How Sustainable are Careers in Higher Education?
By
Wendy Patton Emeritus Professor & Natalia Veles, PhD
Career development practitioners across sectors are working with clients whose careers are increasingly complex, boundary-spanning, and shaped by structural change. This raises important questions about how sustainable careers are developed, supported, and sustained over time.
In this context, the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management recently published a double special issue on Sustainable Careers in Higher Education, edited by Drs Natalia Veles and Wendy Patton. The Special Issue is dedicated to advancing global research and debates on sustainable careers in higher education. It aimed to bring together contributions from academic and professional staff, and those who inhabit third spaces, whose work spans boundaries and professional identities in universities.
The contributions to this issue explore several questions: What are the career pathways available to staff in universities and other higher education institutions? How is career sustainability conceptualised and enacted across diverse roles and contexts? What personal, contextual, and temporal factors shape the development of sustainable careers? How do these dynamics play out across teaching, research, engagement, professional support, and the in-between spaces that defy easy categorisation? And crucially, what forms of support and intervention can help individuals and institutions foster sustainable careers over time?
We were delighted to have curated a contribution of 16 papers, drawn from around the world, which included empirical research as well as conceptual and reflective scholarship. The work is grounded in the Sustainable Careers Framework, the Systems Theory Framework of Career Development and other contemporary theories. Together, these perspectives emphasise the importance and applicability of these theories and the main factors of agency, meaning, time, and social space in shaping career pathways in higher education.
The sixteen papers include five papers which focus on the Australian higher education context, and four papers which discuss the sustainable careers of higher education staff in cross-cultural settings. The remaining seven papers are from a broad spectrum of countries, including Chile, India, China, Switzerland, Italy, Ireland and England, providing international perspectives on the topic.
Key contributions across all papers
The papers in this special edition make a substantial contribution to understanding sustainable careers in higher education through a deep analysis of the lived experiences of academic, professional, and third space work across diverse institutional, national, and cultural contexts.
Collectively, they extend sustainable careers scholarship by illuminating how career sustainability is conceptualised and enacted across multiple roles, career stages, and institutional systems and by highlighting the complex interplay between individual agency and relational, structural, and policy conditions, focusing on either stand-alone country environments or providing cross-country and cross-cultural comparisons.
The five Australian papers proffer insights into regional, rural, and remote healthcare ecosystems, demonstrating how career sustainability for health academics is inseparable from place, mission, and community workforce needs. Early career academic voices and third space and hybrid roles were also featured.
Cross-cultural papers explored sustainable careers in Australia and Japan, the UK, Europe, and the United States, Canada and the UK, and third space professionals across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The seven international papers featured investigations of sustainable careers across diverse roles, career stages, and global contexts including pre-tenure academic careers in China, teacher educators in Chile, senior leadership in Switzerland, academic and support staff in India, creative pracademics and research active professional staff in the UK, and PhD students in Italy.
Across all 16 papers, several strong points of convergence emerge. First, all contributions reject linear, ladder-based career models, instead portraying sustainable careers as non-linear, iterative, and deeply relational, shaped by time, social space, and institutional context. Sustainability is consistently framed as something actively negotiated rather than passively attained.
Second, there is a shared emphasis on role hybridity and boundary-spanning work as both an opportunity and a risk, with papers emphasising how these roles enable innovation, collaboration, knowledge production, and identity expression across institutional boundaries. At the same time, these interstitial roles are argued to expose their inhabitants to precarity, invisibility, and misrecognition, as well as increased workload pressures, particularly where institutional recognition, career frameworks, and reward systems remain connected to traditional academic systems and structures.
Divergences across the papers are most evident in how career security and sustainability are conceptualised across national and organisational systems. For example, contrasting emphases on job security and career sustainability are evident across countries.
All papers presented a picture of significant challenges within academic institutions related to visualising and implementing career sustainability across staff members.
Across the Australian and cross-cultural papers, these challenges are articulated through locally situated institutional and workforce dynamics. A recurring concern is the misalignment between evolving forms of academic, professional, and third space work and institutional career structures that continue to privilege traditional academic norms.
Challenges associated with role hybridity and boundary-spanning work are particularly pronounced across Australian and cross-cultural contributions. While boundary-spanning and project-based work enable innovation, collaboration, and identity expression, they also expose individuals to precarity, invisibility, and emotional labour.
Cross-cultural analyses further demonstrate how these challenges are mediated by national employment systems and institutional logics, with contrasting emphases on job security, career security, and mobility shaping access to sustainable trajectories and migration status adding a layer of vulnerability for immigrant academics.
Taken together, these challenges emphasise the need to resist universal prescriptions for sustainable careers and instead attend to how sustainability is enacted within specific cultural, institutional, occupational, and temporal contexts. They also highlight the limits of individual adaptability in the absence of systemic support, reinforcing the importance of institutional responsibility for enabling sustainable career ecosystems across higher education.
Collectively, the sixteen papers advance scholarship on sustainable careers in higher education in three significant ways. First, they deepen and extend the sustainable careers framework by applying it across a wider range of roles, identities, and systems than has previously been explored, including third space professionals, immigrant academics, health academics, and career development practitioners.
Second, the papers shift the analytical focus from individual resilience to career ecosystems, demonstrating how sustainable careers are co-produced through institutional structures, leadership practices, human resources and other organisational systems, and cultures of deliberate recognition.
Across the Australian, cross-cultural and international contexts, the authors highlight the limits of individual agency in the absence of systemic support, calling for shared responsibility between individuals and institutions.
Finally, these papers collectively reposition sustainable careers as a strategic concern for higher education itself, not merely an individual outcome. By linking career sustainability to public good missions, institutional adaptability, and ethical and meaningful work, the papers demonstrate that sustaining people’s careers is inseparable from sustaining universities’ capacity to teach, research, engage, and serve society over time.
Concluding remarks
Together, these 16 contributions provide a nuanced, multi-level, and globally informed account of sustainable careers in higher education, offering both conceptual advancement and practical insights for scholars, institutional leaders, and policymakers seeking to support diverse and evolving career pathways in an increasingly complex sector.
Clear role architectures, prospective accreditation and explicit recognition of knowledge co-production, and the project-based work are presented in these papers as critical factors of sustainable careers in higher education.
References
De Vos, A., Van der Heijden, B. I. J. M., and Akkermans, J. (2020). Sustainable careers: Towards a conceptual model. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 117, 103196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2018.06.011
Gander, M. (2024). Antagonistic identity discourses in career transitions: An autoethnographic study in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 49(12), 2656-2667. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2024.2319875
Patton, W., and McMahon, M. (2021). Career development and systems theory: Connecting theory and practice (4th ed.). Brill.
Veles, N. (2023). Optimising the third space in higher education: Case studies of intercultural and cross-boundary collaboration (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003259527
Whitchurch, C. (2024). Academic and professional identities in higher education: From “working in third space” to “third space professionals”. In G. Strachan (Ed.), Research handbook on academic labour markets (pp. 49-63). Elgar Handbooks on Education.
About the authors
Professor Patton served in leadership roles, including Head of School and Executive Dean, at Queensland University of Technology Australia from 2001 to 2015. She was awarded the title of Emeritus Professor from QUT Council in July 2016.
She has taught and researched in the areas of career development and counselling, having initiated and designed the Master of Education program in career development at QUT in 1994. She has co-authored and edited more than 10 books and is Founding Editor of the Career Development Series with Sense Publishers, now Brill. She has also published more than 200 refereed journal articles and book chapters and serves on a number of national and international journal editorial boards.
Professor Patton continues to publish and contribute to course development in career development. In addition, she completed a sole authored book on the history of career guidance in Australia in 2019. A 4th edition of her co-authored book on career theory and systems theory was published in 2021. During 2022, Professor Patton and Dr Mary McMahon guest edited the 30th anniversary edition of the Australian Journal of Career Development.
Dr Natalia Veles is a higher education and career development researcher and senior lecturer at James Cook University, Australia. She also holds a doctoral student supervision affiliation at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. Natalia leads the Career Development discipline at JCU.
Her academic background is in applied linguistics, organisational and cultural sociology, intercultural psychology, and career development. Having worked across many educational sectors in leadership roles in Australia and internationally, she has a particular curiosity about how the institution of work provides for sustainable careers of integrated, or third space, professionals, university staff careers and career paths, and the construction of organisational boundaries and discursive spaces.
Natalia’s current research focuses on university third space professionals’ identities and sustainable careers. Her recent research monograph, Optimising the Third Space in Higher Education: Case Studies of Intercultural and Cross-Boundary Collaboration, was published by Routledge in 2022.
Natalia is a registered career development practitioner in Australia. She is also a course coordinator of the Graduate Certificate of Career Development course at JCU.
Wendy Patton
Emeritus Professor, Queensland University of Technology
[email protected]
Natalia Veles, PhD
James Cook University
[email protected]