🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️
In your career you will constantly be applying for opportunities: PhDs, postdocs, tenure-track positions, grants, fellowships and prestigious awards, just to name a few.
A key part of being successful at this process is benchmarking yourself – evaluating how your track record and capabilities stack up, both to the specific opportunity, and to someone at your career stage and with who’s had your opportunities.
In this video, I unpack the key aspects of benchmarking oneself, propose a “as simple as 1, 2, 3” way to broadly categorize performance, and highlight how important context is when doing a benchmarking exercise.
I also highlight some key things to watch out for, including the fact you never know the full story of people you might use to inform your benchmarking, and the mental toll looking at others can take.
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Complete topic list and timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction to Benchmarking Yourself
(0:17) Two Key Benefits of Benchmarking Yourself
(0:37) Benchmarking for Compelling Applications
(1:24) Benchmarking for Prioritising Professional Development
(1:45) Benchmarking Yourself is Optional
(2:37) Getting Started: Basic Principles
(3:03) The Three Simple Categories of Performance
(3:43) Considering Role Requirements
(4:08) Considering Career Stage and Seniority
(4:37) Performance vs Capability vs Track Record
(6:00) Consider Discipline Norms
(6:51) Track Record Relative to Opportunity
(7:39) The Three Performance Categories in Detail
(7:50) Category 1: Noticeable Underperformance
(9:51) Category 2: Typical, Not Noticeable
(10:37) Category 3: Noticeably Exceptional
(11:26) Sanity Check: You’re Not 100% Exceptional!
(12:07) Under- and Over-Estimation is Common
(12:56) Sanity Check 2: Ask Others
(13:20) Using this Benchmarking Information
(13:59) Pitching Appropriately
(15:05) Identify Weaknesses for Development
(16:35) Ask Colleagues for CVs and Applications
(17:08) Search Up People on the Internet!
(17:38) Check Funding Body Reports
(18:07) Check University-Collected Statistics
(18:37) You Never Know the Full Story of Others
(19:28) Manage Your Mental Health
(20:20) Benchmarking: Optional, But Consider It!
(20:51) Recap: 3 Categories, Context Matters
Full Video Notes
Benefits of self-evaluation: throughout your career, you will regularly need to assess your own capabilities, track record and standing.
Why: there are two primary reasons: to inform applications of all types, and for professional development.
Reason 1: Compelling Applications: PhDs, jobs, grants, fellowships, prizes
Reason 2: Guiding Professional Development: to identify problematic areas where some investment of time in development can make a major difference
Learning the Playing Field: to self-evaluate, you need to know what the norms of your field are, at your seniority level, or for the thing you’re applying for.
Philosophical Point: some say just be yourself, and don’t worry about others – this is one approach. But it would be misleading to not point out that current academia at all levels is very much a competitive arena. Competition for limited PhD positions, limited academic jobs, limited funding. You will be regularly compared to others, and those comparisons will determine much of your success in academia.
As Easy as 1, 2, 3: it can be overwhelming to categorise your performance, but there are powerful ways to simplify this process, literally 1, 2, 3 – 3 broad categories of performance for each thing you’re being evaluated for. E.,g. in academia, research, teaching, service, leadership.
Performance Relativity: your performance level is assessed both relative to the expectations of the thing opportunity you’re applying for, and based on your career stage and level of opportunity.
Performance versus Capability versus Achievement: how you’re currently doing, achievement is your historical record of things you’ve done, capability is what you can bring to the proposed role, somewhat independently of past history. Prioritization between these will vary hugely depending on specific opportunity.
Opportunity Expectations: a student applying for PhD, might not have any publications, and one might be exceptional. Application for full professor might be expected to have 100s of high quality pubs.
Career Stage: if you’re 1 year into your postdoc, they’d be different expectations of output compared to someone 5 years into their postdoc.
Level of Opportunity: if you’ve had 100% full-time research focus for several years, different expectations to someone who’s had caring responsibilities, career breaks, time in industry and so on.
Category 1, Noticeable Underperformance: your outputs are low enough in quality, or quantity, as to “raise eyebrows”, so to speak. So your job or grant reviewers will typically notice this. Now you may have one or more legitimate reasons for this, but knowing that certain things will attract attention is useful.
Examples: *Graduating a PhD in a field where all good candidates would have a top tier first author paper. *An academic who has no record of grant funding to their name, even small. *A leadership applicant who has never led an organization remotely close to the size of the one they’re applying to lead.
Category 2, Not Notable Performance: your performance, output or track record is “typical” and hence “not notable” as being particular good or bad. This is typically a very wide bracket, with lots of people in it. Much of what you do, will, realistically, be in this bracket.
Category 3, Exceptional Performance: you are noticeably exceeding the norms of your career stage and/or the requirements of the opportunity such as a job.
Sanity checking Your Estimates: You’d expect to be mostly in the middle bracket, with perhaps one or two things in the exceptional bracket, and zero to few things in the noticeably poor bracket. If you self-evaluate as being mostly in this bracket, then you are likely overqualified for the role, or delusional 🙂
What To Do With This Information: this categorization enables you to do two key things: pitch applications at exactly the right level, and identify professional career development opportunities.
Pitching Appropriately: the key here is making your claims and value pitches as appropriate to the circumstances as possible. If you claim you’re a prolific publisher, but have published an average number of papers, that looks bad. If you have a first author Nature paper, and that’s genuinely unusual in your field at your career stage, you can pitch that strongly.
Targeting Career Development: for a relatively modest amount of effort, you can move your achievements in one area out of the “noticeably poor” category into the “not noticeable” category. E.g. fresh PhD student who has no publications – getting that first publication can make a big difference in some fields. Same amount of effort might not make any tangible difference to activities where you’re already typical, and so this might not be as much of a priority.
Where to Get Your Benchmarking Information: from peers directly, they can share CVs and fellowship or grant applications. From looking at people who are getting the positions or awards that you’re applying for. E.g. PhD who got a job at a tech company or postdoc at a good university. Look up their public profiles. Funding bodies will sometimes publish statistics on people they fund, career stage, years since PhD… and unis will also often curate their own similar statistics on successful versus unsuccessful applications.
Caveat 1: Remember you never know the whole story of someone you’re looking at. They could have a health condition, could have caring responsibilities, many other factors. Think about what someone who google you would and wouldn’t find out about you and whether that would be a complete picture.
Caveat 2: Look after your mental health. It can be incredibly intimidating, draining looking at the records of all these high achievers. Remember their stories are filled with unseen and uncelebrated rejection, all you’re usually seeing is the polished public presentation, which is highly curated.
Summary: if you are at all pragmatic about career development and applying for jobs, prizes, and funding, you will benefit massively from being efficient and accurate at benchmarking yourself. Remember the three broad categories of performance, capability and achievement