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•What significance does the academic profession have for me?

•To what extent is it a vocation, to what extent a job?

•Does the academic life include for me the goal of being an educated person or intellectual—beyond subject expertise?

•How much time am I willing to invest in my professional roles?

•What should my family and private life look like? How do I want to shape it?

•How well can I live with uncertainty?

•How do I deal with frustration?

•How well can I motivate myself?

Clarity about the motivating values helps to avoid a negative dialectic of motivation, moving from hope to despair to defiance. Does academia satisfy the desire for self-fulfilment or the desire to help improve the world, or curiosity and the urge to explore? If one of these value constellations applies, according to our experience, much of the frustration, additional time, and inconvenience can be accepted. If, in contrast, the principle of random chances prevails or if there are no career alternatives, then a satisfying career path in academia, as it seems to be today, can only be travelled with a high degree of self-discipline.

Teaching, research, and administration—The art of fulfilling all professional roles

How many roles you live depends on your current professional and private life situation. How you want to fulfil them depends on yourself, i.e. your goals, priorities, expectations, and values. Above all, your values determine how much time you spend—beyond the minimum—in various tasks.

By definition, role theory describes and explains, on the one hand, the expectations and definitions of roles and, on the other hand, what freedom for action is open to the individual in a role. It deals with how socially prescribed roles are learned, refined, modified, and fulfilled.

Designing your own role profile, constantly developing and maintaining it, is a secret of successful life planning. Make it a habit to regularly inspect your roles to find out whether you are still on the right track and have enough resources to complete all tasks. Also, when making major decisions, check your life vision and goals and adjust if necessary.

•Does teaching have a high priority in my personal view of my roles or do I see myself more as research-oriented?

•Do I see my role primarily in the context of my university or do I want to have an international impact?

•What is my ideal balance between professional and private roles?

Whenever you take on a new position, ask yourself in a self-critical and completely frank way what tasks are associated with it, whether they fit into your life plan, and how you want to fulfil them. Especially if you take on management responsibility, you should be aware that you are taking on a completely new and different area of responsibility, often far removed from your previous expert work. Above all, you must keep a team together, find compromises, communicate internally and externally, raise funds, and market yourself and the organisation.

Your experience of self-determination and autonomy is determined to a large extent by whether you see yourself as a person who can act with the necessary ease and freedom, or as a person who endures roles imposed by life. If you try to meet all the (presumed) role expectations of others, you can very quickly enter a vicious circle shaped by the maxim: ‘Satisfying everyone is an art that no one can master.’ Role models do not always help here because professional life has changed too much in recent years with its demand for constant time flexibility, local mobility, speed, and round-the-clock availability. To not become a sidekick of other interests, you must find and secure your own way and style. It makes a big difference to life satisfaction whether you experience yourself as a creator or as a victim of your roles. The feeling of having your own life in your own hands is the best and simplest protection against burnout.

Possible roles:8

•Researcher

•Teacher

•Author or managing editor

•Organiser of congresses and conferences

•Lecturer

•Mentor

•Expert evaluator

•Committee participant

•Manager

•Colleague

•‘Local hero’ or ‘global player’?

•Private roles: son/daughter, friend, father/mother, etc.

Most roles can be further divided into subroles, which in turn place the most varied, indeed often contradictory, demands on you: extroverted and people-oriented in teaching, meticulously precise and capable of being alone in research, rhetorically brilliant and linguistically skilled in lectures, simultaneously empathetic and goal-oriented in meetings and networking, efficient in administration. Combining all these qualities in yourself evokes the demand for an academic ‘wonder worker’, which you can hardly satisfy. Therefore, you must set priorities, postpone the development of some skills to coming years, and make compromises. Stick to your very personal role definitions⁹ and focus on your strengths in each role, because only in this way can you develop excellence.

•Which and how many life and professional roles can and do I currently want to perform?

•How do I want to live the individual roles?

•How do I meet the different demands that the individual roles place on me? Where do I see my strengths, where my weaknesses?

•What do I think others (organisation, superiors, colleagues, society, family, friends) expect from me in these roles? Do I live up to these expectations or do I even want to?

•How will I deal with the discrepancy between the expectations of others and my own expectations of the different roles?

Become clear about your roles and tasks and how you want to fulfil them, especially if you are (re)orienting yourself professionally. The sooner you do this, not only you, but also those around you, will be better able to adjust.

