RWTH Aachen University will establish a tenure track system and continuously appoint 25 % of its permanent professors via tenure track. Using both the permanent and the tenure track professorships created in the program’s scope, RWTH will make the tenure track one of the essential pillars of its recruitment and appointment strategies. Tenure track professorships will be instrumental in the promotion of young researchers and will help RWTH achieve ambitious equal opportunity and internationalization goals. The specific combination of qualification path (qualifying for a permanent professor’s position by doing a professor’s work) and employment conditions (fixed duration of pre-tenure phase, transparent evaluation criteria) makes the tenure track an attractive career path. RWTH will help its tenure track professors to develop their managerial skills and to reconcile family and professional life.

Tenure track professorships will also strengthen the young faculty. Alongside other measures such as the Permanent Positions Program and the expansion of non-professorial career paths, they will contribute to the diversification of RWTH’s staffing structure. A dynamic and diverse staffing structure is indispensable for institutionalizing processes of structural innovation and renewal as well as for advancing excellence in research and teaching.

The tenure track professors will strengthen RWTH’s cross-faculty profile areas and develop the research topics simulation science, data science and life sciences – working on these interdisciplinarily will be key to solving current and future global challenges.