Promotions

Processing Procedures

1. All promotions will be handled once every academic year, in principle, by academic units that have an opening. The promotion will be approved after passing three levels of Teacher Evaluation Committee review, departmental (graduate institute), college, and university; a promotion report will be submitted to the Ministry of Education for teacher certification.
2. If a faculty member has a joint appointment equally between two departments (graduate schools), the two departments (graduate schools) will negotiate to decide which department (graduate school) will process the promotion application.
3. Promotions of teachers who are physicians at the “Institute of Biomedical Engineering” will be handled by the College of Medicine while promotions for teachers who are not physicians will be handled by the College of Engineering. The promotions of researchers of the Hydrotech Research Institute will be conducted by the College of Engineering with a notification sent to The College of Bioresources and Agriculture.

Promotion Eligibility

1. Full-time faculty members at NTU can be promoted from a lower level to a higher level position. In the second semester that a faculty member teaches at the university, he or she can apply for promotion with the Teacher Evaluation Committee of the department (graduate school). The application must pass the evaluation process (or within the set evaluation period after the promotion) or be waived by the university for that faculty member.
2. Current faculty members who obtained their instructor’s certificate before the amendment of the Educational Personnel Employment Law (March 21, 1997) and who taught without interruption since then can apply for evaluation according to the original promotion guidelines.
3. The promotion of teaching assistants who were employed before March 21, 1997 to lecturers will be handled according to the new guidelines.
4. Full-time faculty members on temporary transfer without pay can apply for promotion if they volunteer to return to teach at the school.

Qualifications and Record of Service

(1) Basic years of service:

1. The last day of the school year (July 31) is used as the record date for calculating years of service for promotion.
2. Basic years of service must meet the specifications of Articles 16, 16-1, 17, and 18 of the Educational Personnel Employment Law.
3. The years of service for research work, professional career, and positions will be calculated based on the months and years recorded on the proof of employment formally issued by service agencies.
4. The years of service of a faculty member at a certain rank will be calculated according to the months and years recorded on the teaching certificate of the specific rank. For adjunct faculty members, half of the length of service will be credited.
5. For full-time faculty members who are approved for full-time advanced studies and research, regarding promotion, a maximum of one year will be credited from the period of advanced studies and research to their years of service. For teachers with approved temporary transfers, a maximum of two years will be counted toward years of service in terms of promotion.

(2) Special Outstanding Performance: If a teacher only matches the basic requirement for years of service set by the Educational Personnel Employment Law, or if an Associate Professor or Assistant Professor has served less than four years, or if a post-doctoral instructor has served less than ten (five) years, he or she must demonstrate special outstanding performance for promotion and provide written certification of extraordinary achievements or review and evaluation.

Review of Representative Work

(1) Regulations:

• Education Personnel Employment Law
• Faculty Qualification Review Guidelines for College and Above
• Faculty Qualification Review Implementation Guidelines for College and Above
• Implementation Guidelines for Authorization from the Ministry of Education for College and Above to Conduct Faculty Qualification Reviews

(2) Recognition of publications:

1. Representative works must be published within five years following the start of the current service (years are calculated retrospectively to the effective date of promotion). However, relevant regulations formulated by colleges (centers) or departments (and subdivisions) shall take precedence.
2. Reference works must be published within seven years following the start of the current service (years are calculated retrospectively to the effective date of promotion). However, relevant regulations formulated by colleges (centers) or departments (and subdivisions) shall take precedence.
3. A female faculty member who is pregnant or gives birth during the abovementioned time frame may apply for its extension for two more years.
4. If the review term of the work of a female faculty member is delayed due to pregnancy or childbirth, such a faculty member who got pregnant or who gave birth after reaching the previous faculty rank and within five years before the submission of review can, as approved by the third Faculty Evaluation Committee in the 2010 academic year, delay the review of their representative works and reference works for no more than two years.

