Being proactive

You need to recognise that the skills of an academic are very different from the skills that you develop as a professional accountant. Some of the skills of a professional accountant, as I have indicated, are really, really helpful to you but you need to develop a set of very different skills. So you need humility to be able to do that. And you need to be willing to put in the work to do that. Finally I think you need a bit of a thirst for developing new knowledge and understanding.

So pointing in the right direction, talking to the right people and following my interests is a brilliant way of me doing it. If I had the pressure that you’ve got to get published in a three or four star journal by this date I would not enjoy it anywhere near as much

I think on the skill side, if you don't have an embedded curiosity in you you're not going to be an energetic researcher, because you need to be curious in nature. And I think you need to be patient. It's a frustrating exercise in the sense that you read vast and vaster amounts of information and data, and you perhaps get one little pearl of wisdom, and then you start hunting, running into that rabbit's trail.

One thing it’s done is given me a new challenge, which is important for me. I want some intellectual challenge. I’m very bad at doing things I’m bad at. So doing something new that I’m not necessarily going to be good at is actually quite a good intellectual discipline for me.

I would also advise that the individual thinks of a doctoral research topic that they are passionate about. And I know a lot of people say that. But, for me, it took a while to realise what’s the difference between passion and interest. Because there were so many things that I was interested in, in my first year. And it took me a while to realise what was my true passion. So, I think that you need to think about what you are good at. When I was trying to pick a topic, perhaps I was wanting to be too ambitious. I was going to change the world. Having a few knocks off people, that’s inevitable. For me it was a hard lesson to learn but it’s brought me back down. Because what’s very, very important to me probably isn’t as important to everybody else. So, it’s something that you’re passionate about, but be realistic about what you are doing.

My PhD is something I am very passionate about. It’s not just a matter of a cynical way to get through it. It’s something that I am passionate about. And I think that there could be some good contribution that comes out of it. Either at an operational type-level or through the academic route. So, for me? Yes, I am passionate about it. But that’s not the case for everyone. Some people are very instrumental. There are fantastic benefits working in academia. And you can pursue areas that you really are passionate about. And the spectrum is wide. Even within a small subject area, like accounting, there is a myriad of different niches that people can explore in more detail, going from accounting history, to sustainability, to integrated reporting, to some of the real econometric type research. There are so many different areas that if you are interested and passionate, you will find something that you are interested and passionate about. And you will be allowed to pursue that, which is fantastic. And it does offer the ability to balance your work life, if you choose to do so. And it involves making a real difference to people’s lives, to students.

We do have routes for non-research staff to get to professorship. It is very, very rare, but it is possible and the dean keeps telling me that I should be working towards my professorship and I need to… But I look at the criteria and I think, without research, they are phenomenally difficult to meet, to have an international reputation and things like that. I read the criteria and I just think I’m not even close to meeting those. A professorship is something I would aspire to, but I almost feel, without the research angle, it is out of my reach.

I think when you go back to work after children you do have a chance to reset things and realise what’s important. So I think at that point when you go back into business and you realise it’s not the right place any more, you don’t want to travel as much, then that’s the point where you need to offer people the alternatives. And perhaps you could think about moving into academia. After having my children it wasn’t really working for me, working part-time in practice. And it was very inflexible. So I just did freelance work, working for accountancy tuition providers just as a freelancer on the days I could do. And then, following on from that, I was doing some freelance work at the University. I had some good feedback from students and through that got the job at the University.

I trained in a big firm and once I had qualified, I went to work in industry. I was the Financial Controller so quite a lot of really interesting new experiences from that role, but when my husband and I decided it was a good time to start a family, I felt that that was too full-on, it was a very full-time role and we weren’t seeing enough of each other really. So I moved into higher education and did it on a very part-time basis. I had been in industry for seven years, and after that time, I never really stopped working. So pregnancy leave wasn’t full time off. I started doing things like marking for professional bodies, things that I could do at home. I actually really enjoyed that, and that became part of developing a network of people. Then I started working part-time for a University very much on an hourly-paid basis.

