The five-year plan looks impressive until you compare it with next week's calendar. It includes publications, a new course, leadership, and funding. What it doesn't say is which task you should do first or what support the plan depends on.
The handbook provides a planning framework and an illustrative example. Use the framework to connect a longer direction to near-term decisions. Don't copy another person's output targets, workload percentages, or funding ambitions as though they were requirements for your role.
Start with direction and responsibilities
Write what you want to contribute through your work and compare it with your assigned duties and applicable criteria. Note confirmed review dates and other relevant boundaries. Separate preferences you hope to discuss from arrangements already agreed.
Use a small set of planning fields
For each priority, record:
- The contribution or capability you want to develop.
- The evidence or work needed to support it.
- The next milestone within your control.
- The time, resources, approvals, or collaboration required.
- A point to review progress and adjust the plan.
Use these fields for research, teaching and mentoring, service, and other responsibilities relevant to you. Keep the set small enough to remain a usable plan.
Work backward without pretending the future is settled
A longer project may need several stages, while a current teaching issue may need a small change this term. Identify the order and dependencies. An external decision, such as a funding award, belongs in the uncertainty column rather than being promised as a result you control.
Include alternative routes when a dependency could change the next step.
Translate one priority into the next three months
For a hypothetical course improvement, the longer goal might be clearer evidence-based reasoning in student work. Near-term actions could be reviewing current samples appropriately, revising a practice task, and deciding how to examine the next round of responses.
That example illustrates the structure, not a prescribed project or guaranteed outcome.
Discuss and update the plan
Use it with your chair or mentors to clarify priorities and support. Revisit it when assignments, evidence, or circumstances change. A plan that ignores rest and other real commitments will be harder to sustain.
Choose one five-year ambition and fill in the five fields above. Then put only its next realistic milestone on your immediate work list. The plan becomes useful when it helps you make a decision today while leaving room to revise tomorrow.
Adapted from The New Faculty Handbook by Zafer Unal, pp. 169-172. The book's example is illustrative, not a universal workload or output standard.