In doing so, do not adhere too much to the ideas of others or to models you have seen, but create a solution that is tailor-made for you.

Take time regularly to assess where you stand, prioritise your roles, reflect on the goals you set for yourself in them.

Have the courage to give up roles and tasks. Stick to the principle: Whenever one area is added, something else is given up or reduced.

Often the challenge lies not in the number of roles and the time they cost, but the energy that is invested in them. Therefore, check regularly whether the roles really important to you are the ones on which you spend the most energy.

Of course, life is often a compromise. Swimming against the current often costs unnecessary energy. Therefore, think about where you can and want to make compromises. Keep in mind, however, that living against your own values and ideas can lead to dissatisfaction or even burnout in the long run.

Value inconsistencies

Whenever you make professional decisions, you should check the values lived in that particular organisation and compare them with your own.¹⁰ Consider in which ‘corporate culture’ or ‘university culture’ you feel comfortable and can bring your best. Decisive factors can be, for example, the size of an organisation, the number of subunits, internationality, prevailing structures, administrative procedures, hierarchies, and the way people interact with each other.

Very often, academic institutions are glorified in advance. Young scholars assume that since working in academia serves a ‘better cause’, the people involved must also be ‘better people’.¹¹ Of course, this makes the disappointment greater when the values discussed at the job interview, often even written down in mission statements, hardly get lived out in everyday life. These experiences can include competition instead of collaboration and decisions based on purely emotional motives or tactical considerations instead of facts. Also, the job may increasingly develop into administrative work, coerced with unforeseen reprisals, or post-doctoral scholars see themselves cheated out of their future and thus their life plan, as verbal promises lose their validity from one day to the next.

Organisational change very often also means a change in values. Our seminar participants repeatedly report the loss of many of the qualities that made them choose the university as an employer. This leads to a growing dissatisfaction, which in turn has an increasing impact on performance and one’s own work behaviour. For example, there is a lack of time for good discussions, both of a professional nature and for interpersonal matters. Insecure career and contractual prospects as well as increasing pressure prevent thinking and doing things together, which is why knowledge and ideas are often no longer exchanged but developed in secret.

In our experience, motives for choosing a career as a scholar and working at a university frequently include freedom to organise time and work, independent work, and self-determination. As explained in Chapter I, however, this freedom also requires a high degree of self-discipline and a self-commitment to the goals set. What one wanted to avoid, namely control by others, now means having to discipline oneself. This means planning consistently, keeping to daily structures, giving priority to important work, and not getting lost in the many secondary activities. Often, nobody notices the progress of work, discusses problems, or simply supports you in your daily work. There is no feedback, which is particularly important for young people, to inform them whether their personal and professional development is on the right path.

This reality very often leads to postponing deadlines and appointments, to self-doubt about the path taken and individual activities, and finally to growing dissatisfaction with oneself. The art of using freedom to the right extent is something that must be learned.

When making career decisions, compare your values with those of the organisation. However, also expect that changes or conflicts may occur. If necessary, try to deal with the changed conditions in a productive way instead of constantly fighting against them.

Everything has—at least—two sides. If you are increasingly entrusted with administrative matters, this will cost you time, but you will also learn a lot (e.g. project and personnel organisation, accounting, etc.), which can benefit you later in a leading function.

View your situation from a distance, as if someone else were affected. Learn to deal with competitive situations, not to take attacks too seriously or (too) personally. Such inner distance expands your personal repertoire of actions and thus your sovereignty.

Remember that freedom and self-determination have a price. Without good planning, frugality, and self-discipline, you will find it difficult to achieve your goals.

Values profile

Values form your identity throughout your life. Nevertheless, your values can shift over the course of your life and from role to role. What comes first in your private life may be less important in your professional life or may not be lived at the moment. Even within professional roles, changes will occur again and again, usually due to personal experiences or existential needs. If you have to support a family, you will probably decide less for purely idealistic activities and more for remunerative tasks (paid expert opinions, projects with businesses, etc.).

If you repeatedly clarify the relationship between your hopes and the current reality of life and work, this will benefit your well-being and energy balance, goal-orientation, and performance. You need to have a personal approach to quality management so that your work methods correspond as well as possible to your values profile.

