You are responsible for preparing and submitting your application to the HR Division and by the deadline date specified in the Timetable. You should complete the relevant application form and provide evidence and examples that best support your case for promotion / progression and clearly demonstrate how you meet the Assessment Criteria, referring to the Indicators of Excellence for guidance. This section sets out certain requirements relating to the form and basic content of required information.
You are encouraged to present your case for promotion in a concise manner, avoiding duplication where possible.
You are expected to apply the principles of the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA). More information on DORA can be viewed here.
Those who applied for the same office/post in the previous year's exercise (2024) will be considered re-applicants. Please refer to the section on references for further details.
When completing the application form, you will be guided through the following sections of the form:
Applicant details
- Personal details, including your name, contact details and current position details.
- Which office/post you are applying for, choosing from (Teaching) Professor (Grade 12), Clinical (Teaching) Professor, (Teaching) Professor (Grade 11), Associate (Teaching) Professor (Grade 10), Associate (Teaching) Professor (Grade 9), Senior Teaching Associate (Grade 8), or Teaching Associate (Grade 7).
- You will be asked if your application is multidisciplinary. If you believe your application is, please ensure your personal statement explains the multidisciplinary nature of your work and indicates those institutions which your work mostly concerns.
- You will be asked if you would like your College Teaching to be considered as part of your application. If you would, you can later provide the contact details of the Senior Tutor of your College, who will be contacted to provide a statement regarding your College Teaching.
- You will be asked if you hold a clinical/NHS contract, or if you carry out clinical veterinary work. If you answer yes to either of these questions, please ensure you refer to these details in your Personal Statement. Additional statements may also be gathered regarding your clinical/veterinary duties.
- You will be asked if you believe that contextual factors should be taken into consideration when evaluating your application. More details on this can be found in the Personal Statement section.
- If you are applying for a (Teaching) Professorship (Grade 11 or 12) or a Clinical (Teaching) Professorship, you will be asked to provide the proposed title for your (Clinical) (Teaching) Professorship, should your application for promotion be successful. Your title should be relevant to your field, and you should discuss and agree the proposed title with your Head of Institution before submitting your application.
You will be asked to attach a copy of your CV to the application form. This should be a concise CV of no more than two sides of A4* (500 words), including any annotations. If preferred, you can choose to provide a narrative CV but please ensure your narrative CV still contains the information below to ensure consistency in the information received by committees.
Your CV should include the following:
- Professional history, including all current and previous professional appointments held. Please include start dates and (where applicable) end dates.
- Education and Qualifications, including details of degrees, diplomas and other qualifications, and where and when obtained.
- Appointments and Affiliations, including memberships of professional bodies, learned societies, advisory bodies, peer review activities (grants, journals, books etc), editorships etc, with start, and where relevant, end dates.
- Prizes, Awards and Honours, including elections to prestigious professional/scientific bodies, providing the full name of the awarding/electing body and the date (year) of award/election.
Evidence of teaching and scholarship contribution (to the extent relevant in each case) should include:
- A record of all under and postgraduate courses taught over such a period as to demonstrate evidence of fulfilment of the teaching criteria (normally not less than three years).
- Details of course developments and pedagogical innovation.
- The annual number of hours of teaching undertaken in your Institution (stint).
- Details of any grants, as applicable. Please note, student awards cannot be classed as grant capture.
- Details of Invited or Contributed Talks/Seminars, or other research presentations. You will also be asked to indicate if you were the keynote/plenary speaker at any of your talks. Generally, keynote speeches are considered the primary speech, which sets the central theme of a conference, whereas plenary speeches cover a broad range of topics. However, in some disciplines, these terms keynote and plenary may be used interchangeably.
- Details of administrative work that the Institution has agreed to be equivalent to part of the annual teaching stint.
- Details of any regular and substantial contribution to the teaching programmes of other Institutions.
- An up-to-date list of any postgraduate students formally supervised, including results, over the period of employment.
- Summary of examining duties.
Samples of course descriptions, hand-outs, bibliographies, summary evidence of student feedback may be included, up to a maximum of ten sides of A4.
Scholarship
Examples of evidence of scholarship may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Textbooks for teaching aspects of the subject matter/discipline, which may be used in Higher Education or other sectors, or in professional/training contexts.
