The University of Freiburg has established tenure-track professorships systematically as a strategic instrument during the first Excellence Initiative. In order to give outstanding junior research group leaders the opportunity to qualify themselves for leadership positions in academia, the University of Freiburg integrated this category of personnel, then referred to as a junior professorship with tenure track, into its Institutional Strategy and its Clusters of Excellence. Since 2017, the tenure procedures and their quality control are regulated in statutes including a quality assurance concept. These constitute a further development of guidelines that clearly structured and transparently elaborated the necessary steps for everyone involved already in 2012. All relevant information about career advancement and career options including tenure track at the University of Freiburg can be found on the Career Website.

For the further development of the University of Freiburg’s personnel structure and career system the tenure-track professorship is one of the main instruments for promoting early career researchers, though not the only one. In principle, the University follows three core objectives:

1. promoting the careers of doctoral researchers as first-stage researchers early on
2. further differentiating personnel categories alongside the professorship and, in the medium term, making up to 40% of the state-funded positions for employees with academic degrees into permanent positions
3. appointment of about 30% of all full professorships due to become vacant, except for those in the medical field, by the career path of tenure-track professorships by 2030.

Academics therefore have several career paths open to them from the doctoral phase on, depending on their level of qualification and their career goal. The University of Freiburg’s promotion of early career researchers and its human resources development concept take into account the fact that the inner-academic career system is fundamentally permeable and that academic careers are characterized by a high degree of mobility.