Senior Academic Staff

VUB’s renewed career policy for professors (from 2025 onwards) aims to enhance wellbeing and tailor careers to individual competencies. Key elements to the career policy are clear guidelines, room for personal development and flexibility, recognition for both individual and team achievements and recognition of engaged leadership (link to next new page) as an essential skill.

Getting started

For each type of professorial staff (lecturer, senior lecturer, professor, full professor), new, updated job profiles have been developed that specify concrete expectations in three domains: education, research and innovation, and governance & societal engagement. By using behavioral indicators, personal leadership and collaboration are also valued and encouraged, contributing to a healthy and supportive work environment.

Agreements notes are used for all professors as a guideline throughout their careers. These agreements notes outline concrete expectations, objectives, and predefined results, forming the basis for reflection, dialogue, and feedback. In addition to individual objectives, the contribution to joint team objectives in both education and research will be discussed.

Reflection and feedback as central principles for career development

Mandatory assessment and evaluations exist only at the end of a Tenure Track, temporary appointment, or for promotion purposes. The main driver for your career development will be feedback discussions with your Feedback, Evaluation, and Promotion Committee (FEB), as well as interim reflection discussions with your Academic Director.

Employees can read all about the renewed career policy for professors via our internal pages.

Leadership at the VUB is “ENGAGED LEADING”

​​​​​​​Enthusiasm, intent and connection.

That is what VUB leaders want to represent. At the VUB, we encourage our staff to take on and share leadership, to speak up, to show decisiveness, claim ownership, and enter into ​​​​​​​dialogue with each other, in order to work together towards our shared goals

Do you see yourself as a leader? Leadership is an inherent part of working at VUB. Regardless of your grade or position, you, like your colleagues, will lead groups or projects and lead people at various points in your career. Therefore, we want to set clear expectations about the type of leadership VUB personnel embodies, and we are committed to better preparing and supporting our (future) leaders.

Enthusiasm, intention, and connection in behaviour. Engaged leading is personal leadership. Through concrete behaviours, you can develop a leadership style that contributes to your individual activities, team objectives, and the broader university framework. VUB uses the behavioural indicators of enthusiasm, intention and connection to engage in dialogue with others about how to translate expectations into practice in your context.

Growing as an engaged leader. VUB LRN, the learning and development hub for all personnel at VUB, offers various Engaged Leading trainings and programmes. The training offer includes Engaged Leading initiatives for all employees, regardless of their grade and position. In addition, some programmes are geared to specific personnel subgroups, such as early career professors or formal leaders amongst management and professionals, to take into account their specific context. Employees have access the broad training offer via the VUB LRN catalogue.

How do you balance the roles of leader, colleague and mentor as a PhD promotor? VUB supports you in this (new) role via short training modules and other tools.

At VUB, all researchers and staff have the opportunity to join for a diverse training and development offer via VUB LRN.