Professor career progression

The University of Botswana (UB) Project Management (PM) section in the Civil Engineering (CE) faculty are in a resource restricted environment and tasked to teach three classes a semester. Each faculty is now being requested to do research work, publish papers, and in many cases work on their PhD at the same time. The emphasis is on administrative and teaching roles, and not research roles. They are caught up in a career ladder that forces them to do research to get promoted, but with no strategic research plan and research is only a means for progression in an academic career and not the end. The mentorship of younger faculty in research is difficult, both from the role of the mentor, and the protégé. The research mentors are rare, and the younger lecturers feel neglected. There is no coordinated strategic research plan for the department, section, or faculty. The average research activity of the majority of the staff at the University of Botswana is very low. The publishing of research of the staff is currently very poor. This paper proposes that the problem is not a University of Botswana issue, but a structural issue that all universities face. The authors propose that faculty be exposed to a new research based faculty career ladder instead of focusing on the traditional teaching and administrative career, and a new approach to research. The research will investigate whether a research based career can possibly be successful at the University of Botswana Project Management section.