The project’s full title is ‘Managing career endings and the transition to retirement’. It is a project investigating later career and retired academic staff in the United Kingdom. It has a particular focus on how academics currently in post anticipate the transition to retirement and on the experiences of academics who have formally retired. 

It is being undertaken by Professor Graham Crow, a sociologist at the University of Edinburgh.

It is being funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

The project’s mixed methods research design includes two surveys (one for academic staff pre-retirement and one for those who have retired), an imagined futures essay component, interviews (not face-to-face), and the analysis of documents relating to policies adopted by UK Universities that relate to the retirement of their staff. 

Anyone currently employed as an academic at a UK University who has started to think about retirement, and anyone previously employed as an academic at a UK University who is now mainly or wholly retired from that role (defined as the situation where the greater part or all of a person’s income comes from their pension or pensions and any continued university employment accounts for only a minor part or none of their income). 

Taking part in one of the two surveys involves answering a set of survey questions online about yourself and your career, including your opinions about various aspects of your career and your trajectory from this into the future. This survey should take about 20 minutes to complete for participants who are currently employed, and about 30 minutes for those completing the longer survey for people who have entered retirement. At the end of the survey there is an invitation to write an essay about how you imagine your future. If you decide to do this, and depending on how much you write, this may take another 10-20 minutes.

Up to 60 individuals will be interviewed. Taking part involves participation in an interview (preferably by skype, alternatively by telephone or email) in which issues relating to the later stages of academic careers and the transition to retirement will be discussed. Prompts will include visual images of retirement that are located on the project website, which interviewees as asked to look at prior to the interview. The interview will last around 30-40 minutes.

If you are or have been an academic at a UK University and would like to contribute to the project by completing the survey please follow the relevant link: 

• For academic staff previously employed at a UK University but now mainly or wholly retired from that role (defined as the situation where the greater part or all of a person’s income comes from their pension or pensions and any continued university employment accounts for only a minor part or none of their income)  
• For academic staff currently employed at a UK University   

Yes, you are under no obligation to take part, and you are free to withdraw at any point during the completion of the survey, imagined future essay writing, or the interview without having to explain your reasons. 

No, participants will not be asked to identify themselves, and all material used will be checked to ensure anonymity. The survey and imagined futures data will be held securely on the onlinesurveys system. The interview data will also be held securely.   

All material collected will be analysed for patterns at an aggregate level, and the findings will be made public through a project report, journal articles and presentations. These outputs will inform key stakeholders (including individual academics as well as organizations) about preparing for retirement and the actuality of the processes of career ending and of retiring. The survey data collected in the project will also be archived for potential use by other researchers in the future, provided that they abide by the same conditions relating to anonymity as are set out above. 

The project revisits and expands on previous research including that published prior to recent changes to pensions arrangements and to retirement ages and the diversification of career patterns that these have prompted. Many of the questions have been based on Tizard and Owen’s study* of retired academics that was conducted two decades ago, to facilitate comparison over time.  

*B. Tizard and C. Owen (2001) ‘Activities and attitudes of retired academic staff’, Oxford Review of Education 27(2), 253-70. 

Further information about the project will be made available on the project web page, including the final project report which will be published in 2021.  

Because survey participants are not asked to identify themselves, completion of the survey will be taken to indicate consent to the use of the information provided. Interview participants will be asked to sign a consent form.

The project has secured ethics approval from the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh prior to the data collection stage.