Career diversity acknowledges that researchers contribute through varied routes: industry-to-academia or academia-to-policy moves, parental and caring breaks, part-time research, late-career entry, multiple discipline shifts, and international mobility. Traditional CVs and metric-driven assessment penalise non-linear paths because productivity tends to be measured against an implicit full-time, uninterrupted, single-institution baseline. Narrative CVs, the Hong Kong Principles' fifth principle, and CoARA Commitment 4 explicitly call for career-diversity recognition. Practical implementation requires explicit prompts in CVs for career context, equivalences for non-traditional outputs, and reviewer guidance to factor context into judgement.
References
- Hong Kong Principles, Moher et al., 2020. League of European Research Universities advice paper on intersectoral mobility.