Webinar invitation 2: Skinny dipping with snapping turtles: Careers in academia

Do you think universities can be better workplaces? Are you committed to attracting the best possible talent to your research groups? Do you see causes for concern and wonder how they might be addressed? If so, you’ll want to join this webinar.

During the webinar, you’re going to hear new ways to articulate the career challenges academia presents, and you’re going to hear ideas about changes that could make us better. That’s important, because universities are under tremendous pressure, and there are ways we can perform better without losing our souls.

I’ll be presenting research about people who leave academia, and I’ll be talking some about the reasons they most often cite. We’ll look at a few of those closely. Young men and women are leaving us, but they leave for different reasons, so we’ll tease some of that apart.

But we won’t look at just the problems. I’m going to present some research, too, on how things might be better. I’ll tell you about a project I’ve been part of (along with colleagues in Tromsø and at The Performance Group) in which we talked with people leading so-called Centers of Excellence here in Norway. We asked them what kind of leadership they use, and what they think is necessary in universities. The results are strong, clear and interesting!

I speak widely on how to build an academic career at a university, describing the current situation as I see it, and offering proposals about how to become better. I’d like to share some of these thoughts with you and to hear your experiences and reactions.

To achieve that, I’ll be hosting a one-hour free webinar on May 23rd, entitled “Skinny dipping with snapping turtles: Careers in academia.”

To listen to this talk, to see the slides, and to have the opportunity to send in “live” questions, you need to sign up for the webinar. Doing so gets you a unique access code that you’ll use to log in to the event.

If you know someone else who might enjoy attending this event, I’ll be grateful if you pass this along to them.

Time zones: The webinar will happen once, so I’ve tried to pick a time that works across time zones. (I know it’s bad for the Aussies, but maybe we can do it another time?)

The time on May 23rd for the event is:

19:00 (7:00 p.m.) Central European Time (Oslo, Amsterdam, Paris)
which is the same as:
18:00 (6:00 p.m.) in Great Britain,
13:00 (1:00 p.m.) Eastern, in North America (Boston, New York, Washington DC)

Information about logging in will come to you when you sign up. Join me and contribute as we work together on this important issue!

Image: Nick Brennan