Ensuring attractive academic careers is high on the international policy agenda. Favourable working conditions is important both to retain the best talents and to ensure the quality, performance, and competitiveness of academic research. In Norway, as in many other western countries there is an ongoing discussion about precarious working conditions and temporary employment in the higher education sector as a major hampering factor for recruiting and retaining talents to an academic career. Effective measures to cope with the problem of temporary contracts are dependent on increased knowledge, and this article aim to provide knowledge on how different sources of funding influence employment, and how immigration status relates to temporary positions. We use data from Statistics Norway’s unique register of research personnel with data on all researchers in the higher education sector where data on employment have recently been added and we connect this with information on immigration status.

In Germany and Norway, there have been vivid discussions about precarious working conditions and challenges to balance work- and private life of Early Career Researchers (ECRs). The focus of this article are ECRs in Germany and Norway. ECRs are here defined as PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. PhD students in Norway are to a higher degree scholarship holders and at the same time employed at higher education institutions than their German counterparts. Germany and Norway differ in their historical approaches facilitating gender equality, even though gender policies are converging in both countries. Drawing on data from the German Science Survey 2019, Time-use survey of Norwegian academic staff at higher education institutions and data from the register of research personal in Norway, we explore time allocation for academic activities among ECRs in Norway and Germany considering different context variables (gender, family model, discipline, doctoral training model) providing implications for further research.