Setting priorities for your values as a person, at work, and in different roles will help you to more clearly make decisions and manage your time. Perhaps it is important for you to be particularly fair when assessing exams. This means investing time in developing assessment criteria that are clearly comprehensible. If a good atmosphere in the team is important to you, you will probably reserve time for constructive discussions. Perhaps you will only be able to put your work aside and go home with a good feeling when you have created order and structure in your documents, data, or at your workplace. Then you should do this for your own satisfaction, but without giving in to possible perfectionist demands in all areas.

A difficulty arises from values that cannot be realised simultaneously. But such contrasting values do not form an exclusionary opposition requiring an either-or decision. Accuracy and speed of work, for example, are both positive values (opposite non-values would be sloppiness and dawdling); however given a task, you have to decide how much speed you will sacrifice in order to be sufficiently accurate and how you will control your perfectionism in order to be fast enough.

When assessing students, a similar conflicting pair of values would be justice and leniency (or consideration for issues such as language difficulties of foreign students). An attitude characterised by the maxim fiat iustitia, pereat mundus has a strong tension with the non-value of injustice, while in between them there is valuable justice and the equally valuable leniency or equity. When faced with a challenge or danger, for example, the contrasting values include not only courage and cowardice, but also the tension between courage and prudence as opposed to the vices and non-values of wantonness and cowardice.¹² This contrast structure can be graphically illustrated with an example like this:

When criticised, we often tend to distance our behaviour from the unworthy (‘I can’t keep improving this chapter forever’ or ‘I can’t submit a sloppy paper’). But the art consists of achieving the right balance, both appropriate and compatible with one’s own values.

Some values you must uphold for your own sake and others you can live without on a case-by-case basis. Become aware of the reasons and motives for your actions and draw up a catalogue of values structured according to roles. Awareness creates the ability to act and frees you from a victim role.

•Which areas of my life or between which areas of my life do I (repeatedly) experience value conflicts? How have I dealt with them so far or how am I dealing with them now?

•How do I solve external value conflicts, such as when I give equal importance to my job and my family, but my immediate professional context shows little understanding for this?

Hierarchy of personal values

Values are on everyone’s lips and again much discussed in sociology and philosophy. Nevertheless, there is no generally accepted definition of values (as distinct from virtues or skills, for example) and no consensus on how to classify different types of values.¹³ These questions and also the old debates about the subjectivity or objectivity of values, about descriptive or prescriptive, substantive or attributive uses of the term must be left aside here. The following table, which makes no claim to completeness, is meant to be exclusively practical: It should help to provide a little more clarity in self-knowledge and self-determination.

Therefore, we accept the vagueness of the common concept of value and make a simple division into three categories. Some value concepts are of a general or principled nature (such as gratitude, which was not classified here), others are more specific. The wealth of phenomena is more important than a strict classification. The classification criterion according to the left column is whether a value is most related to oneself, to others, or to things, but of course many also concern the other two areas. It would be wrong to expect a high degree of precision here.¹⁴

You can give each value 1 to 5 points in the right-hand columns to assess how important it is to you. Then find your ten most important values and write them out below to finally rank them again.

3.Career planning, balance, and integration in my life

What it’s about:

A practical plan encompassing the whole horizon of life has several dimensions: It takes a long view of the career to avoid being exhausted by short-term reactions to necessities and opportunities. It also considers biological, legal, and financial parameters. Furthermore, it has sufficient breadth to integrate all important areas of life and roles. Other professions have a greater likelihood of having regular working hours and thus a fulfilling ‘private life’. Academia, however, despite greater flexibility, often has conditions making it difficult to devote time to anything other than professional activities and to balance all areas of life. Up to the age of 40, compatibility between work and family life is particularly difficult. At the same time, career planning is fraught with many uncertainties.

Assuming that even in academia, it must be possible to lead a complete and balanced life, this chapter, after diagnosing the situation, proposes an individual role analysis that will differentiate the ‘private’ into three areas of life and the distinction of three categories of goals. The method of the annual master plan allows for a meaningful integration of academic work into life.

Academic career and life planning

The typical mixing of work and leisure and the widely accepted opinion that success requires at least one hundred per cent commitment make it very difficult for those in academia—and especially women—to develop a balanced life (see Chapter I). However, this stress programme does not correspond to career security, which is why many young scholars must simultaneously work on career alternatives. Otherwise, there looms the common horror image of the taxi driver with a doctorate. In the middle phase of life, many also want to start a family.

