Teacher educators’ professional knowledge is complex as it consists of theoretical and practical knowledge, of research and teaching competence (Smith, 2011). Often teacher educators join the faculty of universities with a long history as successful school teachers or with a recent doctorate. This means that teacher educators hold two different kinds of expertise, practical and teaching expertise or theoretical and research expertise. They have different forms for what Murray & Male (2005) call teacher educators’ primary and secondary expertise. Many teacher educators’ primary expertise relates to the practice of teaching, which is also the reason for why they have been invited into the programme. The challenge is that a major aspect of their assessment as HE faculty relates to research and publications, and many teacher educators have to develop a new kind of primary expertise (Murray & Male, 2005; Zeichner, 2005). The current paper informs about how a Norwegian university’s general education faculty worked systematically in conceptualizing and building up the individual and collective research competence and publication activity using a long-term perspective. The results are measured as new doctorates, promotions, and publications nationally and internationally of 5 faculty members, whose primary expertise was teaching 5 years ago.