In your first year, you should schedule a meeting with your head or program director to discuss your workload assignment and the promotion criteria for your college and unit. Your head or director should provide you with a copy or a link to your unit’s and college’s criteria for promotion. Your workload assignment establishes the basic expectations that will be used to evaluate your achievements. You should use the questions that are included below to specify your job duties and explore how they line up with the criteria for promotion. For example, will you be teaching graduate courses and other courses that line up with your research interests? Should you teach a range of courses to prepare for promotion, or can you concentrate on several courses to improve your effectiveness and save time by reusing course materials?
You should use your meetings with your head and other senior faculty to discuss your duties and related resources, including any mentoring support that may be available. These meetings are crucial opportunities to clarify teaching, research, and service and outreach expectations. You should use these discussions to review your department’s experience with candidates going through promotion. In these discussions, you should realize that some questions about promotion cannot be answered with specifics. For example, no one will be able to specify how many articles are expected because quality is more important than quantity.
From your first year, you should seek out multiple perspectives, though you should not be surprised if you get differing assessments. Multiple viewpoints come into play in the process of reviewing Dossiers. Dossiers are read by about twenty reviewers, including three to eight external reviewers, departmental and college committees, heads and deans, the University Committee, and senior administrators and the Provost, who makes the final decision on promotions. Your best sources of information will be recently promoted colleagues and senior colleagues who have recent experience reviewing Promotion Dossiers.
Update Your CV Frequently
Your CV is central to your Promotion Dossier. Unfortunately, candidates sometimes omit important contributions such as conference presentations or major committee work. To avoid this problem, keep your CV current. (Suggested CV Format). Keep your CV current. (Suggested CV Format).