Editorial

After four years at the helm of Career Development International, it is time for me to move on and let new people steer the journal. One of the main goals I set for my editorship was to improve CDI’s standing in the academic community. With the dedicated assistance of CDI’s Editorial Advisory Board and reviewers, CDI has increasingly become the first choice of career scholars for submitting their own research and for reading cutting-edge research. Gone are the days when CDI was a half-practitioner– half-academic journal with about a 50 per cent acceptance rate. Today,top scholars from around the globe submit high quality manuscripts to CDI. CDI has become a highly competitive journal with a rejection rate of around 70 per cent. The journal has set the standard for providing detailed, high quality and developmental reviews in a timely manner. The average turnaround time from submission to responses to authors continues to be about 30 days overall, and less then 50 days for papers which are passed for review.

Career Development International benefits from an active Editorial Advisory Board which includes leading members of the careers community and I was delighted when the incoming editorial team of Hetty van Emmerik (Utrecht University, Netherlands) and I.M. “Jim” Jawahar (Illinois State University, USA) invited me to join their Board. I feel confident in passing CDIinto their capable hands and wish Hetty and Jim great success in their editorship.

It has been a special pleasure for me to work during these past four years with so many authors, reviewers, Board members (in particular Nikos Bozionelos,the Associate Editor), and representatives of Emerald, the publisher (in particular Paula Fernandez, my long serving Managing Editor and Nancy Rolph, who replaced her recently). The numerous papers published and special issues (the Sullivan and Baugh special issue on mentoring in particular) taught me many lessons. I have learnt a lot and enjoyed the process. Two lessons of special interest for me were the specific issue of reviewing and, more generally, of editorship. I figured out that there is a significant lack of scholarly preparation for the crucial role of reviewing and a shortage of knowledge in the community about editorship and editorial related issues. This induced me to initiate two edited books – one about reviewing (Baruch et al., 2006) and one about editorship (Baruch et al., 2008), which are offered for the wider scholarly community to improve on these two academic roles. My grateful thanks to the many colleagues who helped me during my term as Editor and contributed to the growth and success of CDI.

Yehuda Baruch