"Many systems in other countries are ahead of us"

Junior researchers at universities are promoted in a variety of ways, for example through PhDs, graduate schools and associate professorships. There are a great number of qualification measures on offer which are also designed to ensure transparency and make planning easier. Kathrin Nolte spoke to Prof. Jule Specht, a member of the Junge Akademie in Berlin and Professor of Personality Psychology at Humboldt University Berlin, about the challenges for German universities in promoting junior researchers. What status does promoting junior researchers have at German universities? First of all, of course, there is the question of who actually counts as a junior researcher. Students' The number of students is at an historic high: never before have so many people been studying, and an ever-increasing number of school-leavers are opting to go to university. Or is it the PhD students who constitute the junior researchers at university? Here, too, we have seen their numbers rise over the past few years - due mainly to the large number of fixed-term projects receiving third-party funding which have given rise to many additional jobs. So these junior researchers have an important status purely from the point of view of the numbers.