All pathways: Personal Statement

You must include a personal statement in support of your application. Your personal statement should be a maximum of 1,000 words and explain your case for promotion, and how the evidence provided in your application demonstrates your achievement of the Assessment Criteria of the office/post to which you are applying. You should highlight information about your achievements since your last promotion/appointment. 

Important points to note

  • 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 achievements since your last promotion/appointment, to best demonstrate your continuing rising trajectory.
  • Your last promotion/appointment start date will be the date you started in your current role.  For the purposes of promotion applications, passing probation is not a change in role so you can include evidence of achievements during your probationary period in your promotion application.

Key outputs/achievements

For applicants on the T&S pathway, 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. 

For applicants on the R pathway, with regard to the evidence provided of research, you should highlight up to four of your key research outputs (including but not limited to, journal articles, books, chapters, reports, pre-prints, datasets, software, artefacts) since your last promotion/appointment, and describe their significance in terms of your discipline, and of your contribution to them (using CRediT taxonomy or your own words), in order to demonstrate the quality and value of your research. You are advised to limit these descriptions to 50-100 words per output. The outputs must be publicly available for consideration. You may wish to indicate if any of these are open access (free to read and reuse at no cost).  In addition, your role and contribution in large, multi-author publications should be made clear. If your research results do not take the form of conventional scholarly publications, you should provide information about this. With regard to researcher development (where applicable), you should include a self-assessment of the impact of your work on your research team. 

Multidisciplinary teaching and/or research

If you consider your teaching and/or research 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

For applicants on the T&S pathway, 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 on the courses you have taught or are teaching. You should provide commentary on the feedback you have received, explaining how you have responded to the feedback, and how you have used the feedback to improve your 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.

Teaching duties

With regard to teaching duties (if applicable), you should include a self-assessment of the impact of your work on students.