Cannot face going back to academic role

I left academia five years ago and never looked back. I was feeling as you are feeling now and it's a horrible feeling. I am earning far more for far less as well which is great. Lecturing was really demanding without three children but now my work life balance is great so the grass could be greener if you decide to change careers. Good luck with it all

Can you fund a lab manager out of one of your grants? Our larger groups have lab/project managers who look after budget, lab facilities, training for PhDs and postdocs as well as grantsmanship (the boring nonsense like putting together consumables and salary budgets). It massively helps with workload around the day to day running of a group.

I sympathise- I spent 6 months of last year dealing with an HR nightmare that would have been completely avoidable if we had a functional HR department. Our central “support” facilities are shocking.

You all work in some rotten places. My institution is in a big crisis and there is much crap and extra work to come, but I can honestly say, apart from one really difficult PhD student about to submit and a couple of requests for references, it has been silent on the email since 17 Dec. I pity you. Maybe you'd should come to our place, if it we weren't massively contracting, because of the crap ways govt policy has hit out slightly specific delivery mode.

@GCAcademic I totally get how shit it is but… why don’t you just not read your emails? I get snotty emails off students every weekend but I don’t read them and let them ruin my time off (I read them on Mondays so I can have a shitty start to the week, ha). I just don’t check it. Or even if I am doing some work on the weekends, it tends to be specific project work and if I need to go into my emails for something I just don’t read the ones that aren’t relevant for what I’m working on that day.

Academic work is like a gas that will expand to take up the time that you allow it. It’s shit but you have to be disciplined in ringfencing your own time for family, hobbies, etc.

[quote Newnews]@GCAcademic I totally get how shit it is but… why don’t you just not read your emails? I get snotty emails off students every weekend but I don’t read them and let them ruin my time off (I read them on Mondays so I can have a shitty start to the week, ha). I just don’t check it. Or even if I am doing some work on the weekends, it tends to be specific project work and if I need to go into my emails for something I just don’t read the ones that aren’t relevant for what I’m working on that day.

Academic work is like a gas that will expand to take up the time that you allow it. It’s shit but you have to be disciplined in ringfencing your own time for family, hobbies, etc.[/quote]
It’s not that simple, unfortunately. First, there’s an expectation from senior management that HoDs don’t disconnect entirely over Christmas. It was even suggested by one of them that a committee I’m on should convene between Xmas and NY due to an emergency issue. There is a specific situation my department has on its plate at the moment which is a crisis one, and unusually has meant that I can’t properly disconnect the email. Hopefully next Christmas will be different.

First, there’s an expectation from senior management that HoDs don’t disconnect entirely over Christmas. It was even suggested by one of them that a committee I’m on should convene between Xmas and NY due to an emergency issue.

I am senior management. There is no expectation in my university that HoDs would read or respond to emails over Christmas. And we certainly have departments with serious ongoing issues, including suicidal staff/students.

I have been reading my own emails but I have deliberately not replied to students or unreasonable requests from staff sent over this period.

I do think female staff take on a lot more than male staff & that we need to learn to copy them and say no more.

Thank you for this post - the past few months I have been sick of my job in and pursuing academia roles. Having just been turned down for one you have made me feel like maybe it was a good thing after all.

Sorry to hear you are unhappy I feel like someone hit the nail on the head earlier saying at some point we may just long for a change. Perhaps during the craziness of the pandemic is not the best time to go through with such big decisions.

Good luck with starting to say no - its something I resolved to do last year and didn't stick to so am going to make it a resolution again.

[quote Marasme]@HandScreen - I do work with other academics, of course, but my junior colleagues (lecturers, senior lecturers) are not "my" juniors and they have no direct role within my own research group. That would be really unusual at my uni. These other academics most often have their own groups, their own challenges with HR, legal, finance and funders.

The only thing half dumpable on others, that i have partially "redistributed" is marking and course leadership, when new colleagues were recruited to our college.[/quote]
Yes, it would be unusual in any uni to had direct reports on the academic staff when you are not in management. I meant that you made it sound as if you lead a research lab/group. Surely some of the newer, more junior academic staff can take some duties associated with your lab? Or are you just having a general grumble that you feel academics are over-worked (which is OK too, of course!)?

You could always agree with a colleague that they will co-lead your research group? They get half the kudos, and share the burdon.

Research groups don’t contain lecturers - just PhD and postdocs. Well, I’ve never seen one in the uk that contains lecturers other than the lab head.

You'd be welcomed with open arms in the civil service, have you considered it? Each department is different but there is usually a large research and analysis section and you wouldn't need to retrain at all. Work life balance is really good. My department currently has posts for academics that are 50% in a civil service role 50% remaining in their academic role if you wanted to try it out, I'm sure other departments have similar roles.

Hi all, I am in the same boat as some of you. Full professor, HoD, and it feels like the job has become less and less fun and engaging over the last few years. Some of it is intrinsic to progression in a large institution. Some of it is due to my personality (I easily get bored when having to repeat tasks, the fist time teaching a new module/course is fun but after that it gets more and more boring). And the pandemic is also not helping, as it indeed has taken away the perks of my job (conferences, meetings, travel, etc.). It's also still so hard to turn way from the constant demands from students and management. I still fondly remember the time I had an operation a few years ago which meant I had to take a month off, it was bliss despite all the issues with recovery, best time of my life! (Which is really sad, it you think about it). It's also a bit sad that I have that career that so many of my students and postdocs dream about, and I'm not happy anymore.

Like Marasme, I used to spend my time off doing pet projects and/or writing grants (like Christmas 2020, which I spent writing research projects to get funding for new PhD students, and received NO funding at all to reward these efforts), but I don't have the energy any more and just want to switch off completely. Many of these pet project were not that successful, or thwarted by the pandemic. I am currently thinking hard about how I want to spend the next 25 years of my working life. I don't want to just repeat each year as I do now. I'd like a new challenge, e.g., consultancy, starting a new business, or even retraining and changing direction completely. I've started coaching, which is paid for by my university, and they really want me to focus on admin based 'leadership projects', while I'd rather talk about taking a new direction for my career.

For those who have successfully managed to turn your career around, what did you do? I've started talking to people more about possibilities, joined linked-in, and am doing some online courses to see what I like. I'm hoping to have taken some steps towards really changing my career path by the end of 2022.

MulchSqulch: which department are you in (if that is not too identifying?). I thought about the civil service before, but am not sure where someone like me would fit in.

I name change a lot so I don't mind saying, I'm in DWP, not a great reputation as a department but a really good research department. I'm in a fairly junior research role but there are researchers all the way up to Senior Civil Servants who manage a division of researchers. They're really keen to get researchers in who have external academic experience to the more senior roles too to bring in varied expertise and and new methods. There's a big focus on career progression and CPD, laterally as well as upwards. People are encouraged to move roles, teams and even departments frequently so the role you go in at is less important than working out which grade would suit you best as a starting point. It's a genuinely flexible place to work where working to your contracted hours is emphasised all the way up the chain. There's certainly things I miss about working in a university it's a very different way to work but since having kids the work-life balance is priceless and I really enjoy my job.

I find the discussion on groups interesting. I think it’s questionable how close ‘research groups’ ever were for academics, but they were a big thing when I did my PhD ~20 years ago. Your first port of call was always the group. That’s all gone now (other than in name in my place). Everyone is expected to do everything. Independence is the aim rather than being part of a team. To me this is driven by changes to fellowships and similar, the strategy of supporting stars from 10 years ago or so which was always misguided.

Otherwise a lot of the points on this thread resonate with me. Mainly the growing realisation that it’s time to go and do something else (if only I knew what).