This challenging or overwhelming situation frequently has the practical consequence of ‘muddling’ from one medium-term goal (such as a doctorate, a contract extension, or a new externally funded research project) to the next one and in doing so neither building up possible alternative career paths nor a long-term partnership. Instead, it would be strategically better and also more conducive to your own well-being to lay a second professional track from the outset. In other words, if you have a line of play in addition to your academic mainstay, you will not one day feel trapped in a single option. What this means in practice varies so much in different academic fields that it is impossible to give general advice. Graduates in law, (veterinary) medicine, technology and the natural sciences will have standard alternatives, while literary scholars or philosophers, for example, must be very creative and flexible in finding further career opportunities.¹⁵ Teaching at a school is not a possible or attractive alternative for everyone. We recommend investing time in cultivating networks and contacts, which very often form the basis for new career options.

Remember that time is life and that long-term planning is about years of your life. ‘Observe the purpose of your whole life! All that we do must correspond to that purpose.… We miss the point because we all consider the parts of life, but no one considers the whole.’¹⁶

To have criteria for evaluating career opportunities, ask yourself the fundamental question of what you want to achieve in the first place – professionally as well as privately. Develop a ‘vision’ of your life and an awareness of your ‘mission’ or calling, that is, an answer to the question of what you are here for in the first place or what you ultimately want to live for.

Finding a vocation, vision development and life planning are something very individualised; this book’s framework cannot provide adequate guidance. We recommend that you seek the personal support of coaching.¹⁷

For your career planning, define milestones and identify where likely forks in the road will force decisions between alternatives. Before committing to your career’s next phase or state, consider how specific, how likely, and how long-term the prospects need to be. Be aware of the price you will have to pay over the longer term for continuing to pursue your academic career goals—in terms of personal and family life, social security, income, and missing out on entry points of an alternative career. The principle of hope is good in itself, but too many fail to realise their aspirations and avoid facing timely questions and possibly unpleasant decisions. Some helpful questions related to these issues could be the following.

If you are just finishing your studies and considering a doctorate:

•What additional opportunities does a doctorate offer me? How important is the honour associated with it to me?

•What value do I place on the scholarly activity itself, what fascination does it exert on me?

•What other goals do I have for the next five years?

•What alternatives are there now in the sense of a quicker career start outside of academia, and what opportunities are likely to open after my doctorate?

Especially if you come from another country:

•Where would I like to work—considering private interests—after the current phase of my life?

•What can I do now to develop opportunities for myself at that place when I finish my studies?

During doctoral studies, if you doubt the meaning of your studies—especially if you are working elsewhere at the same time:

•What is my motivation for the doctorate? To what extent am I driven by the assumption that the doctorate will be important for my career opportunities, how much is personal interest in the matter, how much is the prospect of greater social reputation, how much relates to other motives?

•What alternatives do I currently have?

•What am I giving up in favour of my doctorate (financially, socially, in terms of family, quality of life)?

•What is the highest price I am willing to pay?

If you are pursuing a doctorate or post-doctorate qualification while working in a temporary academic position:

•How would I and those who know my situation estimate the real chance of getting a follow-up contract? If this would also be temporary, what would be the acceptable minimum for me?

•Am I so fulfilled by scholarly activities that this overrides doubts and fears?

•How can my social security be improved? When do I take care of prospects for my financial situation in old age/retirement?

•How do I cope with the awareness of my insecurity or dependence? For how long do I want to accept this state?

If you have considerable doubts about the meaningfulness of your academic (further) qualification, realise that you are not slavishly bound to a previous decision. Giving up (doctoral) studies or a post-doctoral qualification can be very sensible if it is also a decision for something better.

Here, we touch on the topic of academic career planning. It belongs only in a broader sense to the ‘self-organisation’ in the title of this book. Use special guides or personal coaching to confront these issues in more detail.¹⁸ What is immediately important, however, is to face up to the dangers of a precarious academic ‘career’.

