealing the daily dread around the potential impact of insecure employment on retirement benefits.

Wilted flowers of past success

My experience working as an ECRs’ representative in two universities reveals that there is a sense of a wasted past life, fuelled by what I see as the wilting flowers of past success. This is because most universities use PhD, and teaching and research in the university, as benchmarks for academic expertise, and previous experience rarely leads to secure employment. Indeed, career consultants would advise you to leave out most pre-PhD expertise and awards. There is also the stress when, for example, past experience is seen as a problem in some UK contexts.

Based on my coffee room conversations with ECRs, the stress of older ECRs is accentuated by the daily disciplining, albeit unwittingly, in the corridors of the university. They report glib comments by colleagues, some senior, that within the context of precarity, the older ECRs should go back to their “former lucrative jobs”. Such gatekeeping and expectations of return occlude the motivations these scholars had for joining the academy. Getting into the academy after years of practice may be guided by the need for answers to some of the questions older ECRs have encountered in their practice or what the feminist scholar bell hooks calls turning to theory for healing. Exiting the academy may deny the breath of fresh air that such researchers wanted, but one can also say that it reveals the awful naiveté of such hope in the first place.

Calling for solidarity

While pre-doctoral experience may be enriching to older ECRs’ PhD research, and that frocking up in new academic robes with older children by the side can be a cause for celebration, the subsequent journey may be the opposite. According to Fraser and Gordon, shorthand phrases, such as the precarious ECR, carry unexamined assumptions and connotations and mask differences. Exposing the category to scrutiny can open up new ways of understanding the lived experience of diverse ECRs. There is a need for sustained engagement on how diverse life course characteristics intersect with other axes of difference such as race, nationality, gender and even academic pedigree, among others, to define the precarious temporalities of waiting [or not waiting] in the pipeline. It is only by being granular that universities can provide the required support to ECRs and live up to their moral responsibility of providing equal opportunities to all. The lived experience of the older ECRs, often silenced at various levels, also requires solidarity, including with colleagues, as we care for each other, and at the picket lines as we resist, but also nuance the practices of the neoliberal university that we might be complicit with.

Note: A version of this post first appeared on 15 May 2023 on the Contemporary Issues in Teaching and Learning Blog, part of the PGCertHE programme at the LSE.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ This post is opinion-based and does not reflect the views of the London School of Economics and Political Science or any of its constituent departments and divisions.    _____________________________________________________________________________________________ 

Main image: Belinda Fewings on Unsplash