By popular demand, today’s post is about my tenure track position which I started 3 years ago. Although I intended to give an update of how my tenure track is going, there’s a bit of background that’s relevant to share, so this post is only about my experiences when I started. Also, recently I’ve had a few questions from future tenure trackers, so I’m sharing my answers in case it is useful to others.
Starting conditions
As I’ve also explained in my “student or employee during your PhD” post, all academic positions in the Netherlands work with fixed pay scales. You can find these here, below I also added a screenshot of some of the scales.
These numbers are all before tax and per month. Various secondary benefits also apply.

Assistant professor positions are in scale 11 or 12. Typically a starting assistant professor would be in scale 11, and in scale 12 after tenure. The Dutch Network of Women Professors (LNVH) reports that 50.8% of women assistant professors are in scale 11, versus 40.8% of men.

When I started at TUe, I was initially offered scale 11.0. However, I had already been in scale 11 as a postdoc, and my institution was a medical center, with slightly higher pay scales. Due to this I was offered 11.3, which just matched my previous salary, and which I accepted.
There was no start-up package – I think this in general isn’t a thing in the Netherlands, although I do see this being offered more frequently now.
Contract & tenure conditions
The tenure track contract is a temporary contract for 5 years. After 4 years there is an evaluation which decides whether you get tenure or not. If yes, you get permanent contract, if not, you are still employed for a year. There is also a (less formal) midway evaluation after about 2 years, to prepare for the real thing.
The criteria for evaluation are described in various documents. I received some general criteria on what is important for the university (for example “supervising students”), and a department-specific interpretation of these criteria. In the context of creating a personal development plan for the tenure track period, I did receive some quantifiable criteria too, of what you should aim for within 4 years:
- Significant progress in obtaining the teaching qualification certificate
- Responsible instructor for 1-2 courses
- Good teaching evaluations
- Supervision of at least 2 MSc and 4 BSc students
- Co-author of at least 5 peer-reviewed publications in high impact, relevant journals
- Written statement from chair about contribution to getting funding
- Significant progress in increasing external visibility
- Collaborations with other departments, hospitals or industry
- Successful (co-) supervision of multiple PhD researchers
- Examples of strong leadership
- Examples of strong communication skills
- Examples of independence and responsibility
A bit more quantifiable, but still open to interpretation. In my own personal development plan I translated these as follows:
- Get teaching certificate
- Setup and teach a first year course, co-teach in a third year course, later start developing course closer to my research
- Supervise at least 2 MSc and 4 BSc students
- Co-author of at least 5 peer-reviewed publications in high impact, relevant journals
- Apply for 2 medium-sized (1 PhD or postdoc) grants per year
- Apply to small grants, for example for workshops, when possible
- Give talks at (local) conferences, or invited talks if possible
- Setup collaborations with other departments
- Co-supervise a PhD researcher (if funding)
- Outreach about academia through blog and Twitter
Also not entirely quantifiable, but I also left out a few specific details here (examples of papers, collaborations, numbers of blog/Twitter followers etc).
The (midway) tenure evaluation moments consist of submitting an update of this plan and a recent CV, and then giving a presentation about your achievements to a committee of 3-4 professors.
This is all I wanted to share for the first part of this topic – next time I’ll talk about how things are going so far. If you have any questions about this post, or anything I can address next time, please comment below!