Perception of barriers: The experiences of lecturers in adapting to changing institutional expectations in upgraded private technological university in Taiwan

In 1996, the Ministry of Education in Taiwan adopted a policy to allow technical and vocational junior colleges to become four-year colleges. In order to strengthen the faculty's structure, the institutions expected the lecturers to seek and earn promotion to higher rank as soon as possible. After a decade, there were still a great number of lecturers who remained at the same rank. This study aimed to learn from un-promoted lecturers and their administrators about the lecturer's experiences with changing work expectation and the lecturer's difficulties with promotion. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 32 lecturers and 10 administrators at two private upgraded vocational higher institutions.;Seven barriers were found for lecturer's difficulties in conducting research and getting promoted to higher rank and there was much agreement in the categories mentioned by lecturers and administrators. The seven barriers identified were inadequate research support such as research equipment, funding, library database, and research assistants; work adjustment from teaching and service to teaching, research and service due to changing workload; barriers of publishing in prestigious international journals due to inadequate research and English skills; difficulty of using the authoring of specialized publications and technical reports to earn a promotion to associate professor due to unclear expectations from the Ministry of Education; longer time frame required to earn a doctorate in the humanities and social sciences versus in other specialized disciplines; age, especially in that lecturers over 50 had less tolerance of long hours of research and study; and family responsibility, such as taking care of small children and sick parents for lecturers of both genders.;It was further found that both the lectures and the administrators perceived the lecturers should be mainly responsible for the success of their promotion to higher rank because the institutions had policies in place to encourage lecturers to promote to higher rank. Though both the administrators and the lecturers perceived lecturer's barrier to promotion as less related to problems such as inadequate research equipment and funding and more related to personal problems such as age and family responsibility, there are still some improvements the institutions can make to increase the promotion rates of all lecturers. The recommendations provided in this study can not only be helpful in improving lecturers' promotion rates but can also enhance mutual understanding between institutions and lecturers.