It is easy to count a researcher’s outputs and much harder to describe how they have grown. A doctoral student becomes an independent investigator; a postdoctoral researcher learns to lead, to supervise, to win funding, to manage a project; a mid-career academic develops the judgement and the breadth that the earlier stages could not yet supply. This progression is real and consequential, yet the conventional currency of recognition — publications and citations — captures almost none of it. Recognising career-stage progression requires a different instrument: a structured way to describe the capabilities a researcher develops and the stages they move through. Researcher development frameworks provide exactly this, and they are the subject of this article, which draws on the mentorship and career-stages domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.
The problem with output-counting
The dominance of output metrics has a hidden cost for careers. If recognition flows mainly to those with long publication lists and high citation counts, then the many capabilities that make a good researcher — the ability to design rigorous studies, to communicate, to collaborate, to manage, to supervise, to develop others — go largely unrewarded, and the people at earlier career stages, who have had less time to accumulate outputs, are systematically disadvantaged. Worse, output-counting tells you nothing about development: two researchers with identical publication lists may differ enormously in their independence, leadership and range. A system that cannot see growth cannot fairly support, develop or promote the people within it. Frameworks that describe capability and progression exist to correct this blindness.
The Vitae Researcher Development Framework
The best-known instrument of this kind is the Vitae Researcher Development Framework (RDF). The RDF sets out the knowledge, behaviours and attributes of effective researchers, organised into domains that span far more than research technique alone — covering knowledge and intellectual abilities, personal effectiveness, research governance and organisation, and engagement, influence and impact. Its value lies in making the full breadth of researcher capability explicit and nameable. Instead of leaving “development” as a vague aspiration, the RDF gives institutions, supervisors and researchers themselves a shared map: a way to identify which capabilities a researcher has, which they are developing, and where their growth might next be directed. It can structure training provision, inform appraisal and self-assessment, and give early-career researchers a language for articulating what they have learned beyond the papers they have published. The framework turns development from something assumed into something that can be described and supported.
The Concordat and the institutional duty
Frameworks describe capability; policy creates the obligation to develop it. In the United Kingdom, the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers sets out the responsibilities of institutions, funders and researchers towards researcher development. It commits signatory organisations to providing environments and opportunities that support researchers’ growth — including dedicated time for professional development, support for career progression, and recognition of researchers as professionals with careers, not merely as a source of labour for projects. The Concordat matters because it places development on an institutional footing: it is not left to the goodwill of individual supervisors but becomes a commitment that organisations make and report against. Together, a capability framework like the RDF and a policy commitment like the Concordat form a system in which development is both describable and expected.
Recognising supervision and mentoring
A particular and often neglected dimension of career-stage progression is the work of developing others. Supervising doctoral students and mentoring early-career colleagues is demanding, skilled and central to the health of the research enterprise — yet it has traditionally been among the least recognised activities in academic careers. Efforts to address this include the work of bodies such as the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE), whose recognition arrangements for research supervisors affirm supervision as a professional practice with its own standards and development path. Recognising supervision properly does two things at once: it values the labour of those who do it, and it acknowledges that the ability to supervise well is itself a marker of career-stage progression — a capability the researcher has developed. Frameworks that name supervision and mentoring as recognised contributions help bring this work out of the shadows.
The narrative CV as the vehicle
If development and capability are what we want to recognise, the traditional CV — a reverse-chronological list of outputs and posts — is a poor vehicle for showing them. The narrative CV has emerged as a better fit. Instead of merely listing publications, a narrative CV asks the researcher to describe their contributions and their development in prose: what they have contributed to knowledge, to the research community, to the development of others, to broader society. This format is well suited to career-stage recognition because it lets a researcher tell the story of their growth — the capabilities they have built, the people they have developed, the responsibilities they have taken on — rather than reducing their career to a count. The narrative CV and the development framework are natural partners: the framework supplies the vocabulary of capability, and the narrative CV supplies the form in which a researcher can demonstrate it.
A consistent vocabulary for development and contribution
For development and progression to be recognised consistently — across institutions, funders and the systems that record careers — the way contributions and capabilities are described must mean the same thing everywhere. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that a contribution described in one place is understood the same way in another. The structured description of who did what, captured by the CRediT taxonomy, complements the developmental picture by recording specific contributions to specific works, which a narrative CV can then draw on and interpret. To explore how these instruments fit together in practice, see our broader material on learning and the wider research-administration record. Counting outputs tells you what a researcher has produced; development frameworks tell you who they have become — and a fair research culture needs to recognise both.