Fewer academics are civil servants or tenured faculty than in the past, and when they are, it is late (in Germany often only through appointment to a professorship). It follows that the current conditions of the employment contract as well as the future possibilities must be analysed very carefully and soberly, possibly with the help of legal advice. Unfortunately, many people experience that they are held back by promises of a permanent position—whether intentionally or unintentionally, when the money they were promised does not materialise.¹⁹

Or, the responsibility for acquiring third-party funding is transferred to the scholars themselves. A niche can turn out to be a trap in the long run. What one still accepts at the age of 30 may seem unacceptable ten years later (and of course it is). Particularly lecturers with limited work contracts or similar short-term, insecure conditions, as well as post-doctoral lecturers with the obligation of (unpaid) titular teaching (Titellehre after a habilitation at German universities), have to ask themselves how, and above all for how long, they can cope with the prospect of the precarious academic life. They may be faced with the decision to make scholarship a hobby in order to get out of the state of ‘existential lectureship’. Their time management cannot be limited to the efficient organisation of their current academic tasks but must start with a fundamental life planning and long-term self-organisation that also includes switching options and B-variants. Although this is strenuous and time-consuming, it is usually worth the effort.

If you think about future scenarios and decision criteria now, write them down and discuss them with friends. This will help you avoid the temptation later to just keep on going because you have no alternative or because you don’t want to make a decision. Even if completely different possibilities then develop, with these reflections you already have a basis for further thinking and more inner stability.

•Do I currently need additional income? How much, and how are my financial needs (for housing, starting a family, retirement provisions, etc.) likely to develop?

•If I need to generate non-academic income, what options do I have, and how do these harmonise with my academic interests?

•Given a frugal lifestyle, can I and do I want to do without time-consuming or burdensome side-line activities until the completion of my doctorate or post-doctoral qualification?

•Or, are these activities important for building up later career opportunities?

•Am I aware of what, in reality, is my mainstay and what is my side-line?

•Under what conditions would I switch?

Nowadays, international experience is expected if you want to make a career in academia. In your own interest, you should think early on about when (and of course where) this fits into your life plan. Visiting professorships, ‘visiting scholarships’, teaching abroad are often possible in smaller stages or blocks.

Sociological research has considered the problem of academics having children. Fixed-term contracts with high workloads and negative assessments of future career prospects, especially among women, seem to be the reason why both sexes have fewer children than desired. The higher a woman’s educational and professional qualifications, the more likely she is to remain unmarried and childless.²⁰ According to a German study, two thirds of the female academics interviewed have reached their current position by focusing primarily on an academic career and accepting childlessness or the postponement of having children.²¹ The desire to have children is greater than the actual number of children for both sexes—70 per cent of the childless say they want to have children, and one third of the women see only little chance of realising their desire to have children.

Experience shows that postponing family often turns into not consciously choosing to give up that goal. Especially if the career does not succeed as desired, a bitter feeling of having missed out on something important can arise in the second half of life.

This could mean that if one does not actively work towards achieving compatibility between family and academic career goals this leads to the failure of personal visions of life. The first countermeasure would be to be as clear as possible about one’s personal goals, to define one’s own values, and to start developing a vision when planning one’s life.

The previous remarks referred primarily to the situation of younger academics. However, academics over the age of 40 should also soberly take some biopsychological conditions into account: Not only can your values and thus decision-making criteria shift (see Subchapter IV.4 ‘Achieving goals’), but your resilience and resistance to stress will also decrease, and you will need more and more regular regeneration times. In return, however, your many years of experience in the system and in the structures of academia as well as a deepened self-knowledge will help you to work efficiently and effectively: You will be more confident in prioritising the really important goals and tasks, and then quickly master them. You may have developed a better overview, more confident judgement, more good habits, and serenity.

However, in terms of external conditions, people over 40 often have fewer alternatives on the labour market and less personal flexibility to change. This means that a possible reorientation and change should be made well in advance, which in turn has the consequence for the younger ones in that it is very unwise to just let things go without a long-term career perspective. Good life planning considers the foreseeable biological and related parameters.

Possible solutions

Role analysis:

A practical starting point is to reflect on your current roles in life, also called ‘life hats’ (see Subchapter II.2 above). A proven method for this is to create a mind map in the middle of which you write your name in a circle and three to a maximum of seven roles as main branches. It is helpful to ask for whom you are responsible in these roles (for example, for students, for the functioning of your institute or team, for children, for other family members, for close friends and the like). Then answer the question of what exactly you have taken responsibility for and add tasks in smaller branches to the main branches accordingly. In a next step, you can spontaneously evaluate these tasks by adding symbols on the outside that show how important they are to you, for example: