NCFDD Mid-Career Workshop Series

Making the Case: Preparing Your Dossier for Promotion to Full

This is a 4-part workshop offered through the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD). Each recorded workshop is 50 – 60 minutes in length. Free membership in NCFDD is available through the VPGE. Please see this page for instructions on how to sign up for the free membership. Once you are a member and have password access, you can access the 4-part workshop using this link:

Here are descriptions of each of the 4 workshops provided by NCFDD.

Week 1: Charting Your Path: Managing Mid-Career Transitions
Faculty careers are long, characterized by many transitions from achieving tenure and promotion to balancing work and family. The longest stage of the faculty career is the mid-career stage, which includes recently tenured associate professors up to faculty colleagues who are 10 years out from retirement. The purpose of this webinar is to assist mid-career faculty across the academy in navigating through various mid-career transitions and career paths successfully. Together, we will focus on three critical concepts: Your Contribution, the PSEI (Purpose, Scope, Evidence of Impact) Framework, and a Mentoring Needs Inventory. Tools, strategies, and frameworks will be offered to support your growth and career advancement.

Week 2: Leadership & Service: What to Include and Count in Promotion Dossiers?
The dominant model of faculty-reward structure which has persisted since the 1980s has involved inconsistencies in the interests and desires of the individual versus that of the institution. Such inconsistency has been heightened in the wake of the pandemic as women perform more service and spend more time on teaching, mentoring students, and performing “invisible labor.” Faculty members, particularly at the rank of associate professor, take on leadership roles and contribute to university governance. There is external pressure to participate in such service work (the expectations for fear of being viewed non-collegial) and intrinsic motivation for this type of work. However, most often such work is not recognized in the typical faculty-reward structure leading to stagnation of those faculty at the lower ranks of the professoriate. These issues have implications for individual faculty aspirations and institutional goals to build leadership skills and diversify university leadership. Discussing the ‘invisible’ and ‘emotional’ labor performed by faculty, I call for the need to act to consider ways to incorporate such labor in the reward structure. The major takeaways from this webinar are as follows:

Need for faculty and institutions to be cognizant of the ‘invisible’ labor:

in teaching and mentoring
in service work including diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) related work
community engagement work
in contributions to university governance by serving in leadership positions

Need for faculty to:

be selective and intentional in identifying service work of interest. Discuss with multiple mentors
review promotion criteria
consider the illustrative examples from the three scenarios in the webinar

Need for institutions of higher education to recognize:

that structure and process matter
ensure clarity in criteria; disseminate information about process/procedure; develop guidelines/tools for how service contributions are counted/to be incorporated refine annual review
educate promotion committees

Week 3: Preparing the Research Portion of Your Associate-to-Full Promotion Dossier
In this webinar, Dr. Dunlap will share strategies, recommendations, and tips for preparing the research portion of your Associate-to-Full Professor dossier for review. This webinar will cover: 1) Aligning your accomplishments to promotion criteria; 2) Providing evidence of impact; 3) Finding your voice and telling your story, and 4) Constructing the research section of your dossier.

Week 4: Crafting Your Teaching Narrative: Learning Who You are as an Instructor and Articulating Your Impact
For tenure-stream faculty, teaching is the air we breathe. It is an activity we regularly engage and at this stage of mastery, we often engage at a level of fluidity where teaching is second nature. However, as you advance in rank, it is important to consciously remind yourself why it is you teach, articulate your teaching process and demonstrate your impact on your students and your field. In this session, we will give you time to explore your why’s and how’s and guide you through creating a teaching narrative that illustrates impact.