EMCRs working in different types of environments, including universities, research institutes or the private sector, are subject to precarity and hypercompetition, and are most strongly affected by research culture and by assessment practices. These assessments happen at a variety of occasions and for different purposes, including hiring and promotion, yearly cadre reviews and success evaluations, project applications, habilitation, defending a disposition or a doctorate, etc.

Moreover, EMCRs particularly in earlier career stages face an uncertainty about the academic system, as there is little coaching and training on the existing requirements, an ongoing change that is hard to know what to expect and what will be expected, misaligned requirements by funders, universities etc. – and in some cases EMCRs encounter even hard contradictions between expectations from the outside world (e.g. regarding diverse outputs, new career pathways, open science practices) and what their culture realistically looks like (e.g. through departmental reward structures, lacking infrastructure and budget, or demands by the superior).

These pre-existing challenges may further become exacerbated through a change of the assessment practices, which needs to be voided and correspondingly represented by a shift in the basic academic research culture.