The two youngest girls were just starting kindergarten and nursery. I saw an advert for PGCE and it was part-time. That gave me the idea that, perhaps, if I got into teaching, this would be great for the girls. Because I very much wanted to be part of their life, in terms of holidays and everything else. I didn’t, really, want them to fit around my career. I wanted my career to fit around them. And I felt that teaching would be a really good way to do that. So, I started doing a PGCE part-time. My little one went into nursery on the days that I was on the course. Whilst I was doing the PGCE, we were told that we needed to be experiencing teaching at the same time. So that we could reflect on it and we could keep a log of our hours. So, I approached the Programme Director in the Accounting Department at the University where I was doing my PGCE. I offered my services for free and said I was willing to teach one of their classes. I needed it for my PGCE. I’m a qualified Accountant. So, any basic accounting classes, I’d be absolutely fine with. So, he gave me these classes and he was really happy. So he then started offering me work. I later became a Part-Time Visiting Lecturer. I wasn’t on a permanent contract. I was just teaching ad-hoc. Whatever they needed within the Accounting Department. And that suited me well, because I would only take on enough during the time that I was free. And I didn’t have any of the admin attached to it. I wasn’t a Module Lead, so I didn’t have to write exam papers or see students or anything like that. That fitted in really well. A lot of it was just seminar teaching. That was perfect for me because I could choose my timetable. I fitted it around nursery hours and then school hours. So, that was perfect. Literally, I was just coming in, teaching, and going home. I didn’t have any work to take home. I didn’t have any admin things to do. It meant I could fully focus on the girls. Then the Head of Department said to me, ‘look we’d like you to be permanent because you teach a substantial amount for our Department and if you were to just suddenly leave we’d be left with a massive hole.’ So, they offered me a Teaching Fellow contract which suited me because I didn’t want to do any research at this point. My children were still young. For that whole period I was only being paid for a smaller amount of weeks. And my teaching was done around term time. Then, last year, I asked if I could come off the term-time contract and I became 75% but not term-time anymore. Then, this year, I’ve asked to go 100%.

When I was looking at what to do next I tried going on a secondment to our training function. The interview seemed to fit quite nicely. And when I was going to the training course, and also when I started in the early courses, I had this sort of crystallisation of I can do this job. Actually I can do it better than many of my peers seem to be able to do it. I was just thinking this is really good and I spent six months doing that through their training season. Towards the end of it, I was thinking, okay, I know what I really want to do now. How do I do this full time? I saw a job advert listed at a University and it was for a senior lecturing position. It was pretty much a level transfer in terms of money, which was great. I had thought about reskilling, or retraining but you do sort of end up spending up to your earning threshold and I was going ‘I can't take a 50% pay cut to retrain’. The interview went well and I found that I’d got the position. That night before deciding whether to accept the role I did a classic for and against type of thing. I mean general interest, work life balance, a variety of other things. One of the things that swung it was probably the fact that I would not need to move.

In my first role I was doing a lot of teaching but also a little bit of research as well. And then I couldn’t get promoted. I couldn’t get senior teaching fellow there. I ended up taking a job back in practice, which I never saw as a long term option. So I did that for about a year but I’d already made the contacts at another university and I eventually joined that university. I was recruited as a Senior Teaching Fellow and I’ve just put my papers in to apply for a promotion.

I qualified as a chartered accountant, practised for a little while and then went to work for a professional training firm. Then I moved and took over the running of one of the centres. Later I knew it was time to move on. I thought I had been out of practice for too long, to be honest, to go back there. So the natural thing for me was to look at academia as a career because my passion is teaching. I love helping students and seeing that transformational journey that they go through. So, that was a natural place to go.

Getting involved in research is something I have thought about and certainly my current line manager would be absolutely delighted if I did go down that route. He’s always encouraging me to do a DBA or a PhD, but I have to say that what I love, personally, is I just love being in the classroom. I love being with students, so my preference is to teach rather than to do research. I don’t currently have any plans, but I’ve got an open mind and it might be that there is a certain point where I decide, yes, I am going to do research. But I think I need to start off by doing some sort of qualification, either a PhD or a DBA.

Even just doing a couple of book reviews for publishers was very good experience for me because it got my name in front of them. It probably got me a bit more accepted into the community because I did feel as though I crash-landed into academia straight from professional training. I felt for a long time as though I didn’t have much credibility academically. I had to somehow justify my existence as an academic because I didn’t have the research background, didn’t have a PhD. So it comes back to that issue of just being confident in yourself and your own skills and realising that even if you’re coming into academia from having done a different job or with different experiences, just because you haven’t got 20 years’ experience in research, doesn’t mean that you haven’t got valuable experience in other ways. I did supervise a student this year and again, that was quite a good learning exercise for me, looking at the research process from a different point of view and looking at what they’re going through and how they’re responding to my feedback. It’s almost a demonstration of if you want to understand something, you’ve got to explain it to someone else.

I then sort of tried to figure out how I could up-skill myself. So someone said ‘would you take on a PhD supervision?’ And I said ‘yes’ even though I don't have a PhD, and I had no idea what it entailed. Just because I thought it would be a useful thing.

I would very much encourage people, as they’re getting involved in research, to not limit their frame of reference in terms of colleagues and peers to Accountants and Accounting Departments. I would always encourage them to try and build relationships with their peers in the Business School who are in other disciplines. Just to realise that there’s not just the same sort of people grappling to get to the same place. I think it definitely opens up your way of thinking and sometimes I think if you’ve got a clutch of people who are in the same place, such as Accountants, they can reinforce their own ways of thinking. Where, if we can bring in some outside influences, disrupters in a way, I think that’s no harm. So, actually, having multiple networks is what I would say. See them as all offering something. Sometimes new researchers can be quick to close off avenues. Or, they think, ‘oh but that’s very different from me. I don’t know if I’d learn anything from that’. But I think you do.

