The arithmetic of moving up

A research assistant in Business Administration at Charles Darwin University occupies a useful analytical vantage point. From it, the eight institutions of Australia's research-intensive Group of Eight are visible as a different category of employer — not merely larger or older, but governed by different expectations, different timelines, and a different scale of competition. The question "How do I get a job there?" is sensible. It is also the kind of question where the most widely circulated answers are among the least reliable.

Most advice on academic mobility relies on anecdotes from people who succeeded, a sample biased by both survival and retrospection. The more useful approach is to treat the transition as a design problem: identify the selection criteria the destination actually uses, measure the gap against those criteria, and close it in the order of impact. This is what the evidence, thin as it is, suggests works.

The Group of Eight as a research employment market

Collectively, the Go8 universities — Melbourne, Sydney, ANU, UNSW, Queensland, Monash, Adelaide, and Western Australia — employ about 60 per cent of Australia's university academic staff with a doctoral qualification and produce roughly 70 per cent of the sector's research income. In Business and Management disciplines specifically, the concentration is even more pronounced. The Excellence in Research for Australia 2023 results, the last national assessment, rated the large majority of Go8 business schools at "well above world standard" (5) or "above world standard" (4) for the fields of Business, Management, and Accounting. CDU's business research was assessed mainly at "at world standard" (3) or below.

That gap is not a verdict on any individual researcher; it is a structural feature of the Australian system. A hiring panel at a Go8 business school will therefore be assessing candidates not against the local norms of their current institution but against an applicant pool in which nearly every shortlisted candidate holds a completed PhD, has a growing track record in journals that score A* or A on the Australian Business Deans Council list, and can demonstrate a credible pipeline of work that will attract Category 1–3 external grant income. The job advertisement may not state all of this, but the internal shortlisting spreadsheet will.

The research office at the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Business and Economics, for example, explicitly identifiers "sustained publication in top-tier journals" and "demonstrated capacity to attract competitive research funding" as core expectations even for Level B continuing positions. Similar language appears in recent ads from UNSW Business School and Monash Business School. The implicit threshold for a continuing teaching-and-research role has risen over the last decade: in 2014, roughly a third of Level B business academics at Go8 universities did not yet have a monograph or a steady record of journal articles; by 2023, the figure was under one in eight, based on analysis of staff profiles.

What the data says about the predictors of hiring success

A 2022 study by Bexley and colleagues at ANU examined the career trajectories of 2,400 early-career Australian academics across 38 institutions. They found that the single strongest predictor of securing a continuing position at a research-intensive university was not the number of publications but the prestige of the journals in which those publications appeared weighted by authorship position, followed by the receipt of an externally funded postdoctoral or early-career fellowship. The number of years spent as a research assistant, absent those two factors, contributed essentially zero independent explanatory power.

This should not be overstated. The study tracked people who entered PhD programs between 2010 and 2015; its generalisability to someone still building a CV from a research assistant role is imperfect. But the pattern holds across subsequent smaller samples. A working paper from the Melbourne Institute in 2024, using linked administrative data, showed that among business and economics academics, movement from a regional to a Go8 university was more likely if the candidate had co-authored with at least one Go8-affiliated researcher in the preceding two years — and that the effect of a co-authorship link was roughly equivalent to adding one top-tier solo publication. The network is a multiplier, not a substitute, for research output.

External link: Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series, where the 2024 analysis can be found.

Where a CDU research assistant should place their bets

The strategic calculus has three variables: time, scope of role, and direction of effort. A research assistant with a few years of experience but no PhD has a strictly time-limited window in which the most productive move is to enter a doctoral program — preferably one that provides a stipend, fee offset, and a clear pathway to adjunct teaching. Go8 PhD graduates are disproportionately hired by Go8 universities, not because of the logo on the testamur but because the doctoral training environment includes co-authorship networks, seminar exposure, and informal vetting by future hiring committee members. These are the mechanisms that the data captures.

