The precarious academic: professional development and academic identity in the neoliberal university.

Academics are constantly undergoing identity shifts in response to globalisation, marketisation and the impact of technology on academic work. This study investigates the impact of a Graduate Certificate of Higher Education (GCHE) on academic identity development in an Australian University. GCHE graduates and their educators were interviewed to examine whether such extended and reflective professional development might support the negotiation of complex identity shifts. Findings indicated that academic identity development was enabled through this professional development by re-engaging individual academics in the diverse, traditional components of teaching, research and administration, working against the neoliberal trend of role-compartmentalisation for efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]