Academic staff have spent years teaching, researching, and holding universities together while hearing almost nothing back. Today that changes. THE Network on AcademicJobs.com launches a Strava-style kudos feature, and it is about time.
The launch arrives at a moment when academic staff around the world keep describing the same feeling: the work gets harder, the hours get longer, and the acknowledgment gets rarer. You see it in corridor conversations. You hear it in staff surveys. The people who teach the courses, mark the essays, and keep the labs running have been feeling undervalued for years, and the sector has done very little about it.
The pandemic made this starker. University staff moved entire courses online within days, kept research programs alive through lockdowns, and supported students through a crisis no one had planned for. Healthcare workers received public applause. School teachers were recognized for keeping children learning. University staff did comparable work, and the public narrative never caught up.
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
That is the gap the THE Network kudos feature is designed to close. The idea is borrowed from Strava, the fitness app where athletes post workouts and friends tap a kudos button to say nice run. It takes the giver one second. For the receiver, it signals that someone noticed. Strava built an enormous social ecosystem on that tiny gesture because the gesture works.
On THE Network, academics can post their own milestones: a paper accepted, a difficult course delivered, a viva conducted, a grant application submitted. Colleagues and peers respond with kudos and a short note of appreciation. The recognition is immediate, public, and specific to the work done. You do not wait for an annual review or an awards committee. You notice what someone did this week and you say so.
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Why recognition has never been built for academic life
Workplace recognition is not a soft benefit. It is one of the strongest predictors of whether a skilled person stays in a role, how engaged they are, and how they cope under pressure. Academics face a strange version of this problem. The formal system rewards a narrow slice of achievements: papers published, grants won, citations collected. Teaching gets a line in a promotion application. Committee work gets nothing. Mentoring gets nothing. The daily labour of keeping a department running is invisible to almost everyone except the people doing it.
The gap has real consequences. Experienced staff walk away because they feel invisible. Students lose supervisors and teachers who still have years of good work left in them. Early-career researchers in particular describe the lack of acknowledgment as a bigger reason for leaving than pay. Gallup's research on employee recognition has shown for years that people who do not feel adequately recognised are twice as likely to say they will quit within a year.
Jarrod Kanizay, founder of AcademicJobs.com, has spent two decades building recruitment platforms for universities. He thinks the sector has a blind spot when it comes to its own people. Higher education staff have largely been ignored as societal heroes, he says. During the pandemic, university workers kept research moving and moved entire courses online in days. The applause went elsewhere. It is about time they got kudos and their efforts put up in lights.
The kudos feature does not fix every structural problem. It does not shrink marking loads or solve casualisation. What it changes is the signal. It tells an academic that their contribution registered with another professional who understands the work involved. For someone who has spent years feeling undervalued, that signal carries real weight.
THE Network is a collaboration between Times Higher Education and AcademicJobs.com. It gives academics a space to connect beyond their own institutions. The kudos layer turns that space into something more than a directory. An academic in Manchester can acknowledge a peer in Melbourne. A lecturer who tests a new teaching approach can receive kudos from someone who adopted it and saw results. That cross-institutional recognition fills a gap internal hierarchies cannot. Within a university, recognition usually depends on seniority and politics. A professor can praise a colleague, but a postdoc has no clean way to publicly recognise a mentor without navigating departmental sensitivities. Network-level kudos removes that friction.
Retention and recognition are inseparable. In my earlier piece on employer branding in higher education, I argued that institutions which treat their staff well attract better candidates in the long run. The kudos feature is a small part of that picture, but it is a part candidates can see. A candidate who watches how a network recognises its people gets a read on the culture before they ever sign a contract.
The feature is available now at academicjobs.com/the-network. If you are an academic, the first step is simple: post something you completed this week, then give kudos to a colleague whose work you have benefited from. The system works only if people use it, and the first few weeks will show whether the sector takes to the Strava model.
Institutions should also pay attention. When a third-party platform introduces recognition tools because universities have not, that tells you something about internal culture. The kudos feature can sit alongside institutional efforts, or it can be the nudge that prompts universities to do better. Either way, the academic workforce has spent long enough absorbing the message that its work is invisible.
People stay where they are seen. That principle has driven retention in every industry I have worked in, and higher education is no exception. The THE Network kudos feature is a start, and it starts with a simple idea: notice the work, say something, do it now.
Give your first kudos this week. Find one colleague whose work made your day easier and tell them. The sector has waited long enough.