The Researchers' Newsletter – Oct 2025
Your research career: identity and resilience
A research career is no longer, if it ever was, a straightforward linear progression where you can build a career from an early stable foundation.
Your research career: identity and resilience
A research career is no longer, if it ever was, a straightforward linear progression where you can build a career from an early stable foundation.
It is now, especially post-pandemic, more about looking at the opportunities that you have before you, within the context of your career plan as a ‘living document’, and being primarily focussed on attaining the best opportunity, for you, right now - at the stage of career you are at, given the other parts of your work and personal life.
Then that research work becomes the new base from which to build your next research step or research career step. Always with the end in mind, as set out in your plans, but with all the flexibility and adaptability that a global, social media savvy, collaborative person can muster given their work and life circumstances.
The precarity of employment for many researchers is a challenge in trying to build and strengthen a career and also in building resilience.
Research Identity
As with all career issues your ability to navigate between career options and to do so with purpose and resilience is largely dependent on the identity that you hold for yourself (in your career and in your wider life).
This identity is the yardstick by which you measure career options and opportunities, it is your safety blanket if you are temporarily unable to pursue your career and it is a rationale for saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the many opportunities that may come your way.
An identity that acknowledges the stage of life you are at and your wider life context will assist you to decide what you can and can’t focus on.
An identity is a narrative, a story, that you have consciously written. Your focus will be on how your research narrative is moving with each activity you complete.
One way to start this journey is to create your identity narrative as a living statement that you can tailor to reflect the stage of life you are at and your wider life context. You don’t write those things in the identity, because it is your research identity, but you write taking those non-work things into account.
Research Resilience
Another helpful perspective is treating each piece of your research work as the new base from which to build your next research step or research career step, always with the end in mind.
This builds in a regular and ongoing re-assessment of your options and potential next steps. It also implies a non-linear path for most people, where opportunities are assessed in light of the prior piece of successful or unsuccessful activity.
You won’t, for example, apply for a grant without knowing what success will mean for your research and for your research career. Similarly you will always have a ‘plan B’ in place for the inevitable unsuccessful grant applications.
This can mean that your internal yardstick about your success is under constant re-assessment as part of a step by step, and very flexible process of ‘scaffolding’ off your previous successes. You can test this internal yardstick against external benchmarks by looking at what is required for career progression, by feedback from your formal supervisor (in the context of any workload models) and by seeking feedback from trusted colleagues.
In summary, it can be helpful to bed your resilience on a clear research identity and by using a ‘scaffolding’ approach to your next research steps. This in concert with other formal, informal and non-formal support mechanisms can allow for a more realistic but tested internal yardstick for testing your progress.
Next steps: RCA coaches focus on assisting people to establish their research identity, to work through their competing demands and to devise strategies to manage demands to achieve their research goals. RCA has written materials that you can access to complement this coaching.