- Online teaching or learning materials (i.e. either for exploitation by educators or directly by students/learners) which teach aspects of the subject matter/discipline, for use in Higher Education or other sectors, or in professional/training contexts.
- Original research of an applied nature, e.g. pedagogic research into ways of teaching a particular subject/discipline, possibly but not necessarily derived from applied research into one’s own practice of teaching it in Higher Education.
- Original research of a more traditional nature.
More examples of evidence of scholarship can be found in the Indicators of Excellence.
For the avoidance of doubt, research conducted by T&S academics will be considered and assessed as scholarship.
Evidence of the above should be captured in your publications list as applicable (further information can be found below). However, you may wish to provide further details on your scholarship in the section of the application form named “Teaching and Scholarship Contribution” or include them as one of the key achievements you would like to highlight in your Personal Statement (see below).
The impact of your scholarship
A key aspect of your application is the evidence of the impact your scholarly activities have had on your teaching. You should ensure that you explain the relevance of your scholarship and scholarly outputs to the teaching you do for the University, and how the discipline is taught elsewhere, and the impact the resulting changes have had.
College Teaching
You may include details of College(s) teaching and work undertaken as a College Director of Studies, in which case the name and College of the Senior Tutor should be given, so they can be contacted to provide a statement regarding your College Teaching.
Clinical Work and Postgraduate Medical Teaching and Training
If you hold an Honorary NHS consultant contract, you should provide details of your contribution to postgraduate medical education and training. Information provided in relation to teaching will be considered under the teaching criteria and information provided in relation to clinical duties will be considered under Service to the University and Academic Community.
Clinical Veterinary Work and Postgraduate Veterinary Teaching and Training
If you are engaged in veterinary clinical work, you should provide details of your contribution to postgraduate veterinary teaching and training. Information provided in relation to teaching will be considered under the teaching criteria and information provided in relation to other clinical duties will be considered under Service to the University and Academic Community.
Important note: only teaching conducted at the University of Cambridge/its Colleges can be considered as part of your application.
Details of published scholarly outputs should be provided as follows:
- The publications list must be structured into sections, including a section for peer-reviewed publication and a section for pre-prints and author accepted manuscripts which have a persistent Digital Object Identified (DOI);
- Within the sections referred to above, the publications list must be in a clear chronological order, stating for each publication (including any books) the year of publication, and page numbers (where available*). Where relevant, you must clearly mark publications since your last promotion/appointment with an asterisk;
- The publications list must include only outputs which are publicly available** for consideration. Publications which have been “accepted and are in press” but are not yet publicly available must not be included in the publications list. However, if you would like to refer to an in-press publication in your personal statement (see below), you can do so;
- Work in progress but not yet completed must not be included;
- Citation data, in disciplines where this is appropriate, may be included; consideration of an application will not be prejudiced if citation data are not included. For the avoidance of doubt, applications will not be assessed on the basis of citation data/metrics alone, and these will be used in conjunction with qualitative indicators of research quality and impact, in line with the University’s guidance on the Responsible Use of Metrics in Research Assessment;
- Copies of publications must not be included.
- Please note, the points above are intended as guidance only. Applicants are encouraged to follow disciplinary norms when preparing their publications list, which may differ from the above.
Online learning and teaching resources
Links should be provided, clearly demonstrating how the resource is publicly accessible, e.g. via relevant web portals and/or licences. Where available, download data or access statistics should be provided or other evidence of take up or adoption.
Outputs which can be included:
All research and research-led publications that are publicly available** for consideration (i.e. copies are obtainable at the time of application, or at some previous time, by members of the public through normal trade channels) can be included in your publications list.
Non-standard contributions:
For disciplines where the communication of research results is not, or is only partly, in the form of conventional scholarly publication, other forms of contribution should be listed.
Co-authored and multi-authored publications:
Applicants should provide details of their role and contribution in co-authored and multi-authored publications, as referred to in the section on the personal statement (see below).
*It is recognised that page numbers may not be available for online publications.
**It is recognised that in certain circumstances, a publication/output may not be publicly available, for example due to data confidentiality or ethical reasons. If this is the case, please explain briefly why the material is not publicly available and, if relevant, note any protocols by which others in your community might be able to access it.
