Preparing my Senior Fellowship application led to one of the most useful professional documents I have created in years. I work in academic development at a research-intensive university, directing a postgraduate certificate in higher education and mentoring doctoral students, postdocs and academic staff across multiple cohorts of early-career academics for more than a decade. What I had not done, or at least not recently, was apply that same discipline to my own leadership practice.
I am writing from the United States, where Advance HE Fellowship remains relatively unfamiliar and is not tied to hiring or promotion in most institutions. Although it was not required of me, I chose to pursue Senior Fellowship as a deliberate opportunity to examine my practice more rigorously.
From curiosity to excavation
About a year and a half ago, I was in the UK on tour with a rock band - an aspect of my life not typically connected with academic development. During that visit, I learned about Advance HE Fellowship. At first, I misunderstood “fellowship” in the American sense of funding. Instead, I discovered a nationally recognised framework for evidencing teaching and leadership.
The idea stayed with me, and when I returned home, I began exploring what pursuing Senior Fellowship might entail. When I began preparing my application, I assumed I would gather a few programme descriptions and participation figures. It quickly became something else - an excavation. Each time I thought I had enough, the Professional Standards Framework (PSF) pushed me back into my files.
What emerged were patterns I hadn’t fully named: how mentoring structures shaped colleagues’ development over time; how the communities of practice I convened strengthened confidence and collegial exchange; how initiatives connected across years.
Making implicit leadership explicit
Writing for the UKPSF required translation, not simply of terminology, but of perspective. The framework asks you to look at your work from the outside. That clarity prompted me to step back from my day-to-day responsibilities and examine my leadership from a more deliberate distance.
In aligning my work with Descriptor 3, I found myself making implicit commitments explicit: Where does my leadership have demonstrable impact? How do my programmes cohere across time? When does mentoring become influence rather than simply support?
The most formative feedback I received came from my UK mentor in this process, Professor Mike Seal, PFHEA. He pressed me to strengthen claims with evidence. Every assertion had to be earned. It was the same advice I regularly give doctoral students about teaching statements. Experiencing it from the other side was both humbling and clarifying.
A document that endures
What I did not anticipate was how durable the application would become. The final narrative is no longer simply a submission. It is now a working map of my leadership practice. It captures scale, patterns and influence in ways that annual reviews rarely do. It has already informed decisions about programme design, collaboration and mentoring.
I now introduce the UKPSF within our postgraduate certificate at Duke - not primarily as a pathway to credentialing, but as a structure for systematic reflection. Even for those who don’t apply for Fellowship, the framework helps move teaching statements and portfolios beyond description toward evidence-based articulation. The process has also sharpened how I read teaching statements and guide others in articulating their practice.
What changed
In assembling the application, I was required to account for my influence across time, not just activity in the present. I had to connect initiatives that had evolved separately, articulate how they shaped the practice of others, and identify where my evidence was thin. That exercise changed how I understand my own work.
Senior Fellowship carries international recognition. Earning it required me to clarify the scope and coherence of my leadership in terms legible beyond my immediate institutional and national context. I had to move beyond describing programmes and toward explaining their impact on colleagues, on institutional culture, and on the professional trajectories of those I mentor. The reflection required to articulate that impact is what gives the recognition its meaning.
If you stepped back and mapped your leadership against the UKPSF today, what patterns and what opportunities for growth might you discover?
Hugh Crumley is Assistant Dean at Duke University in North Carolina, United States.