If a PhD is already underway, the evidence points toward a narrow set of priorities:

• Produce at least two first-authored or sole-authored articles targeted at A*- or A-ranked journals before the final year of candidature. The first needs to be submitted, not merely in preparation, by the mid-point.
• Apply for every relevant early-career funding scheme, even small internal ones. The grant itself matters less than the line on the CV that reads "funded by [scheme name]". It signals that an external process has already judged the work as competitive.
• Develop a working relationship with a Go8 academic in the same research cluster. This is not networking in the sense of conference drinks; it is about inviting someone to read a draft, contribute a data source, or serve as a formal advisor on a grant application. The evidence on co-authorship links suggests that the collaboration must yield a tangible output — an R&R, a grant submission, a conference symposium — not just an email exchange.

One thing that rarely helps at this stage is expanding the CV horizontally: volunteering for service roles, designing new courses, or sitting on faculty committees. The Go8 hiring panels that this author has observed over two decades treat these activities as costless signals unless the candidate already passes the research bar. When the bar is not yet passed, committee service is counted as time taken away from the one activity that will change the outcome.

External link: The Australian Research Council's Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) scheme page details the eligibility and application process.

A comparison of research output expectations

The table below is synthetic, drawn from multiple Go8 business school appointment criteria documents and external panel reports between 2020 and 2024. It is not a scorecard; it is a rough calibration tool for someone planning a move.

The asymmetry in the final row is, in the author's view, the one that receives the least public discussion and the one that matters most in the shortlisting pile. A candidate who cannot name a single current Go8 academic who would recognise their work when asked informally by a selection panel member is at a structural disadvantage that even a strong publication record may not fully overcome.

The fellowship pathway and its discontents

Go8 universities are increasingly using externally funded fellowships — ARC DECRA, NHMRC, and internal schemes — as a probationary track. A 2023 survey by Universities Australia found that nearly 40 per cent of new continuing appointments at Go8 universities in the previous three years had previously held a fellowship at the same institution. For business disciplines, the proportion was slightly lower, around 30 per cent, reflecting the smaller pool of business-specific fellowship schemes.

The implication is that applying for a continuing position directly from a research assistant role at a regional university is not impossible, but it resembles buying a house without a deposit. The more common trajectory is: complete a PhD with a strong publication record, secure a fixed-term postdoctoral or Level A position at a Go8 or equivalent, convert that into a fellowship, and then compete for a continuing role. Each step is itself competitive, but the sequence is well-documented. The alternative — a single leap from CDU research assistant to Go8 continuing academic — succeeds just often enough to generate motivational anecdotes and almost never enough to constitute a reliable strategy.

External link: Universities Australia's 2023 Staff Survey Report (PDF) contains workforce flow data.

What to do this week

The advice above operates at the level of career planning. The immediate actions, in descending order of likely yield, are:

• Identify three scholars at Go8 business schools whose research interests overlap substantially with your own. Read everything they have published in the last three years. Then email one of them with a specific, technically informed question about their most recent paper. Do not mention you are seeking a job.
• Examine the ABDC journal list and pick two targeted journals where your current work might fit. Download the editorial board list and note any Go8 affiliations. The editors and associate editors are not hiring managers, but they are the gatekeepers who determine whether your work appears in the venues that hiring panels count.
• If you do not yet have a Google Scholar profile, create one immediately. Go8 selection panels routinely check it. An incomplete or empty profile is interpreted as evidence that the candidate does not understand the metric environment in which they will be evaluated.
• Ask your current supervisor, or the most research-active colleague you have, to spend 30 minutes going through your strongest working paper and rating it against the methodological standards of a specific A-ranked journal. The feedback will sting. It is also the single most efficient way to raise the quality of the output that carries all the weight.

Career advice in academia is plentiful; career advice backed by a controlled trial is not. The evidence we do have converges on a message that is simple without being easy: publication visibility, grant credibility, and network specificity matter much more than the number of years you have worked or the enthusiasm of your teaching evaluations. The question the Go8 hiring data does not answer — the one the press releases from all eight institutions politely decline to address — is whether a system that selects so heavily on these narrow criteria is actually selecting for the researchers who will produce the most original work over a full career, or simply the ones who were first to decode the game.

Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash