Freiburg Career Paths in Academia: Permanent Positions Beyond the Professorship
The University of Freiburg aims to make academic career paths sustainable and create permanent career options beyond the professorship. In coordination with various groups from research and administration, as well as representative bodies, the University of Freiburg has therefore developed a statement of voluntary commitment that shows how this can be realized at our University. This statement was passed by the Senate on 22 October 2025:
The University of Freiburg is committed to providing attractive, plannable, and equitable career paths in academia – also beyond the professorship.
Excellent research, outstanding teaching, and innovative knowledge transfer need more than a wealth of ideas and academic freedom. They also depend on reliable career prospects for the people who perform these tasks. To attract the best talent for this purpose, the UFR is creating structural conditions that make academic careers alongside the professorship attractive, sustainable, and amenable to development.
Academia needs reliability
The University of Freiburg is pursuing the goal of combining permanent academic tasks with permanent academic employment. We are thus making an active contribution to ensuring quality in research, teaching, and transfer as well as developing our academic culture further.
The assigning of permanent positions s based on a University-wide conceptual framework that is currently under development. This framework will establish quality-assured selection processes, targeted personnel development, and strategic planning of personnel structure beyond the professorship.
Three job profiles – one perspective
The University of Freiburg is creating permanent career options with the three job profiles lecturer, researcher, and academic manager. These profiles are equivalent but differ in focus. Permeability in career options and capacity for development are integral parts of Freiburg career paths.
Reliable processes – transparent standards
The University of Freiburg ensures that permanent positions are assigned in a quality-assured, equitable, and transparent process:
Our ambition: Excellent research, teaching & transfer through transparent structures and sustainable career paths
The University of Freiburg understands itself as a learning organization that enables excellent research, teaching, and transfer through attractive working conditions, transparent structures, and responsible personnel development. With reliable career paths alongside the professorship, we seek to achieve a balance: between stability and dynamism, between individual career development and structured personnel planning, and between institutional continuity and innovative capacity. We invite all members of the University to help shape this path – for a sustainable, diverse, and future-oriented academic culture.