You should provide a list of contributions other than in teaching and scholarship undertaken in your Institution/School/University and any service to the academic community outside the University that you wish to have considered. This might include service on the central University bodies, working parties, reviews, engagement in widening participation activity, the design and delivery of outreach programmes, contribution to the subject undertaken outside the University, editorial work, contribution to academic societies and meetings, details of research management, of research groups, and the creation and management of multi-institutional national/international research facilities. It may also include public engagement work.
If you hold an Honorary NHS consultant contract you should include details of your participation in regional and national committees (e.g. Royal Colleges, General Medical Council) and bodies concerned with undergraduate and postgraduate medical education, as well as details of your clinical duties.
If you are engaged in clinical veterinary work, you should include details of your participation in regional and national committees and bodies concerned with postgraduate veterinary education, as well as details of your other clinical duties beyond teaching and pedagogy.
You must include a personal statement* in support of your application, which explains your case for promotion demonstrates how you meet the Assessment Criteria of the office/post to which you are applying. Where applicable, you should highlight information about your achievements since your last promotion/appointment.
With regard to the evidence provided of teaching and scholarship, you should highlight up to four of your key achievements since your last promotion/appointment, and describe their significance in terms of your discipline, and of your contribution to them, in order to demonstrate the quality and value of your teaching and scholarship. You are advised to limit these descriptions to 50-100 words per achievement. In addition, you should make clear your role and contribution in co-authored and multi-authored publications or multi-partner projects. You might also wish to highlight key advances set out in your scholarship, how your scholarship informs your teaching, and the benefit this has on your students.
If you consider your teaching and/or scholarship to be multidisciplinary you should explain clearly the multidisciplinary aspects of your work and indicate which of the University institutions your work mostly concerns.
Student feedback is an important factor in assessing the effectiveness of teaching, course development and innovation. Therefore, your self-assessment should take into account student feedback (including informal emails) on the courses you have taught or are teaching. The Head of Institution may comment on this self-assessment in the Institutional Statement. It is acknowledged that some institutions do not have formal processes for gathering student feedback. In these cases, reference to informal student feedback can be included, although such feedback should not be directly solicited from students.
With regard to teaching duties, you should include a self-assessment of the impact of your work on students.
*Please note, the personal statement has a limit of 1,000 words.
You are expected to demonstrate a rising career trajectory in your application, i.e. an active and progressive contribution to your field. You can provide evidence spanning your entire career to demonstrate your trajectory, although you are expected to focus principally on achievement since your last promotion/appointment, to best demonstrate your continuing rising trajectory.
Contextual Factors
You are encouraged to record any Contextual Factors that have affected your performance over the last five years. Contextual factors may include, but are not limited to: part-time working, ill health, disability, caring responsibilities and periods of prolonged leave such as maternity, parental leave or bereavement. This may also include difficulties you faced as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which continue to impact your current or future work.
These details should be provided in the separate Contextual Factors section of the form, which has a limit of 500 words.
If you choose to provide Contextual Factors which include health-related matters, the Faculty Committee assessing your application may refer you to Occupational Health, in order to obtain specialist medical advice about the impact of these matters on your duties. It is important to note that providing Contextual Factors will not have a detrimental effect on any application for promotion, nor will an Occupational Health referral.
As a re-applicant, you have the option to include the feedback statement you received in your previous application in your current application. You may wish to do this so the committees considering your re-application can see the feedback previously provided, and how you have addressed that since your previous application, i.e. what actions you have taken to improve in areas that were previously identified as requiring improvement.
The completed application should be submitted to the ACP mailbox: acp@admin.cam.ac.uk by the deadline date stated in the Timetable.
The relevant application documents can be downloaded from the Forms section of the guidance.
You will be notified of the outcome of your application after the GB meeting that considers ACP T&S recommendations.
If your application is unsuccessful and you wish to receive feedback you should request this from your Head of Institution by the deadline set out in the timetable.
You may ask for the feedback statement set out in the SC minutes to be carried forward for information to your next application under the ACP T&S scheme. This option is intended to help you demonstrate how you have responded to feedback and further strengthened your application. More information on the feedback process can be found here.