Job insecurity is chipping away at me and my cohort. Is it us, or the state of the economy?

I am struggling to find job security. Over the past two years, I’ve been rejected for positions as a senior research fellow, a lecturer and a research funding manager. My initial one-year contract, which was extended to 2.5 years, officially ends in three months. Every application feels like a lottery ticket. Every rejection feels personal, even when I know it shouldn’t. It’s as if I’m no longer good enough to be in academia. The stress is building. I feel like my career is at stake and, even more urgently, I’m starting to ask myself difficult questions about how to pay my rent once my contract runs out.

I know I’m not alone. At least five friends and colleagues at a similar career stage are also applying for jobs with months, or even weeks, left on their current contracts. It’s difficult to aim for independence as a researcher by landing a fellowship or getting a permanent position while navigating a career stage filled with fixed-term contracts.

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I hold a PhD in behavioural science, as well as a doctorate-equivalent qualification required to become a chartered health psychologist. I currently work as a researcher on the mental-health impacts of climate change at Imperial College London, one of the world’s leading universities.

And I’ve done what you’re supposed to do to make it in academia: I’ve published papers, won research grants and consultancy funding, taught across disciplines and co-hosted a United Nations webinar on what solutions young people want to improve their mental well-being during the climate crisis. I’ve also presented and strategized at a European Commission meeting on climate and health, and have been featured on the BBC World Service’s The Climate Question.

I work with several youth-led organizations, co-lead the lived-experience advisory board for the Lancet Psychiatry Commission on climate change and mental health, and deliver training on how to have difficult conversations about the climate, including at the Natural History Museum in London. I have academic mentors supporting me. Outside academia, I have worked in several sectors, including for charities and non-governmental organizations aiding hurricane recovery in the Caribbean.

Many people have achieved much more, but on paper I hoped that I looked like someone who should feel secure in their academic career.

Identifying the issues

So, myself and my colleagues find ourselves whispering the same question: is this a personal failing, or a symptom of a wider systemic shift in academia? A meta-analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour in June¹ reported that early-career researchers have a greater prevalence of symptoms of mental ill health, such as depression and anxiety, compared with the general population. Job insecurity is listed as one of the stressors. I feel especially drawn to this issue because, as a health psychologist, I can see how allowing this period of uncertainty to become a period of self-criticism could damage my health and be unhelpful in my job hunt.

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Conferring with academic mentors, I can recognize why this is happening, and why it might not entirely be to do with my personal abilities and is instead about the wider world and many circumstances that are out of my control.

The job market does not exist in a vacuum. Global conflicts have driven energy prices up and destabilized economies. In the United States, the administration of President Donald Trump has shifted science funding priorities, causing ripples across global health and climate funding. In the United Kingdom, where I live, projections show fewer vacancies and rising unemployment — pressures that hit low- and middle-income countries particularly hard. These changes cascade through research ecosystems, reducing opportunities and intensifying competition. Professors are also feeling the pinch.

Another driver of competition is the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence to assist in the writing of grant and job applications. This has clear benefits for many individual researchers, who can now produce stronger applications, but it also means that competitive applicants can produce even more polished proposals. The net result is that the total number of submissions has surged. Review systems, already stretched, are buckling under the volume of applications. In response, the European Research Council introduced (and soon scrapped, after backlash) a major change that would have seen applicants whose funding applications did not score highly enough unable to reapply for up to four years.

In much of the world, it’s a hard time to be looking for work in any sector.

Competing in an impossible market

I first started to feel panic in July 2024, 18 months before my contract was due to end. I began applying for academic fellowships, widely seen as the next step at my career stage. As my contract’s end date approached this January, I won a small pot of funding to sustain me for an extra six months.

With the clock ticking on my contract, and limited success to show from my applications, I shifted from attempting to win research funding through fellowships to applying for a wider scope of academic and non-academic positions. But the time required to complete each type of application forces difficult choices. You cannot do everything while performing at a full-time job (see ‘Practical support for struggling jobseekers’).

Developing a fellowship proposal takes around a year and repurposing it for a different funder takes another three months. Academic job applications require about three full days to properly tune a CV, read up on the group’s literature and develop your research plan for the next five years. Adjusting a CV and drafting a cover letter for non-academic roles, by contrast, takes me around three hours.