The end of an academic contract used to feel like a clear chapter break: you finished, you left, you moved on. Today, for many early- and mid-career academics, it feels more like being stuck in a long, blurry middle teaching on short contracts, applying endlessly, and wondering when “real stability” will finally show up. This uncertain middle is not a personal failure; it is the new normal in a higher education ecosystem defined by precarity, competition, and constant change.
In this uncertainty, one quiet but radical move is to stop waiting for clarity and start designing it. Instead of asking “Will I get a permanent post?”, the more powerful question becomes “What kind of academic life do I want to build, and what experiments can I run this year to move toward it?”. That shift from prediction to design releases you from the fantasy of a single “correct” path and opens space for multiple, parallel futures. You might pursue a tenure-track role, cultivate industry collaborations, and pilot a community-based project, all as legitimate strands of your professional identity.
To design that future with intention, think in three portfolios rather than one job title: a portfolio of skills, a portfolio of relationships, and a portfolio of impact. Your skills portfolio goes beyond formal qualifications to include habits like facilitation, grant writing, public speaking, coding, mentoring, data storytelling, or digital pedagogy. Naming and curating these capabilities makes it easier to see how they travel across institutions, sectors, and even countries. Your relationships portfolio centres the people you learn with and from colleagues, students, alumni, and partners treated not as “contacts” but as a learning community you actively tend over time.
The impact portfolio asks a different kind of question: “If my current role disappeared tomorrow, what remains of my contribution?” Impact can live in an open educational resource, a policy brief, a community workshop series, or a student-led innovation you helped nurture. By deliberately creating artefacts that outlive your contract, you anchor your value in more than a job description. This also makes your next application, pitch, or promotion case far more compelling, because you are not just listing duties; you are demonstrating legacies.
Thriving in the uncertain middle does not mean suppressing anxiety or pretending the system is fair. It means holding three practices together: honest naming of constraints, imaginative design of alternative futures, and disciplined, small-scale experimentation in the present. Each semester, you might choose one skill to deepen, one relationship network to strengthen, and one visible contribution to produce, regardless of what HR decides. Over time, these accumulative choices transform waiting into building. The middle stops being a holding pattern and becomes a workshop a place where you quietly craft the next version of your academic life long before any contract can fully define it.
Dr. Yusuf Muchelule is a Senior Lecturer & a Consultant.
