While academics need to achieve quality performance in research, teaching, and service to achieve an advancement in rank, many claim that the goalposts of achievement are unclear and subjective. At the same time, we know that institutions use the academic promotion process to achieve the long- and short-term strategic needs of the institution. It may be that the need to strategically deviate from initially communicated promotion policies has led academics to be presented with signal noise regarding what performance is needed to achieve an advancement in rank. As a result, this study explored how credible are the signals sent by higher education institutions via their academic promotion decisions for advancement to senior faculty ranks. To achieve this, we analyzed the research and service activities of 561 faculty from Ireland, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand who were recently promoted to Senior Lecturer up to Professor. From our analysis, we found that the promotion process creates three levels of signal noise, overall signal noise (at the rank level), internal signal noise (at the institutional level), and external signal noise (at the regional level). These signal noises are created as institutions make continuously inconsistent promotion decisions for individuals being promoted to Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor, and Professor. These findings call into question assumptions academics have about academic careers (e.g., citations are an important metric for career advancement) and the career-related decisions we make when benchmarking against those who have gone before us as we find not all ranks are created equally.