I think you have to be curious but I think also with projects, and to a certain extent with PhDs, they may go in a slightly different direction from what you expected at the outset. Some research I have been involved in has gone in a very different direction because of what we found in the first project, which is very good material for a paper for another project. I think it’s also the recognition that you might have a plan, but you might end up going in a slightly different direction and a certain direction might be more fruitful than your original plan. I tell my students to not be too worried about things happening by accident. I had very linear plans, but what transpired is not really the linear plan.

You start out on a journey on the PhD, and you find out as you’re going what’s useful for you and what’s not and things that are helpful for you. And it’s a mutual journey of discovery. So I hope that the Supervisors find it beneficial as well. But one of the things you learn is that you’re not just told how to do something. This is what you need to do, get on with it according to the structure. You might moan about it, but if you’re given something where it’s very open and it’s not decided in advance how it should be, that’s actually very good for you and it helps you to think and learn, but it’s also quite challenging. So not to be afraid of it, to embrace it and to trust in yourself, have confidence that you will learn. You can get there in the end. And that’s probably the thing that I most appreciate about my Supervisors. They’ve never said to me openly, ‘oh, I don’t think you can do it, you haven’t got the skills to do it’. They’ve just said, ‘go off and do this’ and expected me to do it, and then I’ve moaned about it because I don’t know how to do it. But I’ve got there in the end.

At the time I wanted to do my EdD. I’d had to pay for my Master’s and I just thought, why don’t you take the opportunity; the University are going to pay for it. Each year they review the research allowances. If you don’t use them they will take them off you the following year.

We all have access to a personal fund that we can use for further study or for other things, like attending conferences. So, we all have an enrichment fund. Everybody has access to this pool of funds, irrespective of whether you are a lecturer or a teaching fellow, to use for conferences, CPD, for whatever could come under that umbrella. You could use it to pay your fees on a substantial course from it. You absolutely have to use it. Because particularly for people in teaching contracts, the funds often go unused. Go to conferences. There are business school conferences. In education HEA run a whole load of conferences. There are conferences for special interest groups. And local conferences. There are very niche-y type things. But just use it. Go along and see. Have a look around. That’s what I did initially. I just went and looked and listened. And reflected on what I was hearing. And talked to people. All those things are important to do, to work out where you might fit and what you might bring. You must have a convincing story as to why you want to spend the fund. But it’s relatively easy to put together a convincing story. And for some of the conferences, certainly the business school conferences, all you have to do is put in an abstract. It really can just be an idea.

For me, getting to conferences and speaking with the academics in my field, that really, really is beneficial. I have been lucky enough to be awarded a bursary and that’s been fabulous. At my university, the funds available for research are quite limited, as they are, I suspect, everywhere. So, therefore, you need to have presented a paper. And at the minute, I am not quite at that stage yet. The bursary has allowed me to go places, to attend conferences, to speak to other academics. That’s really made a difference to build up that network because, really, there are not that many academics in my area in the UK. There are just very small pockets so, that really, really is useful. I am nowhere near publishing yet but it just allows me to go there, to mix with academics, to see what’s actually going on and how they do it and that really does help me. I really do benefit from that. The other thing that the bursary has given me is in trying to contact people, I found that when I am looking for people to participate in my research just mentioning what I am doing and the fact that I have got this bursary support helps. I really think it’s a privilege that I have been allowed to take that up.

I think someone mentioned in passing that there was a conference being held. And, I think I Googled it to have a look and then found it and thought, ‘oh this looks really interesting’. I thought to myself, ‘it’s about time I started doing something like this’. Then, I approached the Director of Education and said, ‘would he fund it?’ And, he said, ‘yes, we have some staff development fund, he could fund it’. Then I mentioned it to a colleague of mine. I said to her, ‘I’m thinking of going on this. I think it will be really good. Would you like to come, as well, because I know you haven’t done any research or anything either?’ She thought it was a great idea. So, our Director of Education said that he would fund it for both of us. The University also has some teaching funding and I’ve got together with another teaching-focused Lecturer and we’re going to try to do some research. At the moment, we’re thinking very small as we both have very little time and we’ve both got heavy teaching workloads. We have to put in our application by next month to get the grant. At the moment, what we are trying to do is to fill out the application. If we get the grant, then we’re going to try to do this research. And, then, we’re hoping that perhaps we could speak at some conferences. We are hoping that, maybe, we might be able to get a paper out of it. So, maybe this will make myself and my colleague visible. Because, right now, we’re completely invisible.

We get given every year an allowance of £1,000 and that is to use as we wish. I use mine to pay to go to conferences, but obviously with £1,000… I’m always quite selective about which ones I go to, to get best value for money. So £1,000, if you’re careful, you could actually do quite a lot with.

I think the importance of networking is probably what I would tell any fledgling academic. Use the opportunities. Our university, for example, makes funds available for first time researchers. So my conference costs were paid for by the university. Because it's the first time they didn't require any research output from my side. They purely said get the experience, go and do the networking, there you go. So number one, networking, and two, seed funding. I think those are the most important things to get a prospective researcher off the ground.