(3) Rules governing submitted publications:

1. The representative works must be published in local or foreign academic or professional publishers (including electronic journals with peer review processes and are publicly accessible). Also applicable are proofs provided by publishers stating forthcoming articles, or works compiled and published following rigorous review procedures by local or foreign scholarly conferences. However, relevant regulations formulated by colleges (centers) or departments (and subdivisions) shall take precedence.
2. The applicant shall provide printouts indicating the months and years of submitted publications. If they are not available, the applicant should provide proof documents such as the journal front cover with specific dates or table of contents to facilitate review.
3. The applicant should preferably be the first author, corresponding author, or equal contributing author of representative works. If not, a written statement should be provided stating the applicant’s contribution to the works.

(4) Regulations governing unpublished representative works

1. Where a forthcoming work is submitted, the publication thereof should take place within one year following provision of the publisher’s proof documents. The work should then be submitted to the Personnel Department within two months following its publication.
2. If the paper is not published within 1 year for reasons not attributable to the applicant, it must be published within 3 years from the date the paper was accepted for publication.
3. An applicant failing to publish or submit the published work within the specified time shall be reported to the Ministry of Education for revocation of faculty position and the teacher’s certificate of corresponding ranks shall be returned to the Ministry.
4. If an applicant wishing to submit two or more representative works should, to avoid confusion, consider designating only the work that has already been accepted for publication as the representative work in case the other works are not published on schedule in the future.

(5) Specifications for publishing works

1. Applicants from the Colleges of Science, Engineering, Medicine, Bioresources & Agriculture, Management, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Public Health as well as the Center for General Education and the Center for Teacher Education under the Office of Academic Affairs should have works published in SCI or SSCI listed journals. However, applicants in several special fields of study may be reviewed according to the standards of related academic fields other than respective home colleges. Applicants from the Colleges of Liberal Arts, Law, and Social Sciences should have works published in high-quality (top-tier) journals designated by respective departments or graduate institutes, or the journals listed in SSCI, AHCI, TSSCI, or THCI.
2. The journals listed by each department or graduate institute shall be approved by the Teacher Evaluation Committee of each department or graduate institute and submitted to the University Teacher Evaluation Committee for approval. The University shall then make this information available online.

(6) The submitted work should be related to the courses taught by the applicant. If a course is taught in a foreign language, the college processing the promotion application is authorized to determine, considering the relevance to the applicant’s academic specialty, if submission of work(s) written in that language is necessary. A summary in Mandarin should be provided along with the work written in a foreign language. If potential reviewers familiar with this language are unavailable domestically, the college may request the entire work be translated into Mandarin or English.

(7) The submitted works should demonstrate the applicant’s scholarly originality. A work may not be submitted for review if it is a compilation of others’ works through organizing, editing, combining, translating, or if it is nonacademic or not research-oriented in nature.

(8) A proposed representative work may not be part of a thesis or dissertation. However, the above does not apply if such thesis or dissertation has not been submitted previously for promotion application, if the proposed representative work is the result of extending research of said thesis or dissertation, or if applicant  voluntarily provides an explanation and whose representative work is considered to be substantively innovative by reviewers.

(9) Co-authorship: A co-authored work may only be submitted by one of the authors as the representative work for teacher qualification review. A co-authored work with multiple authors must be accompanied by a “Verification of Co-Authors” document to illustrate the contribution or the part completed by the applicant and that by each co-author. Other co-authors shall sign the document to relinquish their right to submit the work for teacher qualification application. The requirement for signature and seal of each co-author can be waived if any one of the following situations:

1. The “Verification of Co-Authors” document with signatures may be waived if the applicant is an Academician of Academia Sinica.
2. The applicant is the first author or corresponding (telecommunicating) author, and the foreign co-author or corresponding (telecommunicating) author provides a signature to relinquish use to the same purpose.

(10) Assistant professors who are applying for promotion to the rank of associate professor should complete post-doctoral research with an independently authored work published after returning to Taiwan. The work should be innovative, insightful, and receive no negative feedback from reviewers.

More information on Personnel Department Website

Personnel Department Homepage → laws and regulations, common forms, or process → Employment Division → Promotion

Department / Employment Division, Personnel Department
Contact / (+886) 2-3366-5932
Website / http://www.personnel.ntu.edu.tw/