Developing and enhancing ‘quality’ in higher education and universities is a major European imperative (Rammell, 2005). A key strategy for doing so is to ensure that all academic staff in higher education institutes (HEIs) have as much opportunity as they need or wish to in order to develop the understandings, abilities and motivations they require to work as effective academics. However, this is not a simple tactic. There is now much uncertainty about the different intellectual directions that academics should, or could, follow. For example, the dual academic roles (and identity) of an academic - that of being both an effective ‘teacher’ and a successful ‘researcher’ – are increasingly (and paradoxically) being both untangled and pulled apart at some levels of higher educational policy and practice while efforts to bring them together more closely are being pursued at other levels. (See, for example, Zamorski 2000, 2002; Robertson and Bond 2001; Scott, 2005; Jenkins A, Healey M & Zetter R, 2007). Academic management and administration offers a further potential route to follow. As academic work begins to fragment, so to do academic identities and careers. Academics now need to make choices about what kind of an academic they or would like to be, or are being asked to be by their institutions. Staff and academic development programmes in universities across Europe and beyond now play an important part in helping academic staff to understand the national, European and even global contexts in which they are now working. They also aim to help academics identify, pursue and manage a career trajectory and academic identity (see Henkel 2000 for example) that is intellectually significant and satisfying for themselves, for their HE colleagues, for the wider intellectual communities they work in and for their students. However, the notion of professional training for academics is relatively new. The extent to which academic staff find them helpful or effective has yet to be tested.

This Roundtable will present research on the role, significance and impact of such programmes from the perspectives of three European countries: Estonia, Sweden and the UK. Four presenters will offer findings from data collected from academics participating in their university staff training programmes, primarily through interviews, questionnaires and observations (participant and otherwise).

Findings will cover issues at conceptual, philosophical and practical levels. For example: how staff deal with and reflect on their academic roles as teachers/researchers and what they learn about this in the context of a changing structure in HE systems and relations; how they identify and handle dilemmas and risks about the choices they make; and the impact of such courses on their teaching skills or teaching/learning philosophy. Findings will be located in the wider national and European contexts of academic development purposes. We hope that the Roundtable will offer a basis for discussion on this subject, looking at future trends of professional development and what kind of support is needed and why?