This presentation emphasizes that for career advancement in academia the key thing is to focus on what you want (your mission) and how you want to achieve this (your strategy), and then align it with your institution’s mission and strategy.

The slides mostly served to support discussion: The initial set of questions raised by starting faculty is listed on slide 2 – the main recommendation is on slide 10:

• You have a clear, future-oriented, mission
• Your strategy offers a compelling way to achieve that mission
• Your past performance demonstrates your strategy execution ability

• Your mission directly helps the university to achieve its mission

• Your university’s strategy helps you execute your strategy
• Your strategy strengthens the university’s strategy

• You offer an inspirational, personal story how all this fits together

I am a professor in software engineering at Delft University of Technology, where I head of the Department of Software Technology. You can follow me on Twitter via @avandeursen.

I consider open access instrumental to wider dissemination of research results: If your conference hasn’t adopted golden open access yet, consider self-archiving through green open acccess.