In the UK lecturers in Health professional fields are often appointed to academic posts following considerable experience gained as clinical practitioners. The expectations on these lecturers for gaining a doctorate and publishing research outputs vary between different universities but are generally increasing. On the other hand the quality assurance regime, including the influence of professional bodies, places great emphasis on clinical credibility and on the work-based learning element of the student experience. This study analyses online survey responses from 372 lecturers in nursing, midwifery, physiotherapy, radiography and occupational therapy. Open ended prompts were used to gather respondents’ narrative about their experiences of becoming and being a lecturer in their professional field. A sociocultural framework (Wenger,1998; Engestrom,2001) is used to understand the relationship between the broader influences of the higher education sector, the more localised overlapping communities of practice in which lecturers in professional fields work, and their individual trajectories of academic identity building. The results show that the lecturers’ balance the expectations for research activity against the pressures for clinical credibility and engagement with employers. The lecturers respond to contradictions in their workplace and follow a range of pathways in balancing credibility as a practitioner with that as a researcher.