Early-career tenure track starts

The Swedish government has introduced a national career path for early-career researchers that aims to make academia more attractive.

The biträdande lektor (assistant professor) position is a four-year programme during which an academic will have time to meet the requirements for a permanent assistant professor position, the government announced on 10 July.

The aim is to encourage more people to become academics by offering better job stability, said Helene Hellmark Knutsson, Sweden’s research minister. As it stands, 28 per cent of academics at public higher education institutions have fixed-term contracts—much higher than elsewhere in the labour market, she said.