Career Progression in Academic Publishing: A Skills-Based Approach

What skills should I foreground if I want to work in marketing, production, or acquisitions? I have good speaking and time management skills; what publishing role would I thrive in? An interactive dashboard prototype developed by the SSP, AUPresses, and ALPSP Career Progression Task Force empowers job seekers and ambitious publishing professionals. Based on systematic coding of over 1,000 scholarly publishing job descriptions, this evidence-based tool brings transparency to an industry that can feel exclusionary to first-time job seekers and where advancement can appear arbitrary. This session will provide an overview of the problems the Task Force set out to address, the laborious work of aggregation and systematic coding it engaged in, and how the dashboard tool can open up opportunities. We seek feedback on other questions we should be asking of existing data, development opportunities for the dashboard, and areas where more data needs to be gathered and exposed.

Applied: Focus on understanding and comprehension; appropriate for those with some experience seeking to build on, apply, or enhance existing knowledge using content in practical applications/implementations.