When "Mid-Career" No Longer Tells You What Comes Next
Updated: Aug 23
"Mid-career" sounds reassuringly precise. You have moved beyond the early years. You have experience, publications, networks and perhaps supervision or leadership responsibilities.
Surely the next stage should be easier to see.
For many researchers, that assumption may no longer hold. The Australian Academy of Science's 2025 survey, published in May 2026, found considerable career uncertainty among 334 early- and mid-career researchers. More than half were employed on fixed-term contracts, while respondents also reported strong competition for funding, concern about track record requirements and uncertainty about remaining in academia. The survey combines early- and mid-career researchers, so its figures should not be treated as evidence about mid-career researchers alone. But other recent research raises a more specific question:
Does "mid-career" still describe the way academic careers actually develop?
More experience does not always mean a clearer path
In 2025, researcher Lynn McAlpine questioned whether familiar career labels such as "early career" and "mid-career" still fit contemporary academic working lives. Her research suggests that the traditional terminology comes from a more linear model of academic employment.
Today's research careers can develop quite differently.
Career decisions may be influenced by institutions, funding, family circumstances, mobility, collaborations and opportunities that appear at different times. Researchers may move between universities, sectors and countries, or combine research with leadership, teaching, industry engagement and other responsibilities. This means researchers increasingly have to define their own direction rather than rely on a standard sequence to tell them what should happen next.
That becomes particularly interesting at mid-career.
Early career goals can often be relatively visible: complete the doctorate, publish, develop expertise, establish collaborations and gain experience.
Later, the options multiply.
A researcher might intensify a particular research programme, build a team, increase supervision, take on leadership, strengthen industry connections, work across disciplines or reconsider the balance between research, teaching and service.
Several choices may be worthwhile. That is exactly the reason why choosing can become difficult. The question may shift from:
"How do I establish myself?"
to:
"What do I want to establish myself as?"
Mid-career support may need to become more individual
A 2025 collaborative autoethnography by Heidi Matisonn and Amanda Hlengwa offers a related perspective. Drawing on their contrasting experiences as mid-career academics, they argue that support at this stage may need to become more specialised and individual, including approaches that go beyond conventional mentoring. They argue that support at this stage may need to become increasingly individual because career goals, circumstances and ambitions differ considerably from one academic to another.
Experience therefore does not necessarily remove the need for career development.
It may simply change the kind of support that is useful.
This is where coaching can contribute. Not by solving insecure contracts, changing funding systems or influencing institutional promotion decisions. Those conditions are outside an individual's control.
Coaching can instead provide a confidential setting in which a researcher examines their goals, assumptions, alternatives and trade-offs.
A 2025 workplace-coaching study by Conny Antoni and Alexandra Tatar, involving 55 coach-coachee pairs, found that interventions focused on clarification of meaning, mastery and coping, and implementation were linked to goal attainment through learning processes. The study was not conducted specifically with academics, so it does not establish that coaching produces the same outcomes for researchers. It does, however, provide evidence for processes that are relevant here. In particular, it covered clarifying goals, examining underlying assumptions, considering alternative approaches and translating learning into action.
For a mid-career researcher, useful questions might include:
What research do I want to be known for five years from now?
Which opportunities genuinely support that direction?
Which responsibilities have I deliberately chosen, and which have simply accumulated?
What kind of research leader do I want to become?
How much of my definition of success is actually mine?
What am I prepared to say no to?
These are not questions an assessment tool or another person should answer for you.
The value comes from thinking about them deliberately.
Clarity is not certainty
A clearer career direction does not guarantee funding, promotion or stability.
It does something more modest.
It helps a researcher understand what they are choosing and why. That may become increasingly useful as academic careers become less linear and the number of credible directions increases.
Perhaps the question at mid-career is therefore not:
"What is supposed to come next?"
It may be:
"What do I want the next stage of my career to become?"
That is worth giving proper thought.
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