Two ways to think about your promotion and tenure file

Does the promotion and tenure file fill you with dread? Inscrutable expectations, seemingly endless work, the sense that the rules keep shifting…it’s no wonder so many tenure-track faculty describe the process as one of the most stressful of their careers. 

But what if the way you think about building your file could make a meaningful difference, in both the quality of the final product and your experience creating it?

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In collaboration with editor Letitia Henville of shortishard.com, I interviewed 15 academics who had recently earned tenure and/or promotion at universities in the US, Canada and Australia, spanning STEM, humanities and social sciences, at research-intensive and teaching-intensive institutions. As they described building and presenting their files, two distinct metaphors kept coming up. Neither is universally better. But understanding which one fits your situation – and your temperament – can help you make sharper decisions at every stage of the process.

Here’s a quick diagnostic: does your institution provide explicit, written criteria or are the standards more fluid? And do you tend to think like a lawyer marshalling evidence or like a writer pulling together the threads of a story? Your answers will point you toward one metaphor or the other.

Metaphor one: build a case

Ask yourself: do I know what the benchmarks are, and can I show I’ve met them? If yes, the case-building metaphor could be your most efficient path.

Building a case means collecting evidence and presenting it against established criteria, with the goal of persuading readers that the applicant has met the required targets. It’s reasoning like a lawyer before a judge: here are the elements required, here is the evidence that I have achieved them.

This approach works best when your institution has transparent, documented metrics. For academic Blake (education, research-intensive, US), explicit written criteria were built into an annual review process, which let him track his progress in real time: “Each year – just by filling out my merit review form – I know how I’m doing in relation to the tenure and promotion guidelines.” When it came time to assemble the file, the work was essentially already done.

Institutions without such rubrics created very different experiences. Alex (education, research-intensive, Canada) felt “constant pressure” because “there was no finish line”. If that’s your situation, the case-building metaphor can still work, but you’ll need to do the interpretive labor yourself. As Remi (social sciences, research-intensive, Canada) put it, the task becomes identifying what the vague language in your governing document, such as “international reputation, excellence, mature trajectory”, actually looks like in practice, and showing how your record meets those self-defined markers.

The case-building approach suits academics who are detail-oriented or legally minded, and institutions where criteria, written or unwritten, are reasonably clear. The risk is creating a file that reads like an annotated CV: comprehensive but without a through line that makes the reader want to advocate for you.

Metaphor two: craft a narrative

Ask yourself: when I look across everything I’ve done in the past several years, what story does it tell? If a coherent answer comes to mind, even if the work itself felt scattered as you were doing it, the narrative metaphor might serve you better.

For our interviewees, crafting a narrative meant finding the common purpose running through disparate work, and using language to make it legible to readers. As Kai (medicine, research-intensive, Canada) put it, the idea was identifying “threads between different themes and then using those to build a story to talk about who I am”.

This approach directly addresses a trap that many promotion and tenure files fall into: the danger that readers will “average” a wide range of accomplishments into a bland middle ground. Selectivity is the antidote. 

Blake (education, research-intensive, US) was deliberate about this: “Even some of the things that align with my research interest I’m going to leave out, because I’m going to draw your attention to the biggest impact factors and the biggest things that I feel are emblematic of what my research is.” Leaving things out might feel counterintuitive but guiding the reader through your strongest highlights is more persuasive than cataloguing everything.

One concrete strategy is to build the narrative from the research outward. Sage (education, research-intensive, US) described being “very clear-eyed about constructing a coherent narrative about my scholarship, and then, threading across those themes, articulating how they show up in my teaching, and how they relate to my service”. This lets your research identity organise the whole file, rather than treating teaching and service as separate boxes to check.

The narrative metaphor works especially well when your institution’s expectations are nebulous, when your work spans multiple subfields or methods or when you’re a natural storyteller. Its risk is scope creep; without explicit criteria to check against, it can be tempting to keep revising the story rather than committing to it.

An unexpected benefit

Whichever metaphor you choose, the promotion and tenure file can also be an occasion for genuine reflection. Looking back at years of accumulated work, seeing how much you’ve done and how far your thinking has travelled, can be more energising than you might expect. No, it won’t dissolve the stress. But allowing yourself some moments to acknowledge your accomplishments, rather than only measuring gaps, may be one of the more sustaining things you can do on the long road to tenure.

Kate Vacek is founder and coach of Compass Academic Coaching.

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For more insights from our interviewees, you can download the free 30-page PDF, covering both the work of earning tenure and promotion and the work of building the file. Tune into the advice that resonates with you and your situation, and you can move forward in your promotion and tenure journey with less fear and more resolve.