Pathfinder Career Narratives is an ongoing series tracking the career choices and experiences of doctoral graduates. You can see all of the posts in the series here. You can find all of the Pathfinder resources and opportunities here. Today’s blog is written by Dr Andrew Struan, Head of Student Learning Development at the University of Glasgow. You can find Dr Struan on LinkedIn here and on Twitter here, and he discusses some of his work on YouTube here.
Name: Andrew Struan
Doctorate subject area, and year of completion: History, 2010
Role and employer: Head of Student Learning Development, University of Glasgow
Approximate salary bracket of this type of role: £60,000-£70,000 per annum
I am the Head of Student Learning Development at the University of Glasgow. Learning Development (LD) is a specific area of work within Higher Education: LDers work directly with students to improve all areas of academic literacies, academic work, assessments, and other elements of students’ academic life. We come from all different kinds of backgrounds, but our work tends to be focused on improving the student experience and on working within and across HEIs to better embed the development of our students’ skills, capacities and confidence.
I am hugely passionate about the work I do: my work and my team make concrete, tangible benefit to the lives of our students through a variety of initiatives, projects, work, and relationships. I wouldn’t change what I do. However, I never planned from the outset of my journey as a researcher to work in this field in any way. I stumbled into this line of work after many years of research and teaching across multiple institutions.
Taking us back to my pre-LD days, my degrees are all in Modern History. My PhD looked at British politics, and British politicians, around the time of the American Revolution. In particular, I looked at the ways in which networks of knowledge and experience influenced the way in which the British Parliament responded to the events in the American colonies throughout the 1760s and 70s (long story short: they didn’t really, probably, but maybe they did more in the 1760s than the 1770s).
Throughout my PhD, I taught a lot. I taught in my subject, I taught IT skills, I taught students with disabilities, I taught in widening participation, I taught research methods. I love teaching. I also had a few jobs working on research projects: I worked for Oxford University as an academic editor for a JISC-funded project on digital research resources; I worked for Edinburgh University on a similar project; I did bits and pieces around Glasgow University; I was involved in a variety of research projects on Parliamentary history and political discourse. It was this variety of jobs that prepared me for the job market post-PhD, and it was this variety of jobs that prepared me for what the world of work is like after the PhD.
My first job out of my PhD was as a Lecturer in International History and Politics in Ireland. I interviewed for the post on the Thursday and started the job (and moved to Ireland) the following Monday. I pulled an Honours course together for that Monday afternoon (I was stressed). The post was just for an academic year; I had my second job lined up already. I left Ireland and moved to the United States: I worked at the University of Virginia as a Research Fellow for just over a year. This post-doc confirmed with me that I wasn’t as interested in being the lone-wolf researcher-academic as I was working more with students, teaching, and working directly with others. I loved living in the US, but I missed teaching and collaborative working. The work I’d done through my PhD – but the work that wasn’t my PhD itself – was what I missed so much.
I came back to Scotland and to the University of Glasgow upon finishing my post-doc and immediately started in Learning Development. I applied for a post in the LD team at Glasgow, and I haven’t left since. At the time, LD wasn’t quite as defined an area of work as it now is, and there was plenty of flexibility in what the jobs could look like.
I never considered my new role as a break from academia as such. Instead, the job allowed me to work on what I loved most and to work in the ways I’d become used to as a PhD student, lecturer and post-doc. My research took a temporary backseat as I focused on new teaching and a new role. Since then, I’ve moved up in the department: I worked for a few years as a Learning Developer, before moving into managing a part of the team, and I’m now the head of department with strategic and operational responsibility for everything we do across all of Glasgow’s 35k-ish students.
I’ve found that so many of the skills and approaches I picked up through my PhD have been crucial to my work in LD. Most importantly, my large teaching portfolio throughout my PhD meant that I was able to immediately jump into teaching without any concern. Secondly, the ability to multitask, prioritise, jump from one task to another, and focus on details all have served me fantastically well. I learned these skills through my research and I use them every day.
The LDers who work in my team are all PhDs and have all consciously made the move from subject-based research into a Learning and Teaching role. Most of the stories are similar to mine: a passion for working with students, the desire to improve the student experience, a feeling that only-research wasn’t enough, and the desire to have an impact.
The challenges of working in a purely Learning and Teaching role can be: the loss of identity as a researcher; the feeling, somewhere at the back of your head at 02:00 as you try to fall asleep, that somehow, your PhD and research potential were wasted and you should be Changing The World Of Knowledge; and the difficulties of watching others progress in their research careers when you opted to not follow that path.
For me, the solution to all of these can be found in one place: I stay research active, but I have changed my focus. My research in my subject background is less now than my research into Learning and Teaching. I’ve been able to apply all of the research training, research rigour, etc., to Learning and Teaching Research. Moving into a new area has been a tough, slow process (I was not an education expert in any way before I started, and I have had to learn the quirks of the subject as I’ve gone along), but the benefits are increased legitimacy, increased visibility, and increased impact.
My advice for anyone looking to move into a purely Learning and Teaching-related role is: do it if it’s the thing you know you love, but be ready to cast off your identity as a researcher. Increasingly, HEIs are filled with people in third-space roles who have PhDs, but who are not active researchers. In this world, your research topic doesn’t matter. Instead, what matters are your skills, your approach, your aptitude, and your ability. Nobody cares if your research was groundbreaking; instead, they care about what you can do now, what impact it’ll have, and that you have a practical, time-bound solution to a specific problem.
Think of the PhD, and maybe even the first post-doc or first post-PhD job, as training opportunities for this type of work. Rather than training opportunities in research-only, try to take hold of as many HEI-related opportunities as possible. I’ve seen many job applications from folks who have done their PhD and not a lot else. These people don’t have the evidence of the transferable skills that are so desirable out of the PhD: project management, group and teamwork, bigger picture-thinking, multi-tasking on a variety of competing priorities, and the ability to integrate their work into a wider team. I’m sure often that the PhD has given them some of these, but there’s more limited ability to evidence and discuss them. These extra pieces of work are essential to building a more well-rounded CV that’ll sparkle above and on top of the rest.
Learning and Teaching roles are fantastic, brilliant opportunities that allow us to take many of the skills and attributes that we develop as researchers and apply them directly to a new context. Don’t be shy in putting the important, valued skills you’ve developed as a researcher to new use and in a new environment. Those skills are wanted, are needed, and are valuable.
Learning and Teaching is at the heart of many institutions, and our focus as researchers should be on improving the way in which we interact with our students, and the benefits we bring to our student experience, in all cases whatsoever.
The Auditorium: a research culture and researcher development blog 