Reflecting on Needs and Fit in Teaching,Research,and Service as Teachers of Psychology

The Challenges of Early Career

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines an early career psychologist as any psychologist in the first 10 years of their career (APA, 2025). APA Division 2, the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP), narrows the scope of this definition, describing EC-ToPs as any nonstudent who began teaching psychology within the last 10 years (STP, 2025). Regardless of the definition, EC-ToPs face unique challenges and obstacles as they seek to establish a successful career in psychology, such as the need to demonstrate competitive qualifications (e.g., prior teaching experience and publications) to obtain a faculty appointment (Boysen, 2020). Moreover, doctoral programs vary in the training they provide to students. Although some require extensive training for Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) and offer opportunities to independently teach courses, for example, many restrict GTAs largely to grading. EC-ToPs may thus enter faculty positions with varying levels of preparedness.

One of the first comprehensive investigations into the experiences of early career faculty noted that they work very hard to balance designing and teaching new courses, publishing scholarly work, and providing service to the department, institution, and profession (Good et al., 2013). In a sample of 85 faculty members, EC-ToPs worked an average of 46.95 h per week, with approximately 12% of the sample working over 60 h per week (Good et al., 2013). The chief concerns reported by EC-ToPs involved balancing job responsibilities, balancing work and home life, and the disproportionate time required to design new courses. Indeed, balance is a concern that is sure to come up in just about any discussion of early career academic life (Austin et al., 2007; Green & Hawley, 2009; Hollywood et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2009; Solem & Foote, 2006). Concerns about balance and burnout have grown, given the backdrop of work demands, social tension, political strife, and unanticipated global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. These conditions have translated into heavier workloads, rapid instructional changes, increased student support needs, and greater emotional labor. Collectively, these pressures can erode boundaries between work and personal life, further contributing to burnout.

Building on several years of work done by STP's Early Career Psychology (ECP) Committee, we provide a holistic resource for EC-ToPs navigating the early stages of their careers. Although we tailor these resources to EC-ToPs, we hope that they will be useful for anyone seeking to establish a more intentional, focused, and successful career in the field of psychology.

Our Objective

How can EC-ToPs establish better work–life balance and careers that are both successful and sustainable? Here, we address these questions from multiple perspectives, providing thought exercises, activities, and recommendations for best practices. We first draw on techniques from industrial–organizational psychology to provide recommendations for an intentional approach to crafting a career aligned with explicitly defined values. We then highlight a framework for developing goals that are specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic, time-bound, inclusive, and equitable (SMARTIE).

We would like to note that EC-ToPs hold complex, multifaceted positions, and “one size” will not “fit all.” Although we discuss EC-ToPs as a broad group, it is important to recognize that their experiences are not uniform. Indeed, individual characteristics (e.g., career aspirations, family responsibilities, health status, and identity) and contextual factors (e.g., teaching load, research expectations, and resource and mentorship availability) can shape how faculty experience work–life balance and evaluate career success. Disparities in workload also arise as a function of social identity. Women and faculty from historically marginalized groups, for example, are often expected to perform disproportionate amounts of service, mentoring, advising, and other forms of invisible labor that may not be fully recognized in evaluation and promotion processes (e.g., Misra et al., 2021). We recognize that these additional responsibilities can limit the amount of flexibility faculty have to pursue personally meaningful goals and may further increase workload strain. Our goal is to provide resources and highlight frameworks of thinking that will benefit as many professionals as possible, and we encourage readers to adapt these ideas to their own context and situation while considering the broader institutional and cultural factors that shape faculty workload.

Step 1: Center Values and Needs

EC-ToPs might be tempted to begin with external values or needs (e.g., an invitation to join a new Provost-led task force) because these are salient and reinforced, but these can overshadow internal priorities. Although external values and needs should of course be considered (we discuss how and when below), EC-ToPs should start by independently clarifying what work they personally want to accomplish. This exercise can quickly identify role conflicts. For example, someone who is most passionate about educating undergraduates may experience a conflict between the desire to innovate or redesign a course and the pressure for increased research output. Recognizing value conflicts may create dissonance, but they should not be avoided. If left unaddressed, these sorts of conflicts may lead to burnout and turnover (Ahmed & Asfahani, 2022; Ghorpade et al., 2011; Homayed et al., 2025).

Faculty should also consider which kinds of tasks leave them energized or drained, and their nonnegotiables (boundaries that protect physical health, mental well-being, research obligations, or family time). This reflection allows EC-ToPs to explicitly evaluate the alignment and gaps between themselves and their work context, which can help identify potential predictors of burnout and well-being.

Step 2: Conduct a Job Assessment

Once EC-ToPs have determined what they want from their career, they can begin to compare these values with the expectations of their appointment. Understanding formal expectations is important not only for promotion and tenure, as applicable, but also for allowing EC-ToPs to consider and potentially adjust the alignment between these institutional expectations and their own values and goals.

There are multiple methods for conducting a job assessment. For example, translate the position's offer letter, the department and institution's promotion and tenure criteria (typically found in governing documents with titles such as “Faculty Statutes” or “Promotion and Tenure Guidelines”), and unit norms (discuss with colleagues, Department Chair) into a concrete list of role requirements. It is more concrete and therefore helpful to list “produce two peer-reviewed publications per academic year” than “demonstrate scholarly productivity.” Because EC-ToPs tend to value mentorship from senior faculty (Troisi et al., 2015), another avenue for obtaining useful information about job expectations is mentorship from colleagues further along in their professional trajectories.

After creating a concrete list of role expectations, consider when performance will be reviewed and what information will be used in those reviews. It is here that EC-ToPs can begin to consider how the activities that currently dominate their time align or misalign with the expectations for their appointment. In the case of misalignment, faculty might consider reprioritizing job duties (e.g., shifting which courses they typically teach and spending more or less time on undergraduate mentorship), finding creative ways to make duties more manageable (e.g., leveraging collaboration opportunities in research), seeking support and resources to help navigate misalignment, or exploring career opportunities beyond the institution.

Step 3: Conduct an Environmental Scan

Whereas a job assessment focuses on understanding the expectations of the specific role, an environmental scan focuses on the broader context in which that role exists (SHRM, 2025). For an EC-ToP, this is the process of identifying the strategic goals of the department, the college, the institution, higher education, and the field of psychology in general. EC-ToPs should ask themselves: “In what areas do my current (or desired) tasks advance these priorities?” Answers can often be obtained by talking with administrators (e.g., the Department Chair or Dean) and using existing resources, such as departmental and institutional websites that provide information on mission, goals, and strategic plans.

The next step is to attempt to identify two or three concrete institutional priorities that can be advanced in some way within the next year. For example, the institution may emphasize experiential learning or high-impact practices (Kuh, 2009). If an EC-ToP already mentors students informally, perhaps they can consider more formal mentorship in the form of taking on undergraduate research assistants (RAs; Whiteside et al., 2007) or teaching assistants (Weidert et al., 2012). This formalizes the work EC-ToPs are already doing in ways that directly tie into institutional initiatives and can be quantified for advancement.

Being able to identify and understand where the EC-ToP's goals coalesce with the broader goals of their department, college, and institution is a key strategy for success. Creating a needs assessment plan can help EC-ToPs determine when to say “no”—a skill integral for healthy work–life balance (Hinton et al., 2020)—and build their own brand as emerging faculty members. The needs assessment exists at a macro level, as these are the building blocks of EC-ToPs’ careers, the concepts that guide high-level decision making. To translate these overarching principles into actionable behavior, we suggest breaking them down into smaller, more manageable chunks of short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals. For this, we recommend the SMARTIE